New to Virtual Pinball, New Cabinet Build. Some General Questions related to VPX and FlexDMD and B2S Backglass.

[skyewelse]

Hi everyone, nice to meet you all. I am completely new to the world of pinball, especially virtual pinball, but I decided to go down the very deep rabbit hole of building out my first ever virtual pinball machine cabinet from scratch. It's a little unique in that I changed the overall design of it shortly after I bult the cabinet frame as it was originally intended to hold a "wooden encased monitor" that I was hoping to use for other purposes as well. I guess you might call it a modular type of setup. After getting it all to fit the way I wanted, I quickly realized that idea was not going to work out very well due to the sheer size and weight of the monitor that I'd be sliding out of the thing....

 

So, I guess you might say that this is in part my own design and I used a lot of ideas from watching several of Way of the Wrench's channel on Youtube. That being said, I'd say the main differences between this and other builds I've seen is that it's bit wider, the lock bar is setup to also be an arcade control panel with a Sanwa joystick and some extra buttons that can be used for other games (mainly vertical shmups) and for my younger kids to be able to play Pinball and actually reach the flippers connected to buttons on the top. There's also some unique missile-toggle / momentary switch fire buttons, and a little cut out for a Kinect 2.0 to sit just above the DMD monitor, because I want to eventually learn how to use some headtracking for VPX. 

 

I decided to go with most of my parts and controller boards being from Cleveland Software Design and it's setup so that it has separate power toggle switches in the back to activate 5v, 12v, 24v and 48v independently so that they don't all come on at the same time that I hit the main power switch. This drives the CSD PinOne Main board (soon to hopefully be upgraded to an Ultra that I just ordered) and there's plenty of ALED lighting that I still need to figure out how to setup using DOF. That's a story for another day as right now I'm just trying to figure out the basics of how to setup VPX and Pinball FX (of which I have mostly working fine in Cabinet mode. Only issues so far are getting nudges to work a bit better).

 

It has 6.1 SSF. Toys include 10 solenoids, 1 knocker, a repeating bell, fan blower, shaker motor, and I'm thinking of also adding shell bells and chimes eventually, so trying to future proof for that. 

 

Anyhow, I think I've gotten pretty far on my own and with help with Chat GPT, but as of last night I pretty much hit a wall in my understanding of how VPX handles FlexDMD and B2S backglasses. 

 

Because I'm using a nice new computer that I decided to upgrade to for this project to be able to run everything at 4K at 120 frames, I was also advised that instead of using VPX 10.8.0, I should be looking at using the VPX 10.8.1 BGFX, so that's what I've been using and what I'm mostly familiar with so far. It's been mostly great and straightforward with how to set a table up with the only caveat being that it sometimes likes to erase all of my input settings and take them back to default VPX keyboard buttons which pretty much require me to set them all back again. I've found that I can somewhat prevent this from happening if I take the .INI file and ensure that it's only one being referenced inside my VPX folder and then using Windows, locking it down to Read-Only file in properties. That seems to do the trick. Then, when I need to quickly tweak a setting, I unlock it from read-only mode making it writable, open VPX and change a few things, save and exit the table, then immediately lock it again. It's annoying, but I don't see that a newer version of BGFX has been released to solve for the problem, so I'm just dealing with it for now. lol 

 

So... using VPX 10.8.1 BGFX, I know that I can open most of the options and setting using F12. If the table happens to be a PinMame table, then F1 will give me even more options. Taking JP Salas's wonderful recreation of Attack from Mars 6.0.0. as a first table example, I was able to get it load up in VPX right away and the DMD was showing in the top-left ontop of the playfield. I learned that I could disable this embedded DMD by turning off Desktop DMD inside of the Table Options. Then... once I got Freezy's Flex DMD files (both the 32 bit and the 64 bit installs) and the latest FlexDMD 1.9.1 (I believe is the latest at the time of writing) and had them all put in my VPX/vPinMame folder, I was finally able to get the designer window to show the demo of Flex DMD without having it crash. I then found that Attack From Mars would allow me to enable that new FlexDMD by turning on the Plugin for it in the F12 Plugins options, and then by using F1, in the PinMame options, it seemed that using Cabinet mode and external DMD using a .dll file seem to do the trick. It still didn't appear where I wanted it to, but eventually I was able to finally move this DMD to the appropriate monitor, size it correctly and it stays there each time I open the table. I still don't have a backglass working for it as I'm still completely puzzled on how that all works. I do have B2S Server installed and registered and for some tables, let's say the original Disney's Aladdin table (2020 by ivantba) comes in running a Backglass perfectly fine. The same with Batman '66. They loaded up perfectly fine without any issues, so I'm not quite sure what needs to be done to tables that don't have a backglass that launch in order to get them working like Attack From Mars. I'm guessing that you download a separate backglass file or a .mp4 video backglass and you tell the VPX script to point to it somewhere and then save the configuration and retest, only there seem to be so many options for what you can download that I'm just scratching my head here on how it all works. 

 

That leads me to my next challenge which was to get JP Salas' Space Cadet (3D Pinball) 6.0.1 working with a FlexDMD (which I read was supposed to be fixed in version 6.0.1) and I wanted to get the original background music working with it (I have the MP3 named "jpspacecadet.mp3" in my VPX/Music folder and I have script set to Song = "jpspacecadet.mp3" but I hear no music, I can't see the score because I can't seem to get FlexDMD to show up at all, and I can't seem to get a backglass to work with it even though I've tried a few different things. It just seems like every attempt I try at fixing it fails, probably due to my lack of understanding of how an original table (no PinMame) is supposed to display these objects. I'd love to get this table working perfectly in particular as the original table is something that my wife loved growing up and I think the kids will like it as well, but at present we can't even tell how well we are doing as there's no way to tell the score. 

 

Thank you for reading my adventure so far! I'm open to any suggestions as to how to best troubleshoot and get this working. If there are some videos you would suggest I start with that are helpful to newcomers, I'd love to see them... only again, I'm using BGFX so far, so I feel like a lot of that might not be the exact same as far setup features as it is a bit newer. That's one of the challenges I've discovered is that BFGX seems to have a completely different interface for settings and setup for the tables. 

 

Here's some pictures of my progress so far as well as some screenshots of what I've configured in VPX BGFX for JP Salas' Space Cadet if it helps. 

 

Thanks for time! I'm hoping one of these days I'll learn enough to make my own modified table. Would love to make one some video game series I enjoy. 

 

-Thomas

 

 

 

 

Edited October 24 by skyewelse