Author	Topic:   Pinball setup
Walt	posted 1/6/03 4:26 AM       So far, Emulaxians has been a learning experience but great results! One thing I have been struggling with for a number of hours, that is halfway documented, is how to set up V Pinball for the frontend. I have the latest versions of virtual pinball, vpinmame, and vplauncher. These all work fine. The difficulty I'm having is getting Emulaxians to play tables. I have used the feutilites on my .dat file from vplauncher to construct a list of my pinball games. I have cut and pasted these into my favorites list and with some tweaking gotten backglasses and playfields to show up on pinball models in the arcade. If I try to name vplauncher.exe as the "executable" it just dumps me to vplauncher's configuration screen when I select my pinball game in emulaxians. When I select vpinball.exe as the emulator executable, it loads and reports "file not found." Worse, when I then exit and get back to emulaxians, it doesn't report out what the execution string was (via lastcloutput.txt). This is despite the fact that I enabled reporting in fepinball.cfg. So I am operating blindly, not knowing what command line is being run. I have read other forums on vpinball's command line options, and have played with every permutation of using quotes, "-play", "/play -" etc. From a command line, the easiest way I have to play a table is just to type in the name of the table such as "Lawman.vpt" - This actually loads the table and plays it. I have tried not specifying an executable and just trying to get emulaxians to ouput just the table path and name, but this results in nothing being loaded and emulaxians' sound suddenly shutting down. (odd...) If someone who has working pinballs in their arcade could please post their fepinball.cfg and a sample playlist (.atf) file with some pinball games in it, I would sure appreciate it as I am losing far too many hours to this. Thanks, Walt L.
Walt	posted 1/6/03 4:29 AM       Oops - Yes I do know that it's VISUAL pinball, not "Virtual.." Too long in front of a computer monitor! Thanks, Walt
Toyguy	posted 1/6/03 6:52 AM     Yup, I'd be interested in seeing this too. I've tried everything I can think of. Neither the internal Emulaxian method nor the vplaunch launcher will work. On both of them, when the emulator type is set to pinball, the sound stops after I press 1 but that's it. Nothing gets launched. If I change the emulator type to console, I immediately get a Director Script Error. I've tried shortening the filename of the table. No dice with that. I can launch the game using vplaunch.exe from the command line, however. That works fine. I've got the vplaunch.exe file in the Tables directory and I've tried setting the emupath in the config file to the Tables directory as well as the VPinball root. Nothing... Any help would be appreciated... http://mysite.verizon.net/toyguy/ Toyguy's Toy Shop
Toyguy	posted 1/6/03 8:07 AM     OK, I've gotten this to work with the internal Emulaxian method, but not with the vplauncher, so I'd still like to see some help with that. As for the Emulaxian method, I had to modify the command being passed to VPinball.exe in the emulator config file. As delivered, it reads |/play -| when it needs to be |-play -| Once I changed that, everything worked good, but I noticed that flipper response was very poor while playing the table. I hadn't seen that slowdown with vplauncher, so I'd like to try that method also. Help still needed on that score... http://mysite.verizon.net/toyguy/ Toyguy's Toy Shop
)p(	posted 1/6/03 8:17 AM       i myself don't use the internal launcher anymore. One off th reasons is that it can take some cycles away from visual pinball because the fe can't be paused because it has to watch for the keypress to close vp. I use Howards vpwrapper (http://www.oscarcontrols.com/lazarus. If you use the internal launncher you should create gamelists that do not inlcude .vpt extension and use type pinball. If you are going to use the wrapper or the normal launcher off the fe (yes you can launch iot directly but you will see vp booting) then include the extension and choose type console or app when you create the gamelist. peter
Toyguy	posted 1/7/03 4:05 AM     Peter, if you could post your fepinball.cfg and a sample gamelist entry, it would be very helpful. I cannot get the launcher to work at all. What I did was add the file extension in the gamelist and change the second instance of |pinball| to |console|. I then changed fepinball.cfg so the executable name was vplaunch.exe/vplaunch.exe and I removed the emuoption entry, leaving just the ||. I changed the emupath from D:\VPinball\ to D:\VPinball\Tables\. It seemed to me that should do it, but when I hit 1 to launch the table, absolutely nothing happens. I just stay in the FE as normal. Thanks! http://mysite.verizon.net/toyguy/ Toyguy's Toy Shop
)p(	posted 1/7/03 7:52 AM       with the wrapper and the general internal launcher, not emupath but gamepath should point to your tables. also be sure you did change pinball to console in the right field... i did have issues with vp under xp not with the fe but in general i still have to reinstall it...as soon as I do i will post my new settings...i will make some default setup for all the 3 ways you can launch it. The easiest way for you to launch it would be using the normal genral launcher if you can live with not having a special key to close it. then it should work like any other emu. (as you allready know adding the -play option to the emulator cfg, console instead of pinball as type and including the extension vpt in the gamelist, emupath/workingdir vp exe, gmaepath table folder -> that should at least launch your vp games ) peter Peter

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