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The Pinball Project, pt. 7 (and MORE!)
I know I haven't been filling you in on the progress of my virtual pinball cabinet these past few weeks. Sorry about that. Distractions, frustrations, and real life keep getting in my way. So, here's an extra-large entry to get you all caught up on this fool's errand.
Now that the two-screen setup is working, my next step is twofold: setting up all the Visual Pinball programs (VPin 9, 9.5, 9.95, and 10)* to work with the control buttons, and setting up the PinballY front end to work with each VPin table. (BTW, "PinballY' is pronounced like "pinball-why.")
*Yes, certain virtual pinball boards work best with certain VPin versions, and those boards made for VPin 10 will not work with VPin 9x (nobody said this would be simple).
Over the past few days, I've been going through repositories of virtual pinball tables, picking and choosing the ones I'm interested in having/playing. Of course, the first three I looked for were my "pinball trinity," the three main boards I would have in my game room (if I had a game room): Flash, Lost World, and Paragon.
Fun fact: 1977 was the year that marked the start of computerized pinball machines, and the phasing out of electro-mechanical boards. By 1979, all pinball manufacturers in the US were making electronically scoring machines, relegating the distinctive clatter of score reels resetting to zero at the start of a game to a bygone era.
What that means for pinball emulation is that while the older electro-mechanical boards were able to be emulated just by Visual Pinball's scripting language, the more modern, computer-driven boards needs the special programming used (in the form of ROM chips) to make everything happen. Thankfully, finding the special ROMs for most pinball machines today is rather easy and repositories abound... with the notable exception of Gottlieb/Premier. Last year, they sent out DCMA takedown notices to all the pinball emulation repositories to remove their pinball ROMs from their sites. That means someone wanting to play a classic Gottlieb board like "Cleopatra" or "Genie" in emulation are going to be out of luck. You can still get the pinball table in emulation, but it won't run without the ROM files. That said, I *did* manage to locate some Gottlieb ROMs I needed for a few choice tables. Score!
Then came setting up PinballY for the tables I had. To its credit, PinballY was very easy to install and set up. It automatically found the pinball tables I had downloaded. It'll even go out to the IPDB and cross reference the exact tables and fill out all the necessary info on it... except for the handful of original, fan-made ones I got.
Then it was the pretty part: getting all the menu graphics for each of the tables. There are things called "media packs" for Hyperpin for just such a purpose. These contain the graphics for the table's backglass, playfield, and menu logo, among other things. Fortunately, PinballY is compatible with them and will assign everything accordingly. At least, for most of the tables I have. There were a few tables where media packs didn't exist for them. Lots of searching for screenshots of backglasses, playfields, and logos, and being mostly successful. There were a few I couldn't find, were unusably tiny, or had a massive, obvious watermark on them to make them unusable.
And then it was (what I was thinking was going to be) the fun part: test playing all the tables to make sure they all work. Yeah. This turned into the BIGGEST FARKING HEADACHE and I encountered: tables that wouldn't exit cleanly by leaving the backglass/scoring active, those that would put the table in the wrong orientation (causing me to futz about with the table's settings to put things in the right orientation), DMD/scoring screens that won't stay in the position I put them, having PinballY thinking that the backglass file was the table and the table file was a new table and doubling the entries, those that would crash Visual Pinball upon exiting, Windows 10 crashing for no apparent reason, and answering all those one-time "Are you using this pinball ROM for personal use?" requester boxes when the computer pointer vanishes as soon as you move onto that requester box, leaving you to scratch your head as you try and figure out how to answer them.
I had been on "the fun part" for a couple of weeks, and just finished up last night. I have about 114 tables, so I went kinda slowly, doing about six to ten tables a day... mainly because of the frustrations trouble-shooting when things went wrong.
And then the part I'll be starting on tomorrow: culling the boards that either won't work properly, continually crash, have really wonky physics (if the ball acts like it's rolling through REALLY THICK AIR, then the physics are wonky), or aren't as good as I thought they would be. Trust me, I know the difference between a "challenging" table that I would have to be in the mood for playing, and one that just flat-out fails to deliver any joy to me.
Today, I re-mounted the motherboard back into the cabinet and made sure it was still working and the cooling still had enough clearance to work properly.
I also attempted to fix an issue I had when I assembled the cabinet, a small area of T-molding wasn't lying flat on top of the cabinet. It was my first time installing T-molding, so there had to be a mistake or two. T-molding is a vinyl strip that finishes a board edge of an arcade video game cabinet. A bit of trimming, a bit of glue, a few taps with a rubber mallet, and it was... well... good enough, I guess, but not as good as it could be... which seems to be the theme of this whole project, truth be told.
In other news, my "good" laptop that I've had for about 10 years was seriously showing signs of age. The screen had a loose connection or break in the cable somewhere that was making the colours go weird when it was opened in certain positions. A few months ago, I had replaced the power supply because half(!) of the cable from the supply to the computer had gone stiff and was cracking. And, despite the best intentions of others saying they could try to get me an updated laptop, I soldiered on with it as best as I could. It was made for Windows 7, and it runs Windows 10 fairly well. It's a little pokey, but not aggravatingly so.
Last month, a few days after my birthday, I got a call from my case worker at the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission asking me if I needed a new computer or tablet. Thanks to an end-of-fiscal-year overage, they were able to supply me with one free-of-charge... the best price to pay! I mentioned that I could certainly do with a new laptop, as mine was pretty long-in-the-tooth. Fast-forward to today, and UPS delivered to me a brand new Dell Latitude 5510 (10th Gen Core I5, 8Gb, 256Gb SSD, Win10Pro) courtesy of the MRC. Holy cow it's good! Now I have to figure out what I'm migrating from my old laptop. It'll take a while before I'm settled with the new one.
That's all for now. Hopefully, I'll post another update sooner than I did with this one.
Now that the two-screen setup is working, my next step is twofold: setting up all the Visual Pinball programs (VPin 9, 9.5, 9.95, and 10)* to work with the control buttons, and setting up the PinballY front end to work with each VPin table. (BTW, "PinballY' is pronounced like "pinball-why.")
*Yes, certain virtual pinball boards work best with certain VPin versions, and those boards made for VPin 10 will not work with VPin 9x (nobody said this would be simple).
Over the past few days, I've been going through repositories of virtual pinball tables, picking and choosing the ones I'm interested in having/playing. Of course, the first three I looked for were my "pinball trinity," the three main boards I would have in my game room (if I had a game room): Flash, Lost World, and Paragon.
Fun fact: 1977 was the year that marked the start of computerized pinball machines, and the phasing out of electro-mechanical boards. By 1979, all pinball manufacturers in the US were making electronically scoring machines, relegating the distinctive clatter of score reels resetting to zero at the start of a game to a bygone era.
What that means for pinball emulation is that while the older electro-mechanical boards were able to be emulated just by Visual Pinball's scripting language, the more modern, computer-driven boards needs the special programming used (in the form of ROM chips) to make everything happen. Thankfully, finding the special ROMs for most pinball machines today is rather easy and repositories abound... with the notable exception of Gottlieb/Premier. Last year, they sent out DCMA takedown notices to all the pinball emulation repositories to remove their pinball ROMs from their sites. That means someone wanting to play a classic Gottlieb board like "Cleopatra" or "Genie" in emulation are going to be out of luck. You can still get the pinball table in emulation, but it won't run without the ROM files. That said, I *did* manage to locate some Gottlieb ROMs I needed for a few choice tables. Score!
Then came setting up PinballY for the tables I had. To its credit, PinballY was very easy to install and set up. It automatically found the pinball tables I had downloaded. It'll even go out to the IPDB and cross reference the exact tables and fill out all the necessary info on it... except for the handful of original, fan-made ones I got.
Then it was the pretty part: getting all the menu graphics for each of the tables. There are things called "media packs" for Hyperpin for just such a purpose. These contain the graphics for the table's backglass, playfield, and menu logo, among other things. Fortunately, PinballY is compatible with them and will assign everything accordingly. At least, for most of the tables I have. There were a few tables where media packs didn't exist for them. Lots of searching for screenshots of backglasses, playfields, and logos, and being mostly successful. There were a few I couldn't find, were unusably tiny, or had a massive, obvious watermark on them to make them unusable.
And then it was (what I was thinking was going to be) the fun part: test playing all the tables to make sure they all work. Yeah. This turned into the BIGGEST FARKING HEADACHE and I encountered: tables that wouldn't exit cleanly by leaving the backglass/scoring active, those that would put the table in the wrong orientation (causing me to futz about with the table's settings to put things in the right orientation), DMD/scoring screens that won't stay in the position I put them, having PinballY thinking that the backglass file was the table and the table file was a new table and doubling the entries, those that would crash Visual Pinball upon exiting, Windows 10 crashing for no apparent reason, and answering all those one-time "Are you using this pinball ROM for personal use?" requester boxes when the computer pointer vanishes as soon as you move onto that requester box, leaving you to scratch your head as you try and figure out how to answer them.
I had been on "the fun part" for a couple of weeks, and just finished up last night. I have about 114 tables, so I went kinda slowly, doing about six to ten tables a day... mainly because of the frustrations trouble-shooting when things went wrong.
And then the part I'll be starting on tomorrow: culling the boards that either won't work properly, continually crash, have really wonky physics (if the ball acts like it's rolling through REALLY THICK AIR, then the physics are wonky), or aren't as good as I thought they would be. Trust me, I know the difference between a "challenging" table that I would have to be in the mood for playing, and one that just flat-out fails to deliver any joy to me.
Today, I re-mounted the motherboard back into the cabinet and made sure it was still working and the cooling still had enough clearance to work properly.
I also attempted to fix an issue I had when I assembled the cabinet, a small area of T-molding wasn't lying flat on top of the cabinet. It was my first time installing T-molding, so there had to be a mistake or two. T-molding is a vinyl strip that finishes a board edge of an arcade video game cabinet. A bit of trimming, a bit of glue, a few taps with a rubber mallet, and it was... well... good enough, I guess, but not as good as it could be... which seems to be the theme of this whole project, truth be told.
In other news, my "good" laptop that I've had for about 10 years was seriously showing signs of age. The screen had a loose connection or break in the cable somewhere that was making the colours go weird when it was opened in certain positions. A few months ago, I had replaced the power supply because half(!) of the cable from the supply to the computer had gone stiff and was cracking. And, despite the best intentions of others saying they could try to get me an updated laptop, I soldiered on with it as best as I could. It was made for Windows 7, and it runs Windows 10 fairly well. It's a little pokey, but not aggravatingly so.
Last month, a few days after my birthday, I got a call from my case worker at the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission asking me if I needed a new computer or tablet. Thanks to an end-of-fiscal-year overage, they were able to supply me with one free-of-charge... the best price to pay! I mentioned that I could certainly do with a new laptop, as mine was pretty long-in-the-tooth. Fast-forward to today, and UPS delivered to me a brand new Dell Latitude 5510 (10th Gen Core I5, 8Gb, 256Gb SSD, Win10Pro) courtesy of the MRC. Holy cow it's good! Now I have to figure out what I'm migrating from my old laptop. It'll take a while before I'm settled with the new one.
That's all for now. Hopefully, I'll post another update sooner than I did with this one.