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lucky1

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Can some of you guys post some you tube videos of some scene replacements and pallete switches. Im starting a project myself and id love to see some decent results from an older pinball.

Oh, is there a way to replace individual frames or even certain layers of a frame? sometimes theres a layer(checksum) that seems to be used many times and coloring each frame is much more laborious than if you could just color that layer of the frame. Thanks for any pointers!

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First of all, Sharrky is the only one I know of who seriously started to color older machines which normally have 4 shades (colors).
maybe he can make a video.

Here is a short introduction to the coloring features of pin2dmd with the editor. 

There are currently three ways to color a animation. All are controlled by keyframes. The first step is to find a keyframe at the beginning of a animation scene which is unique and hits reproducible. To achieve that you can either use  a plane or a combination of plane and mask.
1 of 10 masks can be defined to blank out areas which are dynamic and lead to unreproducible keyframes. To use a masked keyframe you have to activate the Mask checkbox choose or edit one of the masks and assign a keyframe with the Mask checkbox activated. 

If you found a usable keyframe you can use it to either

1. Simply assign a palette (Add PalSwitch) (same color depth as the original)
2. Start playback of a replacement scene (Add  FrameSeq) (16 colors)
3. Add content and/or color information to the scene (Add Color Mask) (16 colors)

For a PalSwitch you can assign the duration how long the palette should be active until it switches back to the default palette. You can play forward in your recording and press fetch duration at the point you want to switch back to the default palette. You can change the colors of a palette by ctrl clicking in the color you want to change.

To generate a FrameSeq you can cut a existing scene using mark start / mark end / cut. Normally the starting point is equal to the picture used for the keyframe. Then you edit the scene with a 16 color palette. You can change everything here

To generate a Color Mask scene you also use mark start / mark end / cut and then activate the ColMask checkbox
After that you can also use the edit tools, but the content coming from the recording is not editable but you can modify the colors of areas by assigning a different color group. You have 4 groups of 4 colors here. Colors 1-2-3-4 are the standard/original colors. e.g by drawing with color 5,9 or 13 you change the color of pixels having color 0 etc.

Since Color Mask needs to be frame sync to the content coming from PinMame/Real Pinball machine it is the most complicated to be used. Preferably use option 1 or 2 and use option 3 only for scenes with dynamic content like score numbers.

 

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I added my introduction to the first post and added the following info.

Since Version 2.8 the recordings can be done with the official vpinmame build by creating a DmdDump folder in the folder where vpinmame.dll is located and activating both Show DMD and Use external DMD in the tables option menu. 
To load them as a animation in the editor you need to gzip the txt file using e.g. 7zip with gzip as compression method.
7zip can be found here http://www.7-zip.org

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On ‎1‎/‎6‎/‎2017 at 2:12 PM, lucky1 said:

First of all, Sharrky is the only one I know of who seriously started to color older machines which normally have 4 shades (colors).
maybe he can make a video.

Here is a short introduction to the coloring features of pin2dmd with the editor. 

There are currently three ways to color a animation. All are controlled by keyframes. The first step is to find a keyframe at the beginning of a animation scene which is unique and hits reproducible. To achieve that you can either use  a plane or a combination of plane and mask.
1 of 10 masks can be defined to blank out areas which are dynamic and lead to unreproducible keyframes. To use a masked keyframe you have to activate the Mask checkbox choose or edit one of the masks and assign a keyframe with the Mask checkbox activated. 

If you found a usable keyframe you can use it to either

1. Simply assign a palette (Add PalSwitch) (same color depth as the original)
2. Start playback of a replacement scene (Add  FrameSeq) (16 colors)
3. Add content and/or color information to the scene (Add Color Mask) (16 colors)

For a PalSwitch you can assign the duration how long the palette should be active until it switches back to the default palette. You can play forward in your recording and press fetch duration at the point you want to switch back to the default palette. You can change the colors of a palette by ctrl clicking in the color you want to change.

To generate a FrameSeq you can cut a existing scene using mark start / mark end / cut. Normally the starting point is equal to the picture used for the keyframe. Then you edit the scene with a 16 color palette. You can change everything here

To generate a Color Mask scene you also use mark start / mark end / cut and then activate the ColMask checkbox
After that you can also use the edit tools, but the content coming from the recording is not editable but you can modify the colors of areas by assigning a different color group. You have 4 groups of 4 colors here. Colors 1-2-3-4 are the standard/original colors. e.g by drawing with color 5,9 or 13 you change the color of pixels having color 0 etc.

Since Color Mask needs to be frame sync to the content coming from PinMame/Real Pinball machine it is the most complicated to be used. Preferably use option 1 or 2 and use option 3 only for scenes with dynamic content like score numbers.

 

Thank you!! This information is really good. It needs to be located somewhere very easy to find! Maybe put it on the pin2dmd.com site on the editor page. Now on to try and get this all working!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey guys, im having a problem with the communication between the pin2dmd editor and my device. Its weird because when I first connected and installed the driver, the device was working properly with the editor but all of a sudden it doesn't work and I get this error:

USB error 3: Unable to open USB device: Access denied (insufficient permissions)

After getting the error I have: updated java, deleted and re-downloaded the latest editor(at least I think its the latest editor. it says its 2 months old on the download page though...). I have also deleted the drivers on my computer and re-connected the device(it re-installed the driver) then updated the driver with zidag. Still no luck. Oh, the device communicates well with the pin2dmd.exe tool, just not the editor. Any help is greatly appreciated!

-Tom

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On 1/9/2017 at 1:34 PM, tjc02002 said:

Thank you!! This information is really good. It needs to be located somewhere very easy to find! Maybe put it on the pin2dmd.com site on the editor page. Now on to try and get this all working!

Added to the new Tutorials section.

 

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On ‎1‎/‎23‎/‎2017 at 11:52 AM, tjc02002 said:

USB error 3: Unable to open USB device: Access denied (insufficient permissions)

Any help on this error? I believe its a java permissions thing or something like that but I cant seem to get it straightened out even after completely re-installing java...

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...

I be playing with the editor last couple of days and it drives me crazy.

I make a video of what i do.Cut a couple of frames then i  colorize it then add frameseq .Then i look back at the animations and the color doesnt change.

 Can somebody tell me what i am doing wrong.

 

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The preview window does not show any changes or process any keyframes. It only plays back the content of the dump files / scenes.

You either need to connect the pin2dmd via USB, upload the project and check the live preview checkbox or
export the files copy them to SD and test them on a real machine.

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On 31.1.2017 at 3:04 PM, tjc02002 said:

Any help on this error? I believe its a java permissions thing or something like that but I cant seem to get it straightened out even after completely re-installing java...

Upgrade your Java to 64 bit and use the 64bit version of the editor.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 4/14/2017 at 4:09 PM, pinovogel said:

I always looked to the preview window nowI tested on a real pinball and its works.Only with upload project and live preview doesnt work for me.

But i am happy here is a little video.

 

This looks great. Any chance of sharing this that I may see how you did it? Was maybe going to use my pin2dmd in my shadow. 

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Is there a way for the software to attempt to copy the coloring done on a current frame to the next frame? Seems it should be able to detect areas that are unchanged and at least give the option to attempt to color it. Or is there a way to do it? I am playing with a fishtales dump and the title screen is 30 frames, I really do not want to color the words fish tales 30 times...

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Is there a way for the software to attempt to copy the coloring done on a current frame to the next frame? Seems it should be able to detect areas that are unchanged and at least give the option to attempt to color it. Or is there a way to do it? I am playing with a fishtales dump and the title screen is 30 frames, I really do not want to color the words fish tales 30 times...


You should be able doing this by just using the "copy to next" buttons. This is exactly what these buttons are for.

Best Steve

Gesendet von meinem SM-G930F mit Tapatalk

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1 minute ago, steve45 said:


You should be able doing this by just using the "copy to next" buttons. This is exactly what these buttons are for.

Best Steve

Gesendet von meinem SM-G930F mit Tapatalk
 

This copies the entire frame doesn't it? This is not exactly what I am looking for as there are bubbles that scroll up on the fishtales logo and these will not be there if i click copy next. unless i am using it wrong.

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This copies the entire frame doesn't it? This is not exactly what I am looking for as there are bubbles that scroll up on the fishtales logo and these will not be there if i click copy next. unless i am using it wrong.


Depends on the editing mode. If your are only adding color planes it should copy only those planes.
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6 minutes ago, steve45 said:


Depends on the editing mode. If your are only adding color planes it should copy only those planes.

Yes that is not what is happening, it is copying the entire frame over and deleting the next frame. Do I need to enable masks or something?

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Yes that is not what is happening, it is copying the entire frame over and deleting the next frame.


So I will try to reproduce that and would consider that a bug.
But anyways I'm working on an new version 2 of the editor which makes a few things easier especially with copy and paste frame content. Maybe you will wait until the new version in finally released. Hopefully this week or next week.
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22 minutes ago, steve45 said:


So I will try to reproduce that and would consider that a bug.
But anyways I'm working on an new version 2 of the editor which makes a few things easier especially with copy and paste frame content. Maybe you will wait until the new version in finally released. Hopefully this week or next week.

Oh yes I can wait as this is ending up to be very tedious and causing me a lot of grief...

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