MaLa And Visual Pinball With Ledwiz plugin

[DJ Infinity]

How do you get MaLa and visual piball to work together? I also set up a cfg file called pinball for the ledwiz plugin but it gets ignored and none of the buttons light. Uncle T's guide didn't provide any setup directions so if any1 knows how plz et me know 

[unclet]

What do you mean?  My guide (v1.4) has a very detailed description on how to configure Visual Pinball.  It is on page 14.  However, my guide does not describe how to use the LEDWiz .....

[DJ Infinity]

I need a new download link so I can go over it again. What I read before were folders etc but no settings on how to have MaLa launch the tables correctly. Currently the visual pinball app will come up then I select a table from it and it runs. thanx Uncle T in advance  and ledwiz plugin guru's so I can get this running 100%?

[Anubis_au]

There are several wrapper programs for the pinball apps, and you should have a play with them to work out which works best for you. I assume you want to go from menu to table play and back so that players don't really know it's a PC.

There are ways...

[unclet]

There are a few places to get it from:

1) My original BYOAC forum post has the latest version:

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

 
2) MALA Wiki has a link under the "Other Emu-Setup" section which points to my BYOAC forum post (see (1) above)

http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Mala_Wiki


3) Go to the MALA homepage, click HELP and on the right side under "How To" there is a link.

http://mala.arcadezentrum.com/help.html



PS:  I believe you use the "-play" option to have the table start up right away.   Although, there are wrappers around which can work as well.

[DJ Infinity]

That guide confuses me sorry, it goes from visual pinball directly to mame and doesn't really tell you how to configure mala to launch it. it also doesn't say you need a wrapper for it. I think you guide is nice with links and all but if you need a wrapper why not post a link for one in the guide? 

[shock_]

UncleT's guide does tell you how to test it outside MaLa first (page 36 at the bottom, for version 1.3 of the guide) and from there it should be easy to put it in MaLa. In v1.3 of the guide though, there seems to be a cut/paste error there, and for me at least (vpinball 8 beta 6) the slashes should be forward, not backward.

Anyway, it should be like this (see attached).

This will get MaLa launching a table directly, although it will still require you to confirm your escape from the program.

That's the main point of wrappers (to have a single escape key quit the vpinball application).  I'm using closemul at the moment, since It Just Works™ for giving me a one-keystroke escape.  All I did to modify MaLa to use closemul is to save closemul.exe in the vpinball directory, point mala to closemul.exe instead of vpinball.exe, and add vpinball.exe to the start of the launch line, viz:

vpinball.exe -play -"%path%/%rom%.%ext%"

I tried Howard's wrapper but couldn't get it to focus (with pinmame visible but the table with focused), also the vplaunch one, which sometimes would forget to fade its own overlay away and leave you with the table visible.  The advantage to both of those wrappers, if you can get them to work, is to remove the fugliest splashscreens ever to squirt my eyes with pain, ie. the vpinmame ones.

Honestly, splash screens are the equivalent of website flash intros... pure evil    ... but now I'm just rambling.

Hope that helps.

[DJ Infinity]

thanx for the screenshots those are most helpful. I will give them a try in the next coupla days. On a good note I was able to get it running with lights using game ex, no disrespect to the MaLa team. 

[unclet]

shock_
Well, I double-checked my setup for Visual Pinball and the path I use is as follows (note the backslash instead of a forward slash):

  -play -"%path%\%rom%.%ext%"

Not sure why you need a forward slash to make yours run.  Perhaps you are using a more recent version of Visual Pinball than I did at the time of writing this document.   To tell you the truth, I have not played Visual Pinball in a while now, so that might have changed, but I can not be sure.

DJ Infinity
As for the Visual Pinball wrapper ...... I do not use a wrapper so this is why there is no mention of a wrapper in my "Mala How-To" document.  I simply documented everything I did to configure all the emulators I have added in MALA.    I believe the Visual Pinball wrapper allows exiting of the Visual Pinball application to occur when the ESC key is pressed instead of having to press multiple keypresses in order for it to exit completely.  This might be handy for some people, but I did not need this since my keyboard encoder (Hagstrom KE-72) can issue many keypresses at the press of one button only.

Now, as for the format of my document, I believe the format is pretty good.   Without referring to MALA at all, I first indicate the complete directory structure I used, showed people how to install MAME (since MALA requires this to be installed already) and finally show people how to install Visual Pinball.   After doing this, I then proceed to tell people how to configure MALA with all the emulators.   Now, shock_ was correct when he indicated page36 shows how to test Visual Pinball from the command line, however, if you read the section entitled "Installing Non-Mame emulators in MALA" you will notice I clearly detail what every line of the MALA configuration screens should be populated with for each emulator (including Visual Pinball).   Under subsection 10) I list what the executable line should be for each emulator.  In this subsection you will notice Visual Pinball is listed to have the -play -"%path%\%rom%.%ext%" executable statement.

Anyway, I can easily understand people might find the document a bit lengthy and that some people probably tend to try to skip around through it, thus causing them to believe the document is hard to read.   If you read the document from top to bottom one time hopefully you will understand the sections and how they are laid out better.

Now, if you are still having trouble regarding Visual Pinball, I can try to help you out, but I still believe a lot of what you are looking for is already included in the document (except for the use of a wrapper, since I do not use one myself).

[shock_]

well I double-checked my slashes and it now seems to work either way!  Must have been another syntax error when I was originally trying to set it up.

Setting up a cab's software, like scratch-building the cab itself, is a LOT more complex than it first appears.  It takes heaps of fiddling at best, and everyone's situation is slightly different so there are usually no foolproof HOWTOs anywhere.  Enter, this forum!

UncleT your guide is indeed amazing.  There is no simple way to present that much data without it confusing somebody sometime, let alone keeping it up to date (which I realise is not your intention). I'm grateful it exists at all. I would recommend anyone using it to read it through cover-to-cover first, skipping only specific emulators they're not running.

DJ I: hope your LED probs all get sorted out if you end up back with MaLa.  Try PM'ing Loadman, he probably knows!