billpa

That is very very generous. Thank you! Going to sticky this thread so it doesn't get lost.

Definitely interested although it will be a few months before I will be ready for one. Keep us posted!

great guide! I am going to sticky this thread...too much good info in this one!

btw, forgot to add...great idea for a thread!

Other answers... Monitor setup 2 monitors does not have to have the backglass monitor rotated, especially if someone is building a mini pin where they can use a 17-19" monitor for a complete backglass. Always set up your playfield monitor 270 (bottom towards the left). This is the only way to play both FP and VP without a bunch of crappy workarounds. Nudging and plunger Adding nudge and plunger capabilities....buy the entire nanotech kit. Do not buy just the plunger. It does not work without the nudge board as it plugs into it via a ESATA type cable. The plunger will not work alone but the nudge board will. CPU Get at least a Core 2 Duo...especially if you are building from scratch. Also make sure you get a decent power supply (600w) because your video card will need minimum 400w if not more. If you are thinking of using 3 monitors, dont forget to get a mobo with 2 PCI Express 2.0 x 16 slots. I bought a mini ATX mobo and it had one PCI Express 2.0 x 16 slot and one PCI Express x 1 slot. I can put a video card in the x1 slot but its slim pickings and a lot more expensive than a comparable GPU on a different interface.

Answering your What kind of graphics card question... Nvidia Nvidia Nvidia. ATI has too many problems, especially with Visual Pinball. A lot of people successfully run the 9800gt series either in 512mb or 1gb flavors. 512mb is the lowest you want to go. In fact, I would probably use the 9800 series as a baseline. There are a lot of cheaper cards that have 1GB of memory (like the 9400 and 9500 series) but they have a lot few stream processors, lower clock speeds, lower memory interfaces, etc. So I would say a higher end 9 series (9600, better yet 9800) or 200 GTS/GTX series Nvidia card, at least 512mb of memory (preferably 1GB if you want to play some of the night mod tables).

I stickied this thread as I think its a really important tool to use to update your HP database.

I believe any changes you make you need to recompile.

HP will be configured so that you can launch VP9 tables and it will automatically display a static backglass. No need to mess with PowerPoint. It will all be there!

yea I think its a good compromise. This allows a seamless integration which is really important with a FE.

Because Emuloader is nothing like HyperPin, or HyperSpin for that matter. The initial install will only have a handful of games to choose from as it is for beta testing. However, you can easily configure HyperPin so that it uses screenshots of the playfields instead of videos. This will trim down the size a lot.

I personally think HyperPin will be very popular among the FP pinball people. Obviously that group is much smaller. But I wouldn't worry too much. HyperPin is a dedicated front end that is much simpler than HyperSpin. There is no animated artwork. All there is, is a wheel and preview videos. I don't forsee having a lot of improvements over time.

Actually people are already using wiimotes for nudging with good success. You can read the details here: http://www.futurepinball.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=3883&hilit=wii And here is a demo of it in action pkGC1KHir48

yea but what's the point of recreating tables if they don't look good? The rendering in FP crushes VP over and over again. Don't get me wrong, I like recreations too. But if I had a choice, I would play Dead Hunters on FP over a recreation of any of those titles in VP. The graphics are amazing and VP will unfortunately never look that way.