Visual Pinball Aspect Ratio and Rotation

[mark shaker]

While doing a little research for a pinball control module for my cabinet, I stumbled across the "ultrapin". (See: http://www.globalvr.com/products_ultrapin_intro.html)

I'm not about to laydown $6K for one, but I'm at least thinking about making a cheap knock-off.

Adjusting Visual Pinball to display an overhead view was easy enough.

How easy would it be to change Visual Pinball to display a table in "landscape mode" on a16X9 aspect ratio display?

Thanks for your help.

   - Mark

[CheffoJeffo]

This is the thread that you want:

http://www.vpforums.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=36732

Cheers

[mark shaker]

This is the thread that you want:

http://www.vpforums.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=36732

Cheers

Thank you! That thread had a lot of great info, now I'm off too see what I can do...

   - Mark

[juggle50]

Mark,

Please keep us posted on what works best for you.  I'm interested in all the pinball stuff rotating as well.  However, I would like to rotate stuff on the fly as I have a cocktail table and sometimes I play stuff vertically and sometimes horizontally.

[RandyT]

I did some playing around with this after reading the thread posted above (always dreamed of using a widescreen plasma for the table.)  You need a graphics card or utility that can rotate your desktop and every table would need to be tweaked for the aspect ratio.

But it does seem to work fairly well.  It'll just take some time to tweak the tables.  There's also the issue of where to put the scoreboard without hacking in second monitor support.

RandyT

[mark shaker]

I did some playing around with this after reading the thread posted above (always dreamed of using a widescreen plasma for the table.)  You need a graphics card or utility that can rotate your desktop and every table would need to be tweaked for the aspect ratio.

But it does seem to work fairly well.  It'll just take some time to tweak the tables.  There's also the issue of where to put the scoreboard without hacking in second monitor support.

RandyT

I think that I'm going to take a conservative approach (for once), and build the pinball controls module for my existing cabinet. If it goes over well, then I'll spend the big bucks on a dedicated video pinball cabinet.

I've got 5 real pins, so it will be intresting to see if my friends warm up to Visual Pinball.

I know that this is the wrong forum, but: If the people intrested in playing the tables in "portrate mode" with the backglass on a separate monitor agree on standards, they could spread the load of reworking the tables.

   - Mark

[Aurich]

You need a graphics card or utility that can rotate your desktop and every table would need to be tweaked for the aspect ratio.

For the rotation part I use iRotate on my vertical cab and it works great, check if out if you haven't already it's free. Works fine with an ArcadeVGA, no idea if it works with all cards.

[juggle50]

Aurich,

Do you tweak all of your tables as well.

[mark shaker]

For the rotation part I use iRotate on my vertical cab and it works great, check if out if you haven't already it's free. Works fine with an ArcadeVGA, no idea if it works with all cards.

I've tried rotating by "Pivot Pro", my video card driver settings and iRotate (which is a utility for easily changing the video card driver settings).

When I used all three, Visual Pinball's Video Preferences resolution choices went blank, but the tables still played.

In Pivot Pro:

As soon as the Table loaded, the screen snapped back to landscape mode.

Using my card drivers/iRotate:

Playing full screen, part of the table was cropped. (The thread posted above has a fix to center the table.)

Playing windowed, the window size was fixed, so the entire 4X3 screen fit within the 3X4 display (the PC equivalent of black bars on a widescreen TV).

It can obviously be made to work, with a bunch of tweaking. I was disappointed that the beta version of Visual Pinball 8 didn't include a portrate mode.

   - Mark

[displacedtexan]

I am interested in playing visual pinball on my cocktail with a vertically oriented monitor as well.  Have any of you guys tweaked any tables to perfection yet?  How can I go about helping?  I can easily host the files if necessary...

What settings did you use for Visual Pinball?

I have messed with irotate a little bit and it seems to be workable with some of the console emulators that I have tried.