The Pinball Project, pt. 6
Oct. 4th, 2020 06:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
punktigerWell, I had sent off the motherboard back to the online store, and I received the replacement on Friday. I was smart this time, I tested it for power before I did anything else... well, after I installed the processor, memory, and hard drive on it, that is. Fortunately, this one works. Woo!
While I was waiting for the replacement to be processed, I took the original motherboard I had initially planned to use in this build and hooked it up to the monitors and buttons. It was placed outside the case along with the power supply. I wanted to see if everything else worked. Both the buttons and the monitors lit up. After some more experimentation, I set up part of the pinball software to get a feel what this would potentially look like once it's done. It wasn't too bad. I even played a few games with the handful of "boards" I set up.
The only minor grump I have about the monitor setup, is that the backbox monitor is considered "widescreen," and it stretches the backglass design to fit it. It's not really all that bad but I tend to notice it. Not that it matters in the end; my attention would be mostly on the main playfield anyway.
Back to the replacement motherboard. After a successful test run, I hooked it up where I had the other motherboard... USB plug for the buttons and lights, the two HDMI cables for the monitors, audio cable for sound, WiFi dongle, mouse and keyboard, and powered it up. The playfield monitor soon displayed the BIOS for the motherboard and allowed me to set it up properly.
Now comes the fun part... installing an operating system. Since all of the pinball software I'm using to run this cabinet is MS Windows based, Windows 10 was the obvious choice (the other system I was using was Win10 as well).
Fun Fact: I was going to get Windows 10 on the computer by first installing Windows 8.1 and upgrading it (long complex story). So, during the install on Win8, I had noticed something. That something being the backglass monitor continually going through its "no signal" test... meaning it filled the whole screen with a solid color (a different one every few seconds) with an info box giving such info as resolution, connection type, frequency in Hertz, etc., slowly moving around the screen. This concerned me, since I specifically landed on this motherboard because it had two video connections, and the packaging said it was for "multiple displays." So, why wasn't it working? I switched the monitor cables around, and the backbox display worked, but not the playfield. To say I was livid would be an understatement. I pored through the BIOS settings to figure out what I was possibly doing wrong. Finding no answers that I could see, I wrote a customer support letter to the motherboard manufacturer about the issue.
Anyway, as for the OS, using that method to get Windows 10 on my computer was not working (much like nearly everything else on this build), so I just installed Win10 directly and linked it to my Microsoft account. I really wanted it separate, though, but I didn't want to pony up the money for another license.
It's not enough to have a fresh install of the OS, you also have to go through UPDATE HELL. That was Saturday afternoon through night. The updates made my internet slow to a CRAWL! My DSL connection is slow enough without Microsoft hogging up every last bit of my bandwidth, so I paused all the updates, did my usual website cruising before bedtime, then restarted the updates and went to bed. Let it go to town overnight when I'm not trying to use the internet.
Well, this morning, after all the updates (except two quick ones) were installed, I reboot the computer to see if there were any more updates coming, and the second monitor started working! I guess Windows 10 just needed to do some driver updates to get both monitors up and running at the same time. I was quite relieved.
After all the rigamarole over the past two days just to get the base system up and running, I took it easy today. I tried doing a little research on virtual pinball front ends (essentially, a glorified menu of the tables installed on a virtual pinball cabinet). The three most popular ones are HyperPin, PinballX, and PinballY. I keep hearing that PinballY is the easiest of the three to set up, so I'll have to read up on it.
So that ends this entry. There were a few other things that I didn't mention (like hooking up the 2nd monitor to a graphics card to see if I could get both to work, no dice), but I figure I've gone on long enough about this for tonight.
While I was waiting for the replacement to be processed, I took the original motherboard I had initially planned to use in this build and hooked it up to the monitors and buttons. It was placed outside the case along with the power supply. I wanted to see if everything else worked. Both the buttons and the monitors lit up. After some more experimentation, I set up part of the pinball software to get a feel what this would potentially look like once it's done. It wasn't too bad. I even played a few games with the handful of "boards" I set up.
The only minor grump I have about the monitor setup, is that the backbox monitor is considered "widescreen," and it stretches the backglass design to fit it. It's not really all that bad but I tend to notice it. Not that it matters in the end; my attention would be mostly on the main playfield anyway.
Back to the replacement motherboard. After a successful test run, I hooked it up where I had the other motherboard... USB plug for the buttons and lights, the two HDMI cables for the monitors, audio cable for sound, WiFi dongle, mouse and keyboard, and powered it up. The playfield monitor soon displayed the BIOS for the motherboard and allowed me to set it up properly.
Now comes the fun part... installing an operating system. Since all of the pinball software I'm using to run this cabinet is MS Windows based, Windows 10 was the obvious choice (the other system I was using was Win10 as well).
Fun Fact: I was going to get Windows 10 on the computer by first installing Windows 8.1 and upgrading it (long complex story). So, during the install on Win8, I had noticed something. That something being the backglass monitor continually going through its "no signal" test... meaning it filled the whole screen with a solid color (a different one every few seconds) with an info box giving such info as resolution, connection type, frequency in Hertz, etc., slowly moving around the screen. This concerned me, since I specifically landed on this motherboard because it had two video connections, and the packaging said it was for "multiple displays." So, why wasn't it working? I switched the monitor cables around, and the backbox display worked, but not the playfield. To say I was livid would be an understatement. I pored through the BIOS settings to figure out what I was possibly doing wrong. Finding no answers that I could see, I wrote a customer support letter to the motherboard manufacturer about the issue.
Anyway, as for the OS, using that method to get Windows 10 on my computer was not working (much like nearly everything else on this build), so I just installed Win10 directly and linked it to my Microsoft account. I really wanted it separate, though, but I didn't want to pony up the money for another license.
It's not enough to have a fresh install of the OS, you also have to go through UPDATE HELL. That was Saturday afternoon through night. The updates made my internet slow to a CRAWL! My DSL connection is slow enough without Microsoft hogging up every last bit of my bandwidth, so I paused all the updates, did my usual website cruising before bedtime, then restarted the updates and went to bed. Let it go to town overnight when I'm not trying to use the internet.
Well, this morning, after all the updates (except two quick ones) were installed, I reboot the computer to see if there were any more updates coming, and the second monitor started working! I guess Windows 10 just needed to do some driver updates to get both monitors up and running at the same time. I was quite relieved.
After all the rigamarole over the past two days just to get the base system up and running, I took it easy today. I tried doing a little research on virtual pinball front ends (essentially, a glorified menu of the tables installed on a virtual pinball cabinet). The three most popular ones are HyperPin, PinballX, and PinballY. I keep hearing that PinballY is the easiest of the three to set up, so I'll have to read up on it.
So that ends this entry. There were a few other things that I didn't mention (like hooking up the 2nd monitor to a graphics card to see if I could get both to work, no dice), but I figure I've gone on long enough about this for tonight.
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