New Pin2DMD user has questions

[JustAnotherRat]

I am new to PIN2DMD and only just got one this week, I didn't really want to start a new thread but it seems that I can't find the answers I am after a few days searching on the forum, some of the answers are there or some of what I am after but there seems to be some missing steps in some of the guides etc. so hopefully someone can help me and in turn others by answering my questions here.

So far, I have the PIN2DMD working and it looks great on most games but I have some problems.

1. SEGA DMD's

My first question related to how SEGA DMD's display on PIN2DMD. The writing in these seems unreadable. I know that these games originally had a larger DMD so I ask, is there a way to make these display properly on a standard Pin2DMD setup (I have seen the larger ones that people have made for SEGA games). Games such as Batman Forever, Maverick, Baywatch and Apollo 13 are games I have tested so far and the images are terrible. I have included a few images to show what I mean.

2. Stern ROM's
When looking at Stern ROMs, I can see some of the files download are a .zip file with a .bin file inside. I have no problem getting them to work however some of the .zip files have a number of files inside but no .bin. How do I use these files? I have found on the Ac/DC ROM that it says to use pin2dmd.exe /b acdc.dat which I am doing (I am doing it for all of the Stern Color ROMS) however it doesn't work. I thought maybe it needs to have BSPatch used to make it workable but my efforts to do that have failed so far.

3. BSpatch. I can see that to use BSPatch I need to use the command bspatch "old file.bin" "new file.bin" "diff file.diff" but where do I get these? Can someone idiot proof this for me? I assume the "Old File" is the original .bin file, but I don't know what the "New File" would be and am not sure where the .diff comes from (other than I assume what is in some of the downloads like I mentioned in point 2). Where does the .dat file come from that I need to call? In simple terms, if I download a ROM from the Stern site, what do I need to do to make a color version to use with PIN2DMD?

That'll do for now. I look forward to hearing the responses so that I can continue to be amazed at what this product can do for me

 

 

[sharkky]

About stern rom:

you have need just "old file.bin" (original file bin) and file.diff

When you use the bspatch command "new file.bin" is the file which will be created

[JustAnotherRat]

Thanks for the advice. I thought I had tried that and it told me that the file was not found but I'll try again. I must have done something wrong.

[Rappelbox]

For 1.) the normal pin2dmd dmds are only capable of 128x32 pixel. That is for now also the limit vpinmame sends out to any kind of "real" dmds as far as I know. So, there's atm no other way to bypass that problem.

For real pinballs with large dmds I have the special pin2dmd-XL version together with my big displays but that doesn't work with virtual pinballs for now.
Maybe there will be an update in the future, but not now.

Greetings,
Dom

[JustAnotherRat]

Thanks for the response. Would there be a way to change the image that is sent to Pin2DMD? Would it be possible to modify the outputs in the future so that it worked?

 

[lucky1]

If you can provide a better algorithm to reduce 192x64 pixel to 128x32 pixel than the one implemented in vpinmame I can try to implement it.

The current algorithm can be found here 

https://github.com/mirror/pinmame/blob/master/src/pindmd/pindmd.c

 

[JustAnotherRat]

Thanks Lucky1. I had a bit of a look at this with my son and he has suggested that perhaps it isn't only a size thing which I was working off (in fact size my be the lesser problem), but on these games the Pin2DMD seems to be more aggressive in adding the brighter colour to the image which means a saturation of sorts and I am inclined to agree with him. We chose some pretty horrible but contrasting colours and could easily see that in some instances the 100% colour would appear in areas that it shouldn't (if that makes sense).

My son has no knowledge of Vpinball at all let alone VPinMame but looked at the code and said that he wouldn't mind having a tinker with it to see whether changing the algorithm to be less aggressive with the colour palette would overcome the problem but we don't know how we can test it.