America's Most Haunted - colorized DMD and sound asset updates
Author - CarnyPriest
Date - August 25, 2023
America's Most Haunted - Spooky Pinball LLC 2014 (IPDB# 6161)
Designer - Ben Heckendorn (benheck.com)
Ben Heckendorn generously provided all assets, models, plans, etc. in making the virtual version a reality.
DMD colorization - herg/Hsrold Toler (https://pinside.com/pinball/community/pinsiders/herg)
https://ledocd.com
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/color-display-for-america-s-most-haunted-it-s-happening
IMPORTANT!!! Always backup before you make any changes. In this case, backup the table, scripts, UltraDMD folder. Find the music files
and back that up too if you want.
DMD colorization -
ARMYAVIATION acquired the set of colorized animations around Oct 2019. This is the set currently used in Bigus1's mod.
The source for all of these GIF files would be at herg's website:
https://ledocd.com/amh_color/index.html
Since 2019, herg acquired the source Adobe Premiere and After Effects files directly from benheck that were used to create the
original DMD animated sequences. And he has continued to do some work, and as of today there are 62 new animated sequences
that have been colorized that were unmodified in the original collection from 2019.
It's pretty easy to grab them and update the table. Herg last posted an update a year ago, but he may find motivation
to return at some point. These instructions will make it easy to update again.
-On the ledocd.com site click the link under
"View the Animations"
-Allow the page to fully load. All of the animation scenes are listed twice (original and modified... if a modified GIF exists - otherwise, it will be the original).
It may take a little while to load all the GIFs.
Instructions are for Chrome but there should be something similar for any browser:
-Right click anywhere on the page
-Save as...
-Webpage, Complete (*.htm;*.html) with the default file name
-Click Ok - all the GIFs will be saved in your Downloads folder "view_table_files"
-Copy the contents of the folder into the America's Most Haunted.UltraDMD folder overwriting the original GIFs. That's it!
Optional:
The folder contains every scene twice. The original would be downloaded with a "(1)" added to the filename. The table script will not call any of these files
because the file name will not match, but you may not want to waste the space.
-Open an instance of cmd.exe
-Navigate to the folder you downloaded
Example
cd C:\Users\Accountname\Downloads\view_table_files
-then enter the following
del *(1).gif
-Now you can copy the contents of the folder into the America's Most Haunted.UltraDMD folder.
SFX and voices-
These instructions are a copy+paste directly from 3fRU1JSRYgTb in reviews to Bigus1's mod at vpforums.com:
https://www.vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=15647&st=80#commentsStart
These instructions will work on any of the tables currently available at the main sites (Shoopity, freneticamnesiac, Bigus1, or drhotwing VR mod). All of the scripts are based on Shoopity's
fine work. When Shoopity published the original VP9 version, it was a time when people would loudly complain about 100Mb+ table sizes. Original SFX were compressed
to manage space.
https://www.vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=15647&st=50#commentsStart
- Download and unpack AMH_SD_V023.zip from the linked site (https://www.benheck.com/amh/)
- Open the table in VPX and go to Table / Sound Manager
- Sort by Import Path and you'll see that most of the game sounds came from "C:\Users\Sprinter\Box Sync\WIP\AMH\Sounds\"
- Create that same folder structure on your computer and copy all the downloaded wav files there (I used Bulk Rename Utility to quickly copy everything from the 25 subfolders in the unpacked .zip)
- In Sound Manager, use shift+click to select all items from C:\Users\Sprinter\Box Sync\WIP\AMH\Sounds\
- Get comfortable because VPX may be unresponsive for several minutes
- Click Reimport then Yes
- There are a few game sound files that came from a different original directory; Update those individually using Reimport From
- Close out Sound Manager, save the updated .vpx, enjoy your 500MB table
Carny Note - You don't really have to have a separate Bulk Rename Utility although it might save a minute or two. It will be enough to cut and paste the contents of folders _FA to _FY into
a single folder, "C:\Users\Sprinter\Box Sync\WIP\AMH\Sounds\". When you have completed the import in VPX then you can delete that folder. We will leave the contents of the archive
folder _FZ, the music files, for the next part.
Music-
The original music pack was distributed with Shoopity's version. It consists of 20 MP3s (256 kb/s/44.1kHz). The music files in AMH_SD_V023.zip (folder _FZ)
are uncompressed PCM16 (22.05kHz). In general terms, they are both CD quality. There may not be any perceivable difference in quality especially with all of the
other effects, table noises and any DOF events happening over the music. But, it is an alternative if players want to take the additional drive space to make it happen.
File names will have to be modified to add the "bgout_" prefix so that VPX will route output to the backglass speakers and the # character deleted from the filename.
Again, a Bulk Rename Utility will help but it's not that many files to rename manually.
The table script will need to be modified replacing calls to files with an mp3 extension to wav. With current versions of VPX, the script contents can be saved
as VBS with the same file name as the VPX table. VPX will prioritize the VBS the next time the table is loaded. If you don't like the result, you can simply delete the VBS
and/or overwrite the changes from your backup.
I don't recommend so much replacing the existing MP3 with the same music that is simply in a different format. The reason why the music files would even be mentioned
in this tutorial at all is because the original Shoopity table was published while benheck was still developing the code. Shoopity ported the initial production version of the
table code to VBS, but he did not attempt to keep up with the codebase. Benheck issued several major revisions to the code since Shoopity's VP9 release including many new
assets and new music tracks.
Players can always substitute existing tracks with something else from the new code base. Again, the script will need to be changed to call the new track.
Ex. Change bgout_de.mp3 to bgout_DZ.wav (i.e., substitute the original demon mode music with the new demon mode music) - See the music.txt file in folder _FZ.
Final Note
Again, benheck's code base is well advanced from the conversion that Shoopity completed. There were a lot of assets added in that time, so when you are
copying GIF sequences and music tracks there will be extra files that will not get called by the current script. That's Ok. Aside from taking up space, this should
not affect gameplay at all. GIF files are relatively small. Music tracks will take considerably more space, but if space is a concern it is fairly easy to manage
the music tracks manually. There are 20 tracks originally, and the final codebase increases that number to 34.
Finally, I can't say that everything in this tutorial is tried and tested. Any errors are mine, and I am happy to make corrections.
All credit goes to benheck, herg, and Shoopity for giving us the opportunity to play this table at home with a nice color DMD.