Launching to and quitting from Visual Pinball / PinMAME (from / to MaLa)

[Anubis_au]

I installed Visual PinBall / PinMAME following UncleT's excellent how-to guide. And although I got it working, but from the perspective of hiding Windows, the result is less than stellar. I'm hoping with some settings / tweaks / whatever, all can come good.

So, if people can offer assistance on any of the following problems I am having with it:

1. The first problem I have is, upon launching a game, it brings up a PinMAME splash screen while the game launches, but with a horrible low-res Windows background as well. How do I remove this? I don't mind an extended black picture while the game sets up, but I'd want to go from MaLa FE to pinball screen directly. Is there a way to do this?

2. The Windows cursor is present and visible during the actual game. How do I get rid of this?

3. Windows stickykeys, or whatever its called.  How do you stop windows from popping up if you press the shift button repeatedly? What's the correct setting to stop this annoying pop-up?

4. When you quit out of a game / table, it brings up the return to editor dialog box. How can you bypass this to go straight back to the MaLa FE? Can you use MaLa's post game command option to send and exit string of characters to the pc, to shut down Visual PinBall?

[shock_]

1. The first problem I have is, upon launching a game, it brings up a PinMAME splash screen while the game launches, but with a horrible low-res Windows background as well. How do I remove this? I don't mind an extended black picture while the game sets up, but I'd want to go from MaLa FE to pinball screen directly. Is there a way to do this?

I'm working my way through a cab-friendly pinball thing right now, too. First up, grab a wrapper.  I'm liking the pinballwrapper from Emuchrist at the moment, although there are still a few quirks and crashes for me to work through, eg. I'm still seeing a windows taskbar while the table loads.  Howard Casto's wrapper works too, but has this weird spash screen while it loads the table.  The cpv2 wrapper lets you change the image to whatever you want.

2. The Windows cursor is present and visible during the actual game. How do I get rid of this?

Haven't noticed this myself, maybe the wrapper is solving that for me too.

3. Windows stickykeys, or whatever its called.  How do you stop windows from popping up if you press the shift button repeatedly? What's the correct setting to stop this annoying pop-up?

Windows Start button > Control Panel > Accessibility Options > Sticky Keys settings button > Un-tick "use shortcut"

4. When you quit out of a game / table, it brings up the return to editor dialog box. How can you bypass this to go straight back to the MaLa FE? Can you use MaLa's post game command option to send and exit string of characters to the pc, to shut down Visual PinBall?

The wrapper should sort this for you as well.  I tried briefly and failed to get the MaLa key intercept thing to work with Pinball, but since I found a wrapper to handle it, I've dropped further investigation.

Other advice - I'm finding it useful, table by table, to get it working outside of the wrapper first (ie. the slow ugly way through vpinball.exe), and then once it's loading nice and stable, adding to MaLa's list.  Otherwise it can just be too unreliable.  Some tables use a switch/config dialog box before they run, which plays havok with wrappers I think. Hopefully I'm just new at this and it'll all work out... or my pinball list will be very short for a long while to come!

[unclet]

1) The last paragraph under the Visual Pinball table section in the "Mala How To Guide" is the following:

IMPORTANT: When playing VPinmame ROM tables for the first time, a window will Pop-Up asking you "Are you legally entitled to play YES or NO".  After you answer "YES", then a VPinmame registry entry will be created which is related to the associated ROM file indicating you are legal to play the table associated with that ROM set.  This way, next time you play the table then VPinmame will not ask you this question again.   

Is this the popup window which you are seeing?  If so, can you confirm whether you are only seeing this when starting the table for the first time or does it happen multiple times on the same table?

2) The version of Visual Pinball I have does not show the cursor when playing a game....  I never heard of that with anyone else either.   Does your pinball game play in "full screen" or is it perhaps playing in a "window"?

4) Unfortunately, I do not believe Visual Pinball allows their program to be exitted via one key press, although I heard a while back that a new version might come out which will allow this.   Also, not sure if there exists a "wrapper" program which perhaps "headkaze" or "Howard_Casto" might have wrote allowing to quit with one keypress.

I am lucky since my keyboard encoder allows me to map multiple keys to one button press, so to quit Visual Pinball, I can press one button which will perform the following keypresses, thus allowing me to exit the program with one keypress:

   Alt-F4
   Alt-F
   X

I use Hagstrom's KE72 keyboard encoder.

[Anubis_au]

The last paragraph under the Visual Pinball table section in the "Mala How To Guide" is the following:

IMPORTANT: When playing VPinmame ROM tables for the first time, a window will Pop-Up asking you "Are you legally entitled to play YES or NO".  After you answer "YES", then a VPinmame registry entry will be created which is related to the associated ROM file indicating you are legal to play the table associated with that ROM set.  This way, next time you play the table then VPinmame will not ask you this question again.  

Is this the popup window which you are seeing?  If so, can you confirm whether you are only seeing this when starting the table for the first time or does it happen multiple times on the same table?

UncleT, I can confirm this. The legally entitled blah blah screen only pops up the first time.

Very easy to confirm when you have only the one PinMAME table for testing.

[Anubis_au]

2) The version of Visual Pinball I have does not show the cursor when playing a game....  I never heard of that with anyone else either.   Does your pinball game play in "full screen" or is it perhaps playing in a "window"?

Full screen as far as I remember. I followed your guide and went into the preferences. The one area where I deviated from your instructions is it gave me a choice of ouputting full screen to either default, or to the ArcadeVGA? I can't remember right now which route I meant (having tried both) but either way, I think I went full screen. But, will double check.

I am lucky since my keyboard encoder allows me to map multiple keys to one button press, so to quit Visual Pinball, I can press one button which will perform the following keypresses, thus allowing me to exit the program with one keypress:

   Alt-F4
   Alt-F
   X

I use Hagstrom's KE72 keyboard encoder.

Yeah, your guide mentions that. I've already bought my IPAC-2 though. Would be nice to know there is another solution out there that doesn't involve buying a new encoder

[Anubis_au]

I'm working my way through a cab-friendly pinball thing right now, too. First up, grab a wrapper.  I'm liking the pinballwrapper from Emuchrist at the moment, although there are still a few quirks and crashes for me to work through, eg. I'm still seeing a windows taskbar while the table loads.  Howard Casto's wrapper works too, but has this weird spash screen while it loads the table.  The cpv2 wrapper lets you change the image to whatever you want.

First up, the wrapper link from the wiki doesn't work... bummer!

I downloaded the CPV2 wrapper, will have a go with that. The instructions seem to be for MameWAH but I'll have a crack at getting it to work with MaLa.

[unclet]

Yes, I was just going to recommend you try the Visual Pinball wrapper located at John's site:

http://www.emuchrist.org/cpviewer/visualpinball.htm

... but I guess you just found it .


I "think" the vpLaunch wrapper is by Howard and his site at oscarcontrols.com no longer exists.   I posted another thread in the "Main" forum asking where his site is.  Once his site surfaces, perhaps the Visual Pinball wrapper will exist on there.

You can always PM "headkaze" to see if he has a separate wrapper somewhere as well .... he likes making wrappers to help people out ...

[shock_]

I "think" the vpLaunch wrapper is by Howard and his site at oscarcontrols.com no longer exists.   I posted another thread in the "Main" forum asking where his site is.  Once his site surfaces, perhaps the Visual Pinball wrapper will exist on there.

http://dragonking.arcadecontrols.com/ seems to be the new Lazarus, with Howard's wrapper.  Look down the right column somewhere.

I downloaded the CPV2 wrapper, will have a go with that. The instructions seem to be for MameWAH but I'll have a crack at getting it to work with MaLa.

I've just got MaLa pointed at PinballWrapper.exe instead of vpinball.exe, told it where the tables (.vpt) are, and set the command line options to "%path%\%rom%.%ext%" (WITH the quotes).

[unclet]

Yes, go to http://dragonking.arcadecontrols.com/ and then on the right side click the "wrappers" link to see all the wrappers he has created.