PinCabView2D : Most old DOS Pinball Games in your Pincab!

[OscarSNM]

Hi Marty

I can't remember if I have FantasiesDx, but i think I have. I've used Claude to resolve this on every table of this emulator and is working ok with the bg that I put on it. It remaps me keys where was necesary and makes menus to select tables and number of players from the frontend. Tonight when I go home, I ask Claude about this and give you it's reply.

Thanks again for logos and BGs.

[OscarSNM]

This is what Claude say about it
 

I think I know this one: I ran into the same thing on my cab with the PinCabView2D DOS tables.

The backglass you see isn’t coming from Popper. PinCabView2D draws its own, from Textures\<Game>.png. When you launch a table, DosBGChanger.bat copies Textures\<Game>_<n>.png over Textures\<Game>.png, where <n> is the table number your frontend passes in. Whatever Popper shows gets covered.

If the per-table file doesn’t exist, the copy fails silently and the game starts with whatever <Game>.png was left from the last run. That’s the “wrong backglass that overrides my settings” effect.

For the FantasiesDx set, the game name is FantasiesDx, so it looks for FantasiesDx_1.png, FantasiesDx_2.png… The pack only ships a generic FantasiesDx.png plus Mania_1..4 and Fantasies_1..4. The Mania tables inside the Dx set have nothing to load.

What fixed it for me:

Back up the generic FantasiesDx.png first. The first launch that has a per-table texture overwrites it for good.
Find out which numbers your frontend passes. Add a line like echo %1 %2 > params.txt to DosBGChanger.bat and launch each Mania table once.
Create the missing textures. Copy the right Mania_x.png (or Fantasies_x.png) to FantasiesDx_<n>.png for each of those numbers.
Check the paths inside DosBGChanger.bat. Mine still pointed to an old install folder, so every copy failed silently. Using %~dp0 relative paths fixed that for good.
Also, if your frontend passes the table number in a rating-type field, PinballX at least caps that at 4 and sends 0 above it. Putting the number in the launch name, like “FantasiesDx 6”, avoids that.

[MartyBarty]

Sadly, in the case of the above, Claude isn't making any sense. Some irregularities with the filenames aside, the main issue is that the file mentioned (DosBGChanger) doesn't exist in the setup I have. It's not part of the PinCabView2D content that I can see. So unfortunately, the approach here isn't going to work.

 

Knowing what the problem is seems easy - tables 5 to 8 inside FantasiesDx display the backglasses and DMD images (not score panels) for tables 1 to 4, most likely because they're calling for incorrect numbers (1-4). However, I genuinely can't work out if there's a way to fix it because none of the files in the package denote how these images are called. I've found every instance of an .ini or .cfg file relating to FantasiesDx, but changing the Backglass setting to 0 instead of 1 (in an attempt to stop it showing and force Popper's display to appear instead) doesn't yield any positive results. I've dug into every other config file in there, also nothing. So, right now, there's no solution and as I said, the software overrides Popper's output so it can't be faked either. Totally stumped. Hmmm.

 

To be clear here, the objective isn't using Popper - the objective is to get PinCabView2D to show the correct images, based on the instructions and the way it's meant to work. Pinball Dreams and Dreams 2 (which are part of the same DreamsDx package) work fine, but then that's one game with eight tables. FantasiesDx is actually Pinball Fantasies and Pinball Mania - they boot separately from the initial starting menu, then have a lineup of four tables each. I suspect this is the problem. But fixing it is another matter... as I said before, renaming the images as Mania1, etc also doesn't work, because technically it's not launching Pinball Mania. Gah.

Edited yesterday at 12:38 PM by MartyBarty