settingsons

Hey blur. I finally installed the lastest wip and it is absolutely brilliant - no problems at all! It feels really slick and smooth. The instruction stuff is great. The printscreen is really excellent as well (and the images are rotated for you - nice one). I have some small suggestions which you might have already planned: (1) I had a lot of backglass images missing for b2s tables, so I just changed the condition in the printscreen sub-routine to this: StringRight, ending, tableName, 3 if (systemName = "Future Pinball") || (systemName = "Visual Pinball" && ending = "B2S" ) { so it also grabs the backglass image for VP b2s tables. (2) I am fed up with having to open my coin door to reach for the speaker volume between tables (especially when the kids are trying to sleep) so I added some code to my copy of your latest fpLaunch to allow the windows master volume to be controlled from two buttons which can be defined in the settings. It works for both VP and FP. I will PM you it in case you want to add it. (3) Something I haven't added but keep thinking would be useful is to have several favourite lists. I was thinking of maybe any number of lists such as: a. EMs.txt b. 70s_solid_states.txt c. music_themed.txt d. horror.txt e. etc The user would just maintain them manually (I currently do this now and just copy the one I want to favourites.txt). From fpLaunch have a button to toggle through the lists. The selected list would just overwrite the current favourites.txt. Then when the user exits out of the table (and this might be the tricky bit), force HP to refresh favourites by forcing keystrokes (maybe??) I won't have time to play with this as a really busy got a busy time ahead for a couple of months but maybe someone else might want to have a stab at it. There might be a another cleaner way maybe.

Nice solution bleasby. There is always a way

Nice idea with the bitmap. What i suggested earlier about a rotated font would be a pain to implement because letters would need to be displayed in a different order - i didn't think it through properly.

It looks really nice like that- i spent over an hour searching around on how to rotate but couldn't find anything. Is there away of taking a font and creating a rotated version of it. Ie: a new font? Maybe there is a simpler method?

I can't wait to upgrade to the new version - might have to wait for xmas break though - all the flyer/instruction stuff looks great and PinMemHi support looks superb. My kids always say why can't they see the high scores in VP like they can in FP, but with this they can!!!! Thanks so much to everyone Blur, DNA, etc. for your massive efforts.

I did a final test before sending and noticed I broke the pause functionality. I think I am destroying it. Anyway I just pm'ed the code as is, as it shows how the fps loss is fixed for loading a table and exiting.

Hey blur. I had a little play with the fps that are lost once a graphic has been displayed and managed to fix it. *It was quite a lot of experimenting but this is what worked in the end: (1) in the method that creates the loading graphic do a destroy at the end. No fps is lost after loading a table. (2) changed the create loading screen sub-routine to only create one image for the one requested by the caller. *Before doing so it destroys the previous graphic. (3) in the loop that displays the 3 loading images I replaced each of the 'GUI n show' statements to instead call the sub-routine to create the loading image for the given parameter. With these changes no FPS is lost despite how many time the Pause/Editing window is launched for one table. The whole thing is quite odd as it only affects some tables. I do get some flicker with the 321 countdown but it is ok. The whole thing seems to relate to garbage collection but where you garbage collect appears to be important. You mat find a cleaner solution but just wanted to share my findings with you. I am not at home now, but if you want my sample script them please pm me and i will send it over to you experiment with. Cheers Excuse the typos - typed on a iPod touch

Thanks for the info Blur. I got back from holiday today (an 8-hour drive!) and spent a bit of time messing with the script. Just letting you know what I found in case it gives you some clues when you are free. Firstly it is quite bizarre why it happens with only some tables. As I said the drop in FPS was happening with the load screen switched on. So I did this: (1) Switch load screen on in the ini file. (2) At the end of the CreateLoadScreen function I added a gui, destroy This fixed the issue with the loading screen - no FPS drop. However the above only worked if the destroy was in the function itself and not from the calling code. I tried various similar things with the 'Exit 1,2,3' popups and nothing seemed to work. I added gui destroys in various places with various index numbers but nothing worked. Maybe the GUI created in a function are not visible to the caller. I was getting quite tired by this stage so threw in the towel Will let you know if I find anything else. Cheers.

I haven't installed Flash after I built the PC, unless it comes as part of the XP SP3 install? I am still on holiday but will certainly check this out so thanks for that.

Hello Blur / thanks again for all your work on this / it is great in my cabinet. I am using the wip2 version now, and I noticed some strange drop in fps. I think it must be something simple, so I will explain it in case you can reproduce it. 1. Firstly if I run JPSalas latest AFM table straight from VP I get 800-850 FPS. 2. If I run it through Hyperpin and the original FPLaunch I get the same 800-850 FPS. 3. If I run it with the wip2 FPLaunch with all pause and loading screens on I get a drop to about 650fps 4. Turn the Loading screen off and I get 800/850fps again. However if I hit Esc and let the countdown get to say 2, then the table drops to about 650 fps. Therefore it seems to have something to do with showing a loading or exit graphic. Once they have been shown a drop in fps is experienced. Maybe this has something to do with the memory for the graphic not being cleared, or maybe VP not being in front <always on top>. I tested some other tables and some are fine, and some are affected. I would have experiemented a bit myself by changing some things in the script but I did all this last night before going on holiday, so I dont have access to my cab now for a week. There are some really things with VPs fps as we all know where frame increases and decreases are caused by other things running, so it may just be an oddity of my configuration. Will be interested to hear if you can reproduce this one.

Fantastic tutorial - and the timing is perfect as I start to wire up my cab! Cheers!

Actually I have experimented with the fp arcade render position. I have a script that roughly sizes the table and backglass automatically for a batch of tables. Only thing the positioning is only rough and each table needs to be adjusted manually. I haven't uploaded the program as values are hardcoded etc. This is much more suited to your program because it can do the approximate positioning and then the user can fine tune the positions. It basically works my sendIng a keypress scrolllock followed by sequences of pgdn, uparw, etc

Great stuff you are doing with this Blur. Regarding the screenshot option - if it helps please feel free to take any code from my screen capture utility which is written in AHK. It captures the screenshots for the playfield and backglass images for FP tables, the playfield for VP, and creates them with the same name as the table in the Hyperpin media directory. The utility is good when you have a whole bunch of new tables as it also creates the XML as well however it will be much easier to add the odd table from your FPLaunch program with a simple button press. The screen images are captured at full resolution in PNG format - all params are defined in the INI file. The playfield is not rotated but I am pretty sure this can be done (there might even be a DLL call to do it). Thanks for your work on FPLaunch.