10 replies to this topic

[Macro]

Video is not the best quality, but shows the changes I am working on in the future pinball interface,

 

FP stores images in full colour, so a slight tweak allows them to be passed on to pinDMD in 24 bit colour as well.

 

Font still only supports the 5 shades of normal DMDness, but I may make it possible to select the 5 colours (although one is usually black!) as well in case people want to do anything special with the fonts.

 

see if on you tube here

[russdx]

Thats looking great macro. Future pinball not quite working properly for me on win10(fresh install no pinDMD) will try and get to bottom of that!

[Macro]

I've changed how you enable full colour mode, and it now allows you to set the 5 font pixel colours (so you no longer have to have 4 shades of same colour + black)

 

as always, phone makes a total hash of video but you get the gist ... here

 

table only uses 2 of the font colours, but shows the principle.

[Macro]

well, I think it's ready for other people to use, and maybe they can then let everyone know what tables work well (and what font colours to use - maybe a seperate thread somewhere)

 

This is a special version of the PinDMD interface for Future Pinball specifically for use with PinDMD3

Pros over 'normal' version
    full colour mode
    select font colours

Cons over 'normal' version
    uses more memory, as it has to cache the full colour versions of the images (although still only 8Mb or so)

By default this will work in precisely the same way as the current interface, remapping font and background to
shades of the colour selected for the DMD. (It will pick up whatever colour has been used in FP and set the
DMD to use that as well)

However, if you add a particular texture to the table then it will switch to sending the background in full RGB
and use the colours within the texture for the font colours.

The texture must be 1 pixel high and 5 pixels wide, with each pixel representing one font colour

X X X X X
            ^  background (0% - normally black)
         ^     40%
      ^        60%
   ^           80%
^              100%

You can set these to whatever you wish, no checks are performed, it just uses the RGB values for each pixel for the
corresponding font element. (you can even set the background to something other than black if you wish)

to enable full colour mode, add the bitmap as a new image using the texture manager, put a decal somewhere on the
pinball (Special / Decal) - it I just added mine above the visible part of the translite, and set the image for
the decal to the new texture.

When the table loads, the interface will see the texture and switch to full colour mode and use the font colours provided.

some existing tables work quite well if you enable colour mode - Bond 50, Pirates of the Carribean and Superman have
all worked whilst I have been testing, but I am sure that there are many more around that also have decent colour images
embedded as textures. (games that do graphics using custom fonts will still only support the 5 shades, but you can still
select what colours you wish each shade to use)

I have included a sample bitmap with the default DMD colours from FP in, so using this will leave the font colours as
normal, but would invoke Full Colour Mode.
 

Of course, if you are a designer, you can add the decal yourself, since it will only come into effect when someone uses

the correct version of the interface, FP and other DMD drivers will ignore it completely

 

Grab a copy here

Edited by Macro, 21 July 2016 - 09:22 PM.

[jinxy]

The link brings me back to this page.

[Macro]

Oops, not sure what I did there - try it now!

[Macro]

Slight update to this, previous version only worked if you allowed 'non power of 2 textures'

 

so, re-download and the texture is now 1x8 pixels to avoid this problem.

 

It would be good if we can make a list of tables that work well with full colour enabled.

 

for the moment I have tried Bond 50, Pirates of the Carribean and Superman.

Edited by Macro, 04 August 2016 - 08:18 AM.

[TerryRed]

Any way to enable this for normal Future Pinball DMD's in game, and / or FutureDMD?

[Macro]

would need an update to futureDMD and the version of FPintercept that it uses, but should be possible - would need the author of futureDMD to talk to me about format to use.

[latin625]

Thanks!  Where do I place this files within Future pInball?

[latin625]

Recently my dmd display yellow and blue and the text is almost solid yellow.  Color still shows though.  Any idea?  Just happened out of nowhere.  If I use the original dll everything goes back to orange and no color.  Thanks!