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Mini Pin using VPX Standalone and/or Batocera. Anyone been down this road?

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jeremymtc:
I'm planning out a mini-pin build using Linux as the OS. The basis of the machine would be an i7 laptop from 2014 which had an unrecoverable Win 10 license.

I had played with VP and PinMAME a long time ago and have a bit of familiarity with how it fits together, but that was all done under Windows 7. Has anybody here had any recent experience with VP and PinMAME using either the recent VP Standalone or Batocera distributions? If so, might you have any advice for someone looking to assemble such a system?

I've read that there may be some limitations with VP Standalone with regard to using a secondary display as a PinMAME driven DMD. I am curious whether or not that might still be the case or whether my understanding is accurate. If you've built something like this, what were the hardware and softaware tools that you used?

Thanks in advance for any information or opinions!

jeremymtc:
Replying to my own question for the benefit of anyone searching for the same kind of question.

Long story short: setting up VPX Standalone in multimonitor is involved but do-able, but not without encountering several limitations and difficulties. If you grit your teeth and power through it though, it can be done. If you have the option of the use of Windows for a virtual pinball build, then by all means use that instead. I'm stupid and have persisted with installation via Linux because I'm pretty much at the end of the road in terms of my use of Windows.

I lack the technical expertise to fully explain all of the complications involved with VPX Standalone, but generally I've learned that it's still early days for the development of the Linux branch of Visual Pinball, and that many of the features available in the program for Windows simply do not exist yet in the Linux version. For instance, in Windows you can simply use a mouse to click on backglass images to set options, or drag a DMD window to wherever you need it displayed, easily resize those windows by hotkey, use GUI to set options, etc. Those options are largely unavailable under the Linux version, and it will be necessary to define the monitor layout and window positions mostly by commandline, and VPX options pretty much solely by editing an .ini file and/or modifying table scripts (.vbs) to force them to work under Linux.

For my specific project, after having compiled and set up VPX Standalone on the target system, I found that the old i7 laptop computer hardware was not up to the task in terms of supplying a usable framerate, so found it necessary to pivot to the use of a different computer. I have a recent N100-based mini PC and have found it to be adequate for use with a 1080p playfield display, so that's what I've gone with. Further, I've decided to go with the use of Batocera on this machine because it does make for an easier installation overall, and importantly, because the primary developer of VPX Standalone seems to be focusing compatibility efforts toward its use in Batocera. Another bonus is that Batocera brings with it a  customized and preconfigured installation of Emulation Station to act as frontend; there are no other frontends available for Linux which are as heavily tailored and actively developed toward making VPX usable on the platform.

I'm close to cabinet construction now on my machine, and will post about it further in the project announcement forum soon.

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