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SAMBuild2.9 beta thread


CarnyPriest

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4 hours ago, Ruebsy said:

Ok so I take that all back. No issues with the play field lights on Star Trek LE with the new r4277. When I switch back to st_161h it works. Only with the st_161c does it add color then take out the lights. Suggestions?


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st_161c is for the pro version which does not have the rgb lights. There is no colonized version of st_161h.

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@Ruebsy What lucky1 said. I've done had my fair share of rom confusion myself when I drank beers and repacked sound modification roms for twd ;) After that I ended up trying to play twd le with a pro rom - crashed on me constantly.

It is important not to use PRO rom on LE tables and vice versa. LE code emulation became possible when DjRobX, one of the developers managed to reverse engineer it with the help of the community.

Because of this, you can be almost sure that a table is PRO if it is a PM5 or VP9.

So a rom 'acd_168' is a PRO rom, acd_168h is a LE rom, acd_168c is a unofficial hacked color of PRO and acd_168hc again unofficial hacked color rom of LE.

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Read through the thread still confused. Should I use this 2.9 to allow the Metallica hammer to work and also the acdc diverter? Will using 2.9 cause other tables to have issue? I know it's beta so there is a chance I guess.

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1. r4277 allows the Metallica hammer to work and also the AC/DC diverter

2. Will it cause other tables to have issues? Maybe. I'm getting conflicting reports. There are a lot of moving parts now with the LE tables:

Which tables have issues?

Are you launching from PBX? Take it out of the equation. If the table runs OK outside of PBX then it is an issue with PBX and you can take it to the gamex forums.

Do you use an external DMD? If so, do you have the latest dmddevice.dll and other associated dll installed and unblocked? I've linked to the sources in the first post. This is especially relevant to Pin2DMD users as lucky1 is continuously updating firmware, drivers, etc. 

PinDMD1/2/3 users - latest dmddevice.dll is included in the VPM post. If things are working, you have what you have thanks to lucky1, freezy, et. al. , but honestly I don't know if they or Paul/RussDX are keeping up with changes. There hasn't been updates in a few months. If things are not working, I don't have any suggestions aside from going to a virtual DMD.

Are you using a virtual DMD? Which renderer: native VPM or freezy's dmddevice.dll (dmdext) or a desktop person using VP?. If you have issues with one have you tried the another? As I understand it freezy's version may have issues with some recent changes with Gottlieb System 3 DMD but I'm not sure on LE. If you are using freezy's version have you disabled the VPM display and enabled external DMD in the game settings? If you isolate your issue with freezy's version then leave a bug report on freezy's github repository and use VPM for now.

If you are using DOF are you using latest configtool export? What happens if you disable DOF?

If you are using B2S are you using the latest B2SBackglassServerEXE executable?

What happens if you disable B2S?

Are you using patched full color game code? What happens if you just use the unmodified game code?

Have you confirmed that you have the at91jit registry key enabled? If it is enabled and it is not working, have you tried disabling?

If there are still issues, are you sure that the hardware is powerful enough to run the SAM LE tables, especially the large ones? Have you exited all apps/processes/services not absolutely required to run the table? What OS are you running? OS and drivers up to date? Exceptions made with Windows Defender/anti-virus? If all else fails, reboot.

As mentioned, I get mixed reports. Seems like some people are doing fine with the r4277. For all I know, some people are just reverting back to an earlier build and not reporting anything which doesn't help. Report issues and they will eventually get fixed.

Perhaps not by me because my cab crapped out and although I can run builds, my laptop is not nearly powerful enough to test the SAM LE tables. But you can be sure nothing much is going to happen if we don't get feedback. 

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@Ruebsy What lucky1 said. I've done had my fair share of rom confusion myself when I drank beers and repacked sound modification roms for twd [emoji6] After that I ended up trying to play twd le with a pro rom - crashed on me constantly.

It is important not to use PRO rom on LE tables and vice versa. LE code emulation became possible when DjRobX, one of the developers managed to reverse engineer it with the help of the community.

Because of this, you can be almost sure that a table is PRO if it is a PM5 or VP9.

So a rom 'acd_168' is a PRO rom, acd_168h is a LE rom, acd_168c is a unofficial hacked color of PRO and acd_168hc again unofficial hacked color rom of LE.


Makes it all that more confusing. The Star Trek vpx table on vpinball last page of vpx tables to be exact. This seems to have an issue when using the pro rom with a ball stuck. The LE rom works great and they are all 161. Either way this beta has no bearing on the lights other than it made it work until I played with the color patch. If I use the regular rom it lights up great.
Is there another version of this Star Trek I'm missing? What table is the color patch 161 for?


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1. r4277 allows the Metallica hammer to work and also the AC/DC diverter

2. Will it cause other tables to have issues? Maybe. I'm getting conflicting reports. There are a lot of moving parts now with the LE tables:

Which tables have issues?

Are you launching from PBX? Take it out of the equation. If the table runs OK outside of PBX then it is an issue with PBX and you can take it to the gamex forums.

Do you use an external DMD? If so, do you have the latest dmddevice.dll and other associated dll installed and unblocked? I've linked to the sources in the first post. This is especially relevant to Pin2DMD users as lucky1 is continuously updating firmware, drivers, etc. 

PinDMD1/2/3 users - latest dmddevice.dll is included in the VPM post. If things are working, you have what you have thanks to lucky1, freezy, et. al. , but honestly I don't know if they or Paul/RussDX are keeping up with changes. There hasn't been updates in a few months. If things are not working, I don't have any suggestions aside from going to a virtual DMD.

Are you using a virtual DMD? Which renderer: native VPM or freezy's dmddevice.dll (dmdext) or a desktop person using VP?. If you have issues with one have you tried the another? As I understand it freezy's version may have issues with some recent changes with Gottlieb System 3 DMD but I'm not sure on LE. If you are using freezy's version have you disabled the VPM display and enabled external DMD in the game settings? If you isolate your issue with freezy's version then leave a bug report on freezy's github repository and use VPM for now.

If you are using DOF are you using latest configtool export? What happens if you disable DOF?

If you are using B2S are you using the latest B2SBackglassServerEXE executable?

What happens if you disable B2S?

Are you using patched full color game code? What happens if you just use the unmodified game code?

Have you confirmed that you have the at91jit registry key enabled? If it is enabled and it is not working, have you tried disabling?

If there are still issues, are you sure that the hardware is powerful enough to run the SAM LE tables, especially the large ones? Have you exited all apps/processes/services not absolutely required to run the table? What OS are you running? OS and drivers up to date? Exceptions made with Windows Defender/anti-virus? If all else fails, reboot.

As mentioned, I get mixed reports. Seems like some people are doing fine with the r4277. For all I know, some people are just reverting back to an earlier build and not reporting anything which doesn't help. Report issues and they will eventually get fixed.

Perhaps not by me because my cab crapped out and although I can run builds, my laptop is not nearly powerful enough to test the SAM LE tables. But you can be sure nothing much is going to happen if we don't get feedback. 


Thank you for all that info! I appreciate it!

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G935A using Tapatalk

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Makes it all that more confusing. The Star Trek vpx table on vpinball last page of vpx tables to be exact. This seems to have an issue when using the pro rom with a ball stuck. The LE rom works great and they are all 161. Either way this beta has no bearing on the lights other than it made it work until I played with the color patch. If I use the regular rom it lights up great.

Is there another version of this Star Trek I'm missing? What table is the color patch 161 for?

 

 

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For Star Trek, the only patch I know of is for the Pro game code. It works (with a script change) with fren's Pro table at VPInball. I think that there is a PM5 table here at VPU also. The Pro tables do not have RGB lighting. The patch does not work with the LE game code. Just use the unmodified code from sternpinball.com for the LE versions of the table.

 

Good news is that it appears to be working as expected for you.

 

 

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I run in VPM/Desktop PC Modes, nothing fancy, using r4277/VPX 10.3 Beta

The Walking Dead insert lights not working(2x light works and it didn't before hehe), no other issues.

 

Thanks for all your hard work, the community loves you!

 

 

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I run in VPM/Desktop PC Modes, nothing fancy, using r4277/VPX 10.3 Beta

The Walking Dead insert lights not working(2x light works and it didn't before hehe), no other issues.

 

Thanks for all your hard work, the community loves you!

 

 


LE, right? No patched color code?

Have the inserts worked before? Which beta version? Did they work with the stable version, 2.8b2?

Does it work with the latest stable VPX, 10.2? Aside from FSS POV tables, I'm not aware of anything that requires 10.3. No guarantee with a beta that it will be backwards compatible.


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have to make more tests tonight but seems that from 4253 to 4277, all extra lights required for some LE roms like twd acdc tron mustang are malfunctioning (after around l80), they are working after a certain time

Envoyé de mon SM-G800F en utilisant Tapatalk

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I think, I have got some interesting news.

There must be something evil in TWD LE (of course there is, but that is another story ;))

I now tested many combinations of VPinMame versions 4253 and 4277, with and without B2S and DOF, with a changed  at91jit, and with and without virtual ExtDMD (normal LCD, no external DMD), and it seems, that TWD has some bad influence on itself and other tables started after that.

 

Examples:

VPinMame 4253:

  1. Start of VPX (stable 10.2)
  2. Loading TWD, Tron and ACDC
  3. Tron and ACDC working flawlessly, all lights are on
  4. TWD working flawlessly, all lights are on (see screenshot 2 above) !
  5. After terminating and restarting TWD (without restarting VPX), no more lights on TWD (see screenshot 1 above) !!
  6. After terminating TWD, Tron and ACDC are also no longer working, There are lights missing, and ACDC gets stucked.
  7. After terminating and restarting VPX, the cycle 2-6 starts again.

 

VPinMame 4277:

  1. Start of VPX (stable 10.2)
  2. Loading TWD, Tron and ACDC
  3. Tron and ACDC working flawlessly, all lights are on
  4. TWD now has troubles instantly, no lights (see screenshot 1 above) 
  5. After terminating TWD, Tron and ACDC are also no longer working. There are lights missing, and ACDC gets stucked.

So the difference between 4253 and 4277 is, that in 4277 TWD never has working lights, in 4253 they work on first start and stop working after that. In both cases TWD makes the other tables stop working, when terminating and restarting in the same VPX session.

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@Ginsonic Nice feedback. I have something to report myself. I decided to play a bit with Avatar mod that @neofr45 uploaded recently. For 4253. If I edit anything on the table, it will crash when saved and going to run right away. If I save and exit and then play, it is never a problem. So, it seem exiting or crashing VP is the fix. Not a big issue normally when you run PBX frontend, but how frustrating it must be trying to make the table in the first place. I should probably do some tests with the latest and greatest.

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@Thalamus: Thanks, and Yes, terminating VPX (forced when crashing or manually closing) seems to "set free" something. As far as I know, VPinMame.dll is only unloaded totally when terminating VP, so that could be a hint.

Since 4253 seems to have some (other) problems, I will try to go back in VPinMame history until this behaviour ends, maybe I can bring more light into this. Stay tuned...

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Done ! I went back in history until 2.9b.4196 and 2.8.b02, always correctly closing VPX before, uninstalling and installing another VPinMame version.

Every version shows the same behaviour with TWD LE (unpatched 156h) as described above under version 4253. First time it works, then it shows no (additional) lights, removes then ramp lights from Tron and crashes ACDC. Either every VPinMame version has the same "bug" or something is wrong with TWD or its ROM :unsure:.

The new Avatar table has no problems for me and does not crash after editing, saving and starting within the same VPX session.

AND: As mentioned above, this is NO form of criticism, I only try to help. And in this sense my grateful thanks to all of you guys, you do GREAT work and bring more happiness in all of our lifes :)

 

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Are you using VPX 10.2 or VPX 10.3 beta? I'd encourage testing with 10.2 so that we can remove changes done for 10.3 from the equation (unless you know for sure that the table requires 10.3).

Be very careful here. I know users often change the table to suit tastes. If you did that using 10.3 then I can't know that this was the cause of issues.

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6 minutes ago, CarnyPriest said:

Are you using VPX 10.2 or VPX 10.3 beta? I'd encourage testing with 10.2 so that we can remove changes done for 10.3 from the equation (unless you know for sure that the table requires 10.3).

Be very careful here. I know users often change the table to suit tastes. If you did that using 10.3 then I can't know that this was the cause of issues.

I never used 10.3 before, always 10.2 latest stable release

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5 hours ago, Ginsonic said:

Done ! I went back in history until 2.9b.4196 and 2.8.b02, always correctly closing VPX before, uninstalling and installing another VPinMame version.

Every version shows the same behaviour with TWD LE (unpatched 156h) as described above under version 4253. First time it works, then it shows no (additional) lights, removes then ramp lights from Tron and crashes ACDC. Either every VPinMame version has the same "bug" or something is wrong with TWD or its ROM :unsure:.

The new Avatar table has no problems for me and does not crash after editing, saving and starting within the same VPX session.

AND: As mentioned above, this is NO form of criticism, I only try to help. And in this sense my grateful thanks to all of you guys, you do GREAT work and bring more happiness in all of our lifes :)

 

Thanks for digging into this. It's very helpful that someone is going through a full troubleshooting exercise. As mentioned, among patched game code, alternate DMD output, B2S, etc there are a lot of components that need to work properly. It's getting complicated.

I want to confirm that on a fresh start of VPX that TWD LE works properly on 2.8b, r4196, and r4253. Correct?

And otherwise AC/DC and Metallica are working as expected with r4277? How about Spider-Man VE, Star Trek LE, and Mustang LE?

AC/DC, Metallica, and TWD by far have the largest bin files of any of the rom sets. They all push 100Mb or beyond. The next one down is Spider-Man VE at around 65Mb with Mustang and Star Trek behind that. I know that earlier versions of VP had some memory management (leakage) issues that would cause crashes. I thought some of that behavior was cleared up, but I guess there is no guarantee that all resources are freed up with these tables. I'd just make it a habit that when you are done with a simulation that you exit VPX and restart. Just so you know, I recall running into similar issues when I don't restart VPX, so I've just made it part of the routine when testing. If you are using a front-end then you don't have to worry about it.

People were asking for the Pro code on Avatar. I don't think anyone's having any issues at all with Pro versions, so we can set that aside.

 

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3 hours ago, Thalamus said:

When I do changes - I always make sure I use 10.2 to prevent possible incomparability issues. Curious @CarnyPriest - long before your cab is up and running again you think ?

 

Playfield display took a crap early March. Been trying to find the time to take it apart since then. Hoping that it is just a matter of replacing blown capacitors on the power board. I'm also broke since paying income taxes. You do the math. 

If I get my workspace together I have a little 20" flat screen that I can hook up to at least do some testing. Nothing else is wrong with the cab. We'll see.

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