60 replies to this topic

[Slydog43]

I'm a total idiot, setting working directory worked great. THANKS on my way again.  (I had actually gotten it to work with a combo of AHK & vb, but this is so much better!)

 

Can't wait to show this off with my new backbox/topper addition

Edited by Slydog43, 08 April 2018 - 02:30 PM.

[Slydog43]

Check out this quick little video showing off the topper with hi-scores on it that look like a chalk board.  All of my real pinball machines in my house have a little note on top that displays the top 5 scores.  This way someone can come over and see right away what score is needed to get on the list.  I wanted something similar with the virtual cab.  Works pretty well.

 

https://youtu.be/Q7EkEjT7XFA

 

 

what do people think?

 

any change of adding Pinball FX2/3 to PINemHi?  

Edited by Slydog43, 10 April 2018 - 02:14 PM.

[DnaDisturber]

It's awesome and seems to work great


After reading your post i went to take a look at the fx2 and 3 files but not an easy one to get it figured out i'm afraid.
But will take another look to see if i can manage to get them out.

[Dave Beedle]

Giving the new version a try and seeing an issue.  I added a couple new games to fill in some of the ones I'm missing but those are not posting scores.  AL's Garage Band, Batman The Dark Knight and Avatar for example.  I see the nvram files in the directory (avr_110.nv, bdk_294, wrldtou2) but the log in the plugins directory says "Scores comparison > scores are equal , no submit of score!".  I notice the tablename line is blank though.  Could be I have something off? 

[DnaDisturber]

Hi Dave

You always need to start a game one time before it submits scores....maybe this is the case?
The tablename isn't needed anymore so it is no problem that it's blank.
Do the older games like attack form mars do work with the new version?

Are you using vpinmame 3.0 ?

If it continues even after a second play you could check the file in the directory database in pinballx and take a look at the statistics.ini file to see if the game recognizes the rom.

Let me know if it works after a second play...and if not we'll figure it out

Edited by DnaDisturber, 10 April 2018 - 11:36 PM.

[Dave Beedle]

I vaguely remembered the play twice behavior.  As a test I played Rocky and Bullwinkle twice.  Avatar I had trice a few times.  VPinMAME 3.0 confirmed.  Attack from Mars and Attack and Revenge from Mars seems to work.  

 

Including some stuff.  Thanks for looking!

 

Pinemhi.ini (the same is in Pinemhi_leaderboard.ini along wtih ID and password):

 

[paths]

VP=C:\Visual Pinball\VPinMame\nvram\

FP=C:\

(I don't have FP)

 

Stats:

[VisualPinball_Avatar_Stern_2010_85vett]

description=Avatar(Stern 2010)

lastplayed=4/10/2018 5:10:39 PM

timesplayed=8

rom=avr_110

secondsplayed=2030

highscore_1=G S|75000000

highscore_2=L R|55000000

highscore_3=J R|40000000

[VisualPinball_RAB_FS_2_2]

description=Rocky and Bullwinkle (Data East 1994)

lastplayed=4/10/2018 7:41:02 PM

timesplayed=3

rom=rab_320

secondsplayed=415

highscore_1=TWS|500000000

highscore_2=KVD|450000000

highscore_3=NRW|400000000

[VisualPinball_Als_Garage_Band_Goes_On_A_World_Tour_AlvinG_1992_oooPLAYER1ooo_10_FS]

description=Al's Garage Band Goes On World Tour (Alvin G 1992)

lastplayed=4/10/2018 5:13:32 PM

timesplayed=3

rom=wrldtou2

secondsplayed=188

highscore_1=AJG|475000000

highscore_2=JWA|380000000

highscore_3=PJD|299767960

[VisualPinball_Batman_Dark_Knight_FS_VP_99_version_2]

description=Batman (Stern 2008)

lastplayed=4/10/2018 5:16:27 PM

timesplayed=2

rom=bdk_294

secondsplayed=401

highscore_1=GAG|240000000

highscore_2=LFS|200000000

highscore_3=M G|160000000

[VisualPinball_Pirates_Of_the_Caribbean_13]

description=Pirates of the Caribbean (Stern 2006)

lastplayed=4/9/2018 6:25:42 PM

timesplayed=1

rom=potc_600af

secondsplayed=208

highscore_1=D N|75000000

highscore_2=K O|55000000

highscore_3=D T|40000000

 

Plugin Log:

04-10-2018 7:37:56 PM   System : Visual Pinball

04-10-2018 7:37:56 PM   Game Start : Rocky and Bullwinkle

04-10-2018 7:37:56 PM   Tablename : 

04-10-2018 7:37:56 PM   Name of player : dbeedle

04-10-2018 7:37:56 PM   code found in pinemhi_leaderboard.ini

04-10-2018 7:37:56 PM   ROM found previous session : rab_320

04-10-2018 7:37:56 PM   Score extracted from previous session

04-10-2018 7:41:03 PM   ROM used in this session : rab_320

04-10-2018 7:41:03 PM   Scores comparison > scores are equal , no submit of score !

04-10-2018 7:41:03 PM   -------------------------------------------------------

[DnaDisturber]

Could you check the last update time from avatar, avr_110.nv in your nvram folder?
So first look at the last updatetime , then play a game using pinballx , exit and see if the last update time is different than before.

I have a suspicion that the nv file doesn't get updated by vpinmame...
This could be the reason why pinemhi leaderboard says that the scores are equal.

Edited by DnaDisturber, 11 April 2018 - 01:36 AM.

[gpstevens]

Check out this quick little video showing off the topper with hi-scores on it that look like a chalk board.  All of my real pinball machines in my house have a little note on top that displays the top 5 scores.  This way someone can come over and see right away what score is needed to get on the list.  I wanted something similar with the virtual cab.  Works pretty well.

 

https://youtu.be/Q7EkEjT7XFA

 

 

what do people think?

 

any change of adding Pinball FX2/3 to PINemHi?  

 

Hey SlyDog, I'm new to using PINemHi and I really like you concept here.  One of the things I really like about newer pinball machines is the competition about getting a high score. Your approach here to make the high scores easily accessible in the topper monitor (or even the backglass monitor where Instructions are shown) is a great thing!  Thanks for your efforts and hopefully others think this is a good idea and it could get incorporated into it's own button or something.

[Dave Beedle]

Could you check the last update time from avatar, avr_110.nv in your nvram folder?
So first look at the last updatetime , then play a game using pinballx , exit and see if the last update time is different than before.
I have a suspicion that the nv file doesn't get updated by vpinmame...
This could be the reason why pinemhi leaderboard says that the scores are equal.

I was able to give it a try this evening. Played a game of Avatar and the nvram does appear to have been updated. At least, the date changed. No score posted and the log says the same, no change in score.

I did notice that the nvram directory was marked as read only as was the nvram file. I marked both writable before the run. I'm fairly certain that I had done that yesterday too though. The directory returned to read only. The nvram file didn't this time.

[DnaDisturber]

Just to know for sure...could you start avatar using pinballx , play a game (short one)....write down your score.

Then exit avatar and start it again without playing a new game....does your previous score appear in the dmd (could take a little while).

Just to make sure vpinmame does write to the nvram.

Checked my nvram dir , it also says read only....nvram files are all writable

 

Did you update vpinmame to 3.0 for this new version of pinemhi_leaderboard or some time ago?

 

Perhaps you could run setup (from vpinmame) and click install (again) and check the paths , then delete the avr_110.nv file and see if that does the trick? (play it twice to check after that)

Are you sure you only have one vpinmame version installed?

Edited by DnaDisturber, 12 April 2018 - 01:55 PM.

[Dave Beedle]

Just to know for sure...could you start avatar using pinballx , play a game (short one)....write down your score.

Then exit avatar and start it again without playing a new game....does your previous score appear in the dmd (could take a little while).

Just to make sure vpinmame does write to the nvram.

Checked my nvram dir , it also says read only....nvram files are all writable

 

Did you update vpinmame to 3.0 for this new version of pinemhi_leaderboard or some time ago?

 

Perhaps you could run setup (from vpinmame) and click install (again) and check the paths , then delete the avr_110.nv file and see if that does the trick? (play it twice to check after that)

Are you sure you only have one vpinmame version installed?

 

Tried again with Avatar, it does bring up the previous score on the start of a game but does not post them.  I also tried with another (Soprano's) which did post.  

 

The system was a new load on Windows 10 with VP, VPinMAME, etc installed via the all in one installer. I'll give the re-install a try this weekend.

[gpstevens]

I tried it myself setting up system 6 to run vpx

See attachment for screenshot

system6.png

 

I deleted the game in statistics.ini to be sure to test it well

After that i ran pinballx

In statistics.ini after playing:

[VisualPinball_SpiderMan_10]
description=Spider-Man
lastplayed=8-4-2018 07:41:12
timesplayed=2
rom=sman_261
secondsplayed=142
highscore_1=SSR|150000000
highscore_2=LFS|120000000
highscore_3=J R|90000000

 

The score is submitted properly (i do notice that it says visual pinball instead of system6 , didn't set the variable as you did in config ?!?)

 

This is how it is in the config file of pinballx:

[System_6]
Name=VPX
WorkingPath=D:\Visual Pinball
TablePath=D:\Visual Pinball\Tables
Executable=VPinballX.exe
Parameters=/play -"[TABLEPATH]\[TABLEFILE]"
 

It all seems to work fine on this end, even when using sytem6 .

 

 

The thing that Tom said PinballX gets the rom name to match from PinEmHi.ini. Take a look at the file and see what has changed.

Those are the pretty romnames to romnames.nv section in pinemhi.ini

If the pretty romname doesn't match with the name of the window that vpinmame opens it cannot find the rom.....that should be ok as long as you didn't edit in that section.

I took all the names from vpinmame 3.0 so they should match properly (it works on my systems)

 

 

Didn't see the visual pinball setting in your pinballx config , i'm curious if this line is in there:

NVRAMPath=C:\Program Files (x86)\Visual Pinball\VPinMame\nvram

are the games that work all on the visual pinball 991 ?

As that line is in there

 

Could probably also be that the games that do work were already in statistics.ini with the rom and therefore still work....

The upside is that it probably works if you add the romname manually to statistics.ini for the games but that is rather time-consuming and it shouldn't be necessary

 

So the next step should be to see if it works to put the nvram  line in the other systems and visual pinball if it isn't in yet.

You could also try adding the rom manually for instance on attack from mars in statistics.ini and see if it works

also if you were already planning to do that upgrade pinballx and see if that solves it ( you may have to overwrite the pinemhi.exe and pinemhi.ini after the new version is installed , if it's the old version)

 

I found the problem to my setup and everything seems to work great now in PBX.

 

If you recall, for whatever reason PBX would return the value of "pinball" for the NVRAM value for every table except a small handful. Very odd.  I tried alot of different things to try and figure out why this was happening, perhaps related to how I had set up multiple System types in PBX to run my multiple versions of VP tables. None of it seemed to work. But, when I ran pinmame directly from VP, it would properly identify the ROM name. I was stumped.

 

Then, I thought of searching for "pinball.nv" in your pinemhi.ini file to see if somehow pinemhi was indirectly returning "pinball.nv" from the ROM pretty names.  Sure enough, I found an entry that was returning pinball.nv.  It was in the pinemhi.ini file as follows:

 

...

Pinball Magic (Redemption)=pmv112r.nv

Pinball Magic=pmv112.nv

Pinball Pool=pinpool.nv

Pinball=pinball.nv

Pink Panther (7-digit conversion)=pnkpntr7.nv

Pink Panther (sound correction fix)=pnkpntrs.nv

Pink Panther=pnkpnthr.nv

...

 

I don't have a VP table installed on my setup that uses pinball.nv, so I just deleted this line from the pinemhi.ini file.  And low and behold, everything started working!  PBX now started returning all proper ROM names for all my VP tables from all the different system types I set up in VPX.  It was like a switch was turned on and everything started to work great.  I am now getting high scores showing up on the Information pages in VPX and high scores are getting sent to your LeaderBoard site as well.

 

I can't explain why this was happening to my setup, but I wanted to share this with the community in case others are having a similar problem.

 

Thanks DNA for spending the time to help me track down my issue.  I'll ping Tom Spiers as well over at GameEx and let him know how I fixed the problem for his future reference too.

[DnaDisturber]

Hi gpstevens,

Good to hear you found a workaround....strange thing this problem.
Saw you did your first challenge Nice

[Dave Beedle]

 

Just to know for sure...could you start avatar using pinballx , play a game (short one)....write down your score.

Then exit avatar and start it again without playing a new game....does your previous score appear in the dmd (could take a little while).

Just to make sure vpinmame does write to the nvram.

Checked my nvram dir , it also says read only....nvram files are all writable

 

Did you update vpinmame to 3.0 for this new version of pinemhi_leaderboard or some time ago?

 

Perhaps you could run setup (from vpinmame) and click install (again) and check the paths , then delete the avr_110.nv file and see if that does the trick? (play it twice to check after that)

Are you sure you only have one vpinmame version installed?

 

Tried again with Avatar, it does bring up the previous score on the start of a game but does not post them.  I also tried with another (Soprano's) which did post.  

 

The system was a new load on Windows 10 with VP, VPinMAME, etc installed via the all in one installer. I'll give the re-install a try this weekend.

 

 

 

Still no joy.  Went though the install with VPinMAME, no change. 

Re-downloaded the ROM, no change.

Re-installed Pinball X.  Got the message that the ROM was not supported in that version. 

Re-installed the new version of PINemi.  Go the messages that score was extracted but not submitted and this was normal (first play).  Played again, no post and the usual log message of score was the same.

Hate to reinstall everything...hoping there's something else to try!

[DnaDisturber]

Did you delete the nvram file for avatar?

[Dave Beedle]

Did you delete the nvram file for avatar?

 

I did.  I think I did that along with the re-install of PinballX.

 

Th re-installs, by the way, were over the existing installation.  I have not tried deleting everything and doing a complete new PinballX, VP, VPinMAME, PinemHI reinstall.  Getting PinballX to behave reasonably was such a pain I've tried to avoid it!

 

A quick Q...I have a PinemHI.ini and a Pinemhi_leaderboard.ini file.  It appears both are used?  But Pinemhi_leaderboard.ini is not in the latest plugin version?  It looks to me the paths exist in in both but _leaderboard.ini is used to get the ID/Password.  Is that normal?  

Edited by Dave Beedle, 16 April 2018 - 02:02 PM.

[DnaDisturber]

Hi Dave,

 

No need to do a complete new installation and setup.

and the answer to your question, yes both ini files are needed (the pinemhi leaderboard.ini is in the newest version 1.31. on this site, I checked to make sure )

 

I'm curious if this happens to every new game that i introduced since the new version?

It appears to be.....

Normally i would say there is another nv file that it reads out and that would be the reason it says it's equal....could you do a search on your entire computer for avr_110.nv ?

Just to try and see if something else is going on here.

 

I'll pm you a version that we can use to see what is registered by pinemhi leaderboard and what it compares.

maybe we can figure out what is happening here....

Edited by DnaDisturber, 16 April 2018 - 04:04 PM.

[nikodemus]

Quick question which I hope is simple. I am using pinup popper and had the idea of setting myself some playlists so I could have a single game on each table in the list, then run a batch file to get pinemhi to output my scores to a simple text file. The usual “>> example.txt” after the pinemhi anyrom.nv doesn’t work. Any help from anyone more savvy than me would be appreciated. I’ve limited coding knowledge but can follow instructions well.

Thank you

[DnaDisturber]

With append. >> i think the file must already exist.
With > i am sure it doesn't

[nikodemus]

With append. >> i think the file must already exist.
With > i am sure it doesn't

>> it adds if the file exists but with > it overwrites if the file exists.

I’ve been able to get that bit working at last but still stuck from there. I created a batch file with
pinemhi mm_109c.nv>>season1.txt
pinemhi afm_113.nv>>season1txt

It executes line 1 fine but never line 2 which should add the afm scores to the season1.txt file

I’m rubbish with command line stuff anyway but cant figure why it executes the command in line 1 but not line 2.

If I can create a batch to sequentially execute I can create one for my playlists & extract all in a single click.

Might not be possible but would be nice.

Thanks again