1532 replies to this topic

[mjr]

I've been working on a new table browser/launcher system, basically a 100% open-source alternative to PinballX or HyperPin.  It's feature complete and ready for testing, but so far I've only run it on my own systems, so it will need some testing with more diverse configurations before it can be considered stable.  If you'd like to help out with that, you can find the downloads, source code, and more information here:

 

http://mjrnet.org/pi...pe/PinballY.php

 

Because this is an early "alpha" release, it wouldn't be surprising to find that it flat out doesn't work on some (or many) configurations.  We all know what a nightmare Windows deployment can be.  If it doesn't work on your machine, it will be extremely helpful if you're able to do a source build with Visual Studio and run it under the debugger.  That will probably be the only way I'll be able to track down many types of problems.  If you don't know what a Visual Studio is or you're not comfortable with that level of technical work, definitely feel free to try it out anyway - hopefully it'll just work, after all! - but I wanted to set expectations that I probably won't be able to fix certain types of problems unless you can help me diagnose them via the debugger.  (Just in case you didn't know, Visual Studio Community Edition is free, so there's no cost barrier here that restricts this to the Professional Developer Priesthood.  The only priesthood barrier is that VS isn't the world's simplest program to use.)

 

[Carny_Priest]

I always like open source solutions. On doing a build are there any dependencies that would not get loaded automatically by VS?

[mjr]

I always like open source solutions. On doing a build are there any dependencies that would not get loaded automatically by VS?

 

I think the only thing you have to install separately is WiX Toolset, and you can skip that if you don't need to build the MSI installer, which there's really no reason to do unless you want to create your own forked binary distribution.  (It's the last build step, so if Wix is missing it'll fail, but not until everything else, and everything you actually need, succeeded.)  But I can't be sure until someone tries to set it up on a new machine; there might be something I'm taking for granted that I had pre-installed.

Oh, wait, there actually is one external dependency, as documented in Notes/Build Environment Setup.txt - you need a specific older DirectX SDK (details in the file on which one and where to get it).  You need this to deal with the gigantic mess that Microsoft made of the DirectX Audio deployment situation across Windows versions.  I wanted to include support for Windows 7, and to accomplish that, this one old SDK is required.  Fortunately the Win 8 and 10 libraries are included in the modern DX SDK that comes with VS, but in their wisdom MSFT decoupled Windows 7 support from the modern SDK.

Edited by mjr, 31 July 2018 - 11:55 PM.

[TerryRed]

mjr, thanks for your continued work for the community.

 

I tried it myself. It load ups just fine, and I can make changes and navigate the menu...but as soon as I try to navigate to another table it crashed and closes on me. It doen't matter if I'm using new media, or old PBX media...new xmls, or old xmls...the result is always the same. I heard a couple of others mention similar issues.

 

My system is running newest Win 10 updates.

 

It should be noted that myself (and the other who tested PBY) also have PinUP System installed. 

 

If you aren't aware, PinUP System is the installation of both Pinup Player and the new Pinup Popper front-end (that utilizes Pinup Player). One of the requirements for Pinup System is to have only the 32 bit version of VLC installed, and it needs to be 2.2.8., not the newer 3.0+.

 

To clarify:

 

Pinup Player is used to play active videos on your Backglass, Topper, etc. Similar to what you would see in a newer Stern or JJP table. A VPX table can be created to use PuP directly (Stranger Things: Stranger Edition), or it can use a PuP-Pack which will work from B2S Server triggers, or PuPCapture DMD triggers.

 

Pinup Popper is a fairly new front end that came out a while ago. It utilizes Pinup Player for the media playback.

 

Anyone can use Pinup Player tables and PuP-Packs without the need to use Pinup Popper front-end. PBX users have no problem running anything supported by PuP.

 

 

Since PuP currently needs 32 bit 2.2.8 VLC installed (and not 3.0+, Nailbuster can explain better why),...I wonder if this will be an ongoing issue for PBY, and I also wonder if that could be part of the cause of the crashing?

Edited by TerryRed, 01 August 2018 - 03:29 AM.

[mjr]

I tried it myself. It load ups just fine, and I can make changes and navigate the menu...but as soon as I try to navigate to another table it crashed and closes on me. It doen't matter if I'm using new media, or old PBX media...new xmls, or old xmls...the result is always the same. I heard a couple of others mention similar issues.

 

Sounds like yours would be a good system to do a source build on and see what's going on in the debugger, if you're able.  You probably have some configuration incompatibility - it would be good to find out what it is.

 

 

Since PuP currently needs 32 bit 2.2.8 VLC installed (and not 3.0+, Nailbuster can explain better why),...I wonder if this will be an ongoing issue for PBY, and I also wonder if that could be part of the cause of the crashing?

 

It should be completely irrelevant.  PinballY has its own private libvlc DLLs that it explicitly loads from absolute paths, so it doesn't matter how many other VLC DLLs you have installed elsewhere.  And the private libvlc DLLs won't interfere in any way with any other copies you have elsewhere - there's absolutely nothing in the registry, system PATH settings, etc.  It's all completely self-contained.

[TerryRed]

 

I tried it myself. It load ups just fine, and I can make changes and navigate the menu...but as soon as I try to navigate to another table it crashed and closes on me. It doen't matter if I'm using new media, or old PBX media...new xmls, or old xmls...the result is always the same. I heard a couple of others mention similar issues.

 

Sounds like yours would be a good system to do a source build on and see what's going on in the debugger, if you're able.  You probably have some configuration incompatibility - it would be good to find out what it is.

 

 

Since PuP currently needs 32 bit 2.2.8 VLC installed (and not 3.0+, Nailbuster can explain better why),...I wonder if this will be an ongoing issue for PBY, and I also wonder if that could be part of the cause of the crashing?

 

It should be completely irrelevant.  PinballY has its own private libvlc DLLs that it explicitly loads from absolute paths, so it doesn't matter how many other VLC DLLs you have installed elsewhere.  And the private libvlc DLLs won't interfere in any way with any other copies you have elsewhere - there's absolutely nothing in the registry, system PATH settings, etc.  It's all completely self-contained.

 

 

I can't do much of anything for the next few weeks, as I'm in the middle of a personal project that is very time sensitive. 

 

If time comes up after that, I'll see what I can do, though I don't know anything about compiling builds,etc.

[mjr]

I can't do much of anything for the next few weeks, as I'm in the middle of a personal project that is very time sensitive. 

 

I understand that!  Hopefully someone else with whatever the configuration problem is will be able to track it down in the meantime.

 

One possibility is that it's not configuration, but media.  If you want to shoot me a ZIP with a full set of the media objects you're using for some adjacent pair of games you have installed, I could try them out and see if the problem reproduces on my machine.  The reason I suggest "adjacent pair" is that you're seeing the crash on switching between games, if I understand correctly, so it could be loading the new one, unloading the old one, or some interaction between the two - the best shot at solving the mystery crashes is always to try to reproduce conditions as faithfully as possible.

[hlr53]

I will try to install this Friday. I can put Visual Studio on my Alienware laptop. Win 10 home, i7 and GTX1060 if I plug in the graphics amp. 16gig. May need some hand holding. I can also test it on my cab.  i7, GTX1080 Win 10 Pro. 16 gig.
 
Understand coding and data structures but have never done Windows stuff. I will try to muddle through. Sounds exciting!

Both my videos 1080x1920, real DMD

Edited by hlr53, 01 August 2018 - 02:30 PM.

[STV]

I'm running it and had to do these things:

 

Manually disable the real DMD option as I'm a virtual but the default is ON and nothing really worked at all until I turned that off.  

 

Abandon playfield and BG videos in the browser and use only images.   It might take a good 30 seconds to launch the playfield video.  Tried both f4v and mp4 created by pbxrecorder.  Also tried the videos created by pinballY. 

 

It's a 4k screen with a 1070ti, the BG is 1920x1080

 

So I moved the PBXrecorder PF and BG images into the c:/pinballY/media/VPX/<foldernames> folder for use but they're also still quite large and the menu scrolling still had a bit of hitch so I process those in an image editor to change size from a 14MB png to a 1.2MB (ish) jpg.  Then menu scrolling is smooth as expected.   Haven't yet tried those same large images in the old pinballX to see if it also had the delay.

 

Happy to help in any way I can.

[mjr]

Manually disable the real DMD option as I'm a virtual but the default is ON and nothing really worked at all until I turned that off.  

 

The default is actually "Auto", which looks to see if there's a VPinMAME/dmddevice.dll installed, and uses it if so.  I'm guessing you have a copy of that DLL installed there for one of the physical devices, maybe just some cruft left over from a past installation.  In any case, right, you can just set the manual OFF option to tell PinballY not to even try looking for the DLL, in case you want to keep the unused file for some reason.

 

 

Abandon playfield and BG videos in the browser and use only images.   It might take a good 30 seconds to launch the playfield video.  Tried both f4v and mp4 created by pbxrecorder.  

 

That's too bad - I would have expected libvlc to be fast enough for 4K video, but I've only tested with 1080p.

[dopdahl]

Sounds like this is a great start!  More decisions for me.  I was just starting to look at the other frontends.

 

You'll be out of alpha before I even get set up probably but if I can help at this point I will...  Debugging locally is no problem.

 

Thanks Mike!

[TerryRed]

 

Manually disable the real DMD option as I'm a virtual but the default is ON and nothing really worked at all until I turned that off.  

 

The default is actually "Auto", which looks to see if there's a VPinMAME/dmddevice.dll installed, and uses it if so.  I'm guessing you have a copy of that DLL installed there for one of the physical devices, maybe just some cruft left over from a past installation.  In any case, right, you can just set the manual OFF option to tell PinballY not to even try looking for the DLL, in case you want to keep the unused file for some reason.

 

 

Abandon playfield and BG videos in the browser and use only images.   It might take a good 30 seconds to launch the playfield video.  Tried both f4v and mp4 created by pbxrecorder.  

 

That's too bad - I would have expected libvlc to be fast enough for 4K video, but I've only tested with 1080p.

 

 

 

Pinup Popper uses VLC 2.2.8, which only uses mainly CPU instead of GPU, and I'm running 4K playfield video, backglass, dmd , and Topper videos (and at one point an additional 2K underlay video) with no problems in performance...instant playback and switching of videos all around. My cab uses i5 2500K, gtx 970 GPU.

 

The newer library your are using has hardware accel support....so if anything it "should" play 4K videos a little better I would think.

[mjr]

The newer library your are using has hardware accel support....so if anything it "should" play 4K videos a little better I would think.

 

That's my expectation as well.  Although unfortunately the hardware support isn't well utilized in PinballY because of the compositing through D3D11.  But for what it's worth, 2x 1080p playback plus DMD is blazingly fast on my machines.

[hlr53]

I installed on my pincab. First time through it showed my Pinball Arcade,Visual Pinball and Future Pinball tables. Since I am currently obsessing with FP, I launched a random FP table with the flippers (via Pinscape and JoyToKey) and it came up fine. Backbox looked good and my v3 DMD was recognized. The playfield looked a tad narrow from where I set it with BAM so I wasn't sure if PBY is, by default, launching FPloader in the BAM directory or the FuturePinball exe? So, I went into Options and tried pointing it to FPLoader which PBY said was already registered.

 

Once I did that nothing worked in PBY. So, I uninstalled with Revo Uninstaller Pro which wipes out any registry settings and reinstalled. Still wouldn't work. Restarted and still wouldn't work. I didn't power down and try it again yet.

 

Not going to fool with it anymore in the cab but will play with it on my gaming laptop with external monitor. It uses the keyboard OK correct? I will also install Visual Studio Community Friday since I am off (may still have it on there from previous playing with the Unreal engine).

Edited by hlr53, 01 August 2018 - 09:13 PM.

[mjr]

So, I went into Options and tried pointing it to FPLoader which PBY said was already registered.

 

Once I did that nothing worked in PBY. So, I uninstalled with Revo Uninstaller Pro which wipes out any registry settings and reinstalled. 

 

Well, I'm not sure what's going on with the FPLoader change, but FYI, it's completely unnecessary to use any uninstaller software.  There simply are no registry settings involved (apart from the install keys that SETUP adds to facilitate removal, but those have no effect on anything else).

 

So just to reassure you, PinballY didn't change anything global on your system.  All of its configuration is self-contained in its folder and is wiped when you delete the folder.  

 

The reason the settings seem to be sticking is, ironically, that you used an uninstaller rather than doing a simple folder delete.  I know we're all used to Windows software having its tentacles all over the place and requiring extreme measures like smashing your hard disk with a hammer to eradicate it, but it's just the opposite in this case.  You're better off just deleting the folder.  An uninstaller will usually leave behind any files that weren't part of the install set - which is what's going on here.  The Settings.txt file isn't part of the install set because I want to let you keep your old one when installing an update.  As a result, your uninstaller probably left your Settings.txt file behind.  If you want to start over, just delete the old Settings.txt file and you'll be back to defaults.

And just for future reference, by the same token, you don't even have to bother uninstalling anything to get back to defaults.  It's super easy: just delete Settings.txt. 

Edited by mjr, 01 August 2018 - 09:26 PM.

[hlr53]

 

So, I went into Options and tried pointing it to FPLoader which PBY said was already registered.

 

Once I did that nothing worked in PBY. So, I uninstalled with Revo Uninstaller Pro which wipes out any registry settings and reinstalled. 

 

Well, I'm not sure what's going on with the FPLoader change, but FYI, it's completely unnecessary to use any uninstaller software.  There simply are no registry settings involved (apart from the install keys that SETUP adds to facilitate removal, but those have no effect on anything else).

 

So just to reassure you, PinballY didn't change anything global on your system.  All of its configuration is self-contained in its folder and is wiped when you delete the folder.  

 

The reason the settings seem to be sticking is, ironically, that you used an uninstaller rather than doing a simple folder delete.  I know we're all used to Windows software having its tentacles all over the place and requiring extreme measures like smashing your hard disk with a hammer to eradicate it, but it's just the opposite in this case.  You're better off just deleting the folder.  An uninstaller will usually leave behind any files that weren't part of the install set - which is what's going on here.  The Settings.txt file isn't part of the install set because I want to let you keep your old one when installing an update.  As a result, your uninstaller probably left your Settings.txt file behind.  If you want to start over, just delete the old Settings.txt file and you'll be back to defaults.

And just for future reference, by the same token, you don't even have to bother uninstalling anything to get back to defaults.  It's super easy: just delete Settings.txt. 

 

 

Wow, I deleted the folder and on reinstall it asked if I would like to repair, of which I said yes of course, and it is back running. Cool! Good info for future troubleshooting so I don't have to get out the hammer and beat on the backglass and do a lot of additional swearing.

 

Question again: If I install on my laptop can I select tables with the keyboard? 

 

Unfortunately, all the time to play with for today :-(

[mjr]

Question again: If I install on my laptop can I select tables with the keyboard? 

 

Right, you should be able to do everything with keyboard keys.  

The Buttons page in the options lets you reassign all the keys, by the way.

[hlr53]

Question again: If I install on my laptop can I select tables with the keyboard?

 
Right, you should be able to do everything with keyboard keys.  The Buttons page in the options lets you reassign all the keys, by the way.

Good to go and after I asked it I forgot I use a wireless Steam controller to play pinball on the laptop.

Edited by hlr53, 02 August 2018 - 09:34 AM.

[mjr]

Good to go and after I asked it I forgot I use a wireless Steam contoller to play pinball on the laptop.

 

I don't have any support for that particular device in there, but as long as it can emulate a keyboard or joystick, it should work.  If you need to assign joystick buttons for it, you can do that from the Buttons settings as well.

[hlr53]

I would highly recommend to everyone that after downloading PBY to take some time and read all the info on that Pinscape page. It answers a lot of questions you may have at first. Like resizing all the windows to your system, adding tables, etc...
 
When I saw you can add tables and media on the fly along with using IPDB to auto fill in table info while the program is running, and not having to restart, is kinda jaw dropping. I'm thinking like WOW that is so fast and efficient!

Edited by hlr53, 02 August 2018 - 12:37 AM.