Visual Pinball and MALA..please help

[severdhed]

ok, so i searched the forums and i just cant seem to figure this out.  I am running MALA as my frontend.  I have visual pinball installed and working.  I can even get mala to display the tables and launch them, however, almost every time i lauch a table, the editor window pops up on top of the table, then i have to alt-tab to play the game.  This is annoying for me, but makes it unplayable for people who arent familiar with my cabinet.  Also, when i hit Esc to exit the table, i have to select Exit to editor.  when i do, it closes the table, but the editor stays open.

i tried using the exit hook option in mala set to the Esc key.  if i do that, i hit esc, everything eventually goes away, but then i get a "this program has encountered a problem and needs to close" error. 


after googling, i found this page

http://www.mameworld.net/tigerheli/pinloader/main.htm

i followed his instructions on creating the batch files and scripts.  when i set it up that way, the tables launch, the editor is still usually focused though.  when i hit esc, i get the pop up to choose Exit to editor, once i do that, it closes down and takes me back to MALA.    I dont mind doing it this way, but i still need to find a way to make it launch visual pinball with the table as the focused window.

any ideas?

just for the record, i am not using pinmame at all, im not that concerned with an absolute authentiv pinball experience, i found some good tables that dont require pinmame and they are fine for me.   I would like to be able to play these games, but the way it is now, if a friend comes over to play, as soon as they try to play pinball, they go from being impressed with the arcade, to "oh, its just windows" 

please help.

[unclet]

Hey ... I just got back from vacation a tonight and just found this post .....

You should check out my "Mala - How To" thread (See below) since I devote a whole section on how to set up Visual Pinball and some of it might be helpful.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=56010.0

Also ... some quick things:

1)  I use the following MALA execution statement to run Visual Pinball ... perhaps this is all you need ....

       -play -"%path%\%rom%.%ext%"

2) If you do not have any PinMame tables then you can skip that part of my setup description I believe.....

3) PinMame emulates the light matrix displays found on pinball machines (not sure if that is the correct name or not but you probably can understand what I am referring to).   Anyway, since some pinball tables do not have these light matrix displays, then those pinball tables do not need PinMame to execute fully.   "PinMame" emulates the light matrices and "Visual Pinball" emulates the actual pinball game (ie: moving ball around, bumpers, plunger, etc...) .  I just wanted to let you know what PinMame was used for.

[severdhed]

i found that document a while back, but i still cant get this working right (or at least the way i think it should work)

it still launches the tables with the editor in focus very frequently (but not all the time)

it is still a pain to close.

i setup future pinball the other day, it seems to play with mala much better, but it seems to lag a bit compared to visual pinball.  im not sure what to do at this point

[Howard_Casto]

Use my visual pinball wrapper.


 
I still don't have a clue why people still try to use other methods. Visual pinball never recieves focus right, the main purpose of the wrapper is not to launch nor exit the game but to make sure it gets the right focus. 

Btw you'll run into the exact same issues with future pinball, just to a lesser degree (the smae guy made both programs ya know   )

[severdhed]

sounds great, i'll try that tomorrow.....by the way, where might one obtain this so called wrapper?

[unclet]

Not sure why the editor pops up when starting Visual Pinball sometimes but not all the time.   Perhaps the table you are trying to play has a problem (missing files perhaps ... dont know) and when you launch the table then it kicks you into the editor.   Just a guess.

Anyway, the default exit procedure for Visual Pinball is not simply pressing ESC .... but you need to press a few keystrokes.  That does not bother me since I can program my keyboard encoder to perform all the keystrokes for me when a single pushbutton is pressed.   

Anyway, I would try Howard's wrapper ......

[X-fact0r]

sounds great, i'll try that tomorrow.....by the way, where might one obtain this so called wrapper?

http://www.oscarcontrols.com/lazarus/
just click the "Wrappers" link

[CyrusMzRG]

Hi Severdhed, I havd the same proble as you few days ago and I asked for it here. I Used the Howard's wrapper, but it doesn't work for me, so I looked for something similar and here is the solution, please read the post I posted, and I hope it can help you with your problem:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=57966.0