Fresh Build Gone Haywire

[fudgeycaca]

Long story short, I had a fully functional build that was stable, but the motherboard died on me.  I rebuilt it from scratch (detailed below), it appeared to be solid, so I copied over my assets, continued testing, continued building out...... And now suddenly everything's screwed up and acting like bad data is being processed, leading to weird behavior and states.....  Once the build was stable, I even did an export of the DB and confirmed that the PinupPopper front end was not open, only the Config app was open. Could that have done it?

 

DETAILS:  First symptom was that CFTBL's virtual DMD was flickering and acting screwy.  It was recommended to update VpinMAME, VPX etc... to make 100% sure they matched the versions needed for the new VPW CFTBL release.  So I used the online updater in the Pinup Popper Configuration app, it updated VPX, VPinMame, B2S Server etc... etc... but it's not fixing anything. 

 

Upon further testing, the problems are not isolated to just CFTBL.  Every table I'm testing is misbehaving, and it makes no sense based on the meticulous build steps I followed.  I've built 3 vPIN environments with Baller Installer in the last 3 years.  Every archive was unblocked before extraction, vPIN apps haven't been configured to Run As Admin, there is no Antivirus beyond Defender (which is disabled and has exceptions configured for Apps and Directories) the system was connected to the internet during Baller installation....... 

 

Today I tested the Original Clue table w/ PuP Pack.  Standard targets and ramps worked as expected, callouts seemed to be correct, but then a mode lit and wasn't progressing properly.  The DMD was displaying "feed the dogs 1" but it should have been a countdown timer that would expire and disappear.  After I successfully hit the feed the dogs target, the display updated to say "Feed the dogs 30" and counted down.  In the meantime, the ball drained, but the "feed the dogs" text remained stuck.  I then launched Atlantis. Existing coins were present as expected on the ROM, so I started a brand new game and the immediate callout was "Go for level 3" and the playfield lights reflected that level 3 was in process, but levels 1 and 2 weren't illuminated solid like you'd expect at that game state.  The game is supposed to be initialized to Level 1 at game start, no?  I then launched AFM and a variety of lights were illuminated on the field that shouldn't be there for a fresh game.  Upon draining the ball a few seconds later, the score tally was significantly higher than it should have been for the targets hit.

 

TL;DR - Am I missing a setting somewhere that would force VPX to discard an in-process game state on exit/ re-initialize at boot?  Or is something just seriously screwed up here?  The behavior reads to me like data from exiting a previously in-process game is being held over and shoved into memory on the table's next boot...... (I suspect that my testing could have induced this since I've been closing out of many in-process games during testing of my new build.  Going through my tables one by one to load and adjust the virtual DMD positioning etc...).

 

This build is a completely different computer than the last one:

1. Brand new SSD, WIN 11 Pro install
2. Defender Firewall & Antivirus disabled
3. All system firmware and drivers installed
4. Baller Installer latest release installed and configured https://popupdates.nailbuster.com/inst/PinUP_Popper_Baller_Installer_2501.exe
5. Exceptions entered into Defender Antivirus for Pinup folder on desktop, all of the .EXEs contained within, as well as the c:\vPinball folder and each of the subdirectories

 

After that, I went through to configure my audio, video, and input settings for VPX and Popper, copied over all my backed up data (good working ROMs, tables, B2S backglasses, script files, UltraDMD folders, Popper assets, PuP folders, VPMAlias file etc.....  Spent a couple days spot-testing some tables, they appeared to be working as expected and going through all modes completely.  Next I went through to re-build my popper playlists and scrape all the data (forgot to back those up.....).  Continued testing, everything working fine including PuP packs, the only sticking point was that I had to go through and disable External DMD for many tables, and adjust virtual DMD positioning for many others.  So I've been going through one by one to do so.....  And then suddenly I noticed the CFTBL DMD going on the fritz.....

 

Not sure where to go from here, except to start all over from scratch again.... But I'm hesitant to invest all that time and effort without understanding what went wrong to begin with............