I'm going to try and revisit Pinmame / Visual Pinball I just want it to "Rotate"

[mrclean]

Time and time and again ive asked this question and have gotten various repsonses to my knowledge visual pinballs current sofware doesn't allow you to rotate, but i heard an older 1.6 does? i was told that you can edit each individual script per table, all I want to do is get the sofware to do what MAME does and auto rotate for me / roll. because i have an lcd that rotates  and wouldn't want the backround photo's just the table.. i know this is possible to do sorta like turning it into an ultrapin i keep revisiting this because i can never get it to work. I can get it to run in 4:3 mode but i'd like to experience this on my monitor that rotates without having to go into my graphics card i need the software to do it automatically

[Kangum]

there is no software that will do what you want. at the very least you would end up with a squashed image because of the backdrop and possible reels. each table has its own inclination and field of view. this is different for every table. you must adjust this for each and every table to different values depending on the table. also, you must remove background images and possible other items from the playfield to get it to fill the whole screen. you cant simpley rotate to portait and call it a day. not with visual pinball anyway.

by the way ultrapin is modified on a table by table bases as well. there is no magic program there.

[mrclean]

can some one edit the adam's family script for me it's the only one that id like to test out and where the code needs to be placed

[headkaze]

I have no idea why it's such a big secret to get VP running on a vertical monitor. Is it because people are making money selling digital pinball machines or what? I don't see the big deal.

I think I might have a go at this at some time because the idea of a digital pinball machine is really appealing to me (esp. a digital pinball/coffee table design) think we should work together and make the info public so people can make their own pinball cabs.

There is an interesting thread here where a guy named "Tim N." has made one and has about 100 tables converted to vertical monitor format. He uses VP 6. Aparently there is a bit of work involved converting the tables. Again I don't see what the big secret is, and even Tim doesn't go into detail on how to do it because "some authors may frown upon this and out of respect to them, I will not post at this time". Why would the authors of the tables care if you convert them to use a vertical display? Seems like a strange conspiracy or something going on. Anyone in the know why it seems to be a big secret how to do this? Tim would be a great help with all this but he seems to have dissappeared (maybe he was assassinated by the Men In Black?)

Anyway I'll be taking a look at this some time. I'm guessing we use the video card's hardware rotation, then we need to get VP to run in portrait mode somehow. Then the tables need to be changed to viewed in top-down perspective. Can't be too hard can it?

[9innail]

It looks to me like he explains how to do it on this page:
http://www.ralphwiggum.net/multipinlog.html
I haven't tried it but it looks like a complete explanation  to me.
hmmm 

[Loafmeister]

... There is an interesting thread here where a guy named "Tim N." has made one and has about 100 tables converted to vertical monitor format. He uses VP 6. Aparently there is a bit of work involved converting the tables. Again I don't see what the big secret is, and even Tim doesn't go into detail on how to do it because "some authors may frown upon this and out of respect to them, I will not post at this time". Why would the authors of the tables care if you convert them to use a vertical display? Seems like a strange conspiracy or something going on. Anyone in the know why it seems to be a big secret how to do this? Tim would be a great help with all this but he seems to have dissappeared (maybe he was assassinated by the Men In Black?)

I can answer part of that:

1 - Modding tables and Visual Pinball politics.  Short version:  A long time ago, there were disagreements amongst a few in the community/authors on whether people should be able to mod existing tables. Some were maybe over-protective, others had legitimate concerns, even more didn't really care, they just wanted the tables.  The result is, for some just uthering the work "mod" causes chills down the spine.   I do believe for SOME who don't share how to do this, they probably have good intentions at heart.  whether there is justification behind a respect to not mod other authors work (some don't mind, they've clearly stated this), my own opinion is many probably were more concerned about others re-releasing the modded table as their own work without acknowledging the original author. But in this case, we're talking about adjusting a viewing angle, etc, so to me, it's not the same thing though I would conceal if an author doesn't want his tables touched, then that's cool, there are lots of others out there.

2 - I'm not 100% sure of this, but there was one dude who was writing a "how to" at vpforums on how to do this, but then he got cold feet after getting emails/pm's from someone. I'm really not sure if it was an author asking him to stop, or someone representing Ultracade or whatever, but basically what I do recall is the OP edited all his posts with just a period and I don't believe he ever did release how he did this.

edited: some stuff somehow got cut off, can't remember what I was going to add anyway .

[mrclean]

again can someone mod me adam's family and send me back the script

[headkaze]

again can someone mod me adam's family and send me back the script

Take a look at the link 9innail gave. Look under the title "Table Modifications & Settings" and it actually explains how to modify the Adams Family table as an example. The only problem I see is you need VP 6 and XP SP1.

Loafmeister: Thanks for the info I had a feeling it was something like that. I don't know why authors don't release their tables under some sort of license (like the MIT license for example) so the original author credit must remain in the documentation.

[mrclean]

I can't seem to find VP 6 non expiring can anyone direct me to where i can obtain that software all i can find is 8

[headkaze]

I can't seem to find VP 6 non expiring can anyone direct me to where i can obtain that software all i can find is 8

http://mamefaq.lexigame.de/pinmame-dateien.htm

It also runs fine for me on XP 64 SP2 and I found out if you force the VP process to close you can stop it from crashing. So it should be quite easy to write a script to do that so it runs from a front end.

Editing a table seems quite easy, all you have to do is move a few things from the sides, change the inclinations and FOV and set the correct resolution.

[mrclean]

ah can you provide me with this script ? im using MaLa and i got vpinball running / game working didn't try to rotate it just yet but when exiting it gives me an error... OK sooo.. after reading all that on that link i still can't ROTATE it because i manually turn my monitor and MAME does this for me with roll left ccw or whatever.. i read this article and i was able to eliminate the background images which is great however i still can't seem to figure out how to rotate it!

[gonzo90017]

I think your problem is that you have to set your monitor to example: 768x1024 before you launch the the table. Or else it won't work.

[headkaze]

ah can you provide me with this script ? im using MaLa and i got vpinball running / game working didn't try to rotate it just yet but when exiting it gives me an error... OK sooo.. after reading all that on that link i still can't ROTATE it because i manually turn my monitor and MAME does this for me with roll left ccw or whatever.. i read this article and i was able to eliminate the background images which is great however i still can't seem to figure out how to rotate it!

Did you try rotating your monitor then setting the resolution in VP?

Visual Pinball Settings- It is important that your primary monitor is rotated before adjusting video settings in Visual Pinball or you won't be able to select the proper output in Visual Pinball. In Visual Pinball, select "preferences" and the then "Video Options". Select the resolution that matches your current resolution as defined when you rotated the monitor using your software. For my setup, I use 768x1368x32(color depth), and select the "Full Screen" radio box. Look at the screenshot below to see this step (Again, done from my laptop so don 't pay attention to the settings you see in the screenshot

As for killing the VPinball.exe I knocked up a wrapper to do it. Just place VPLaunch.exe in the same folder as VPinball.exe and launch it instead.

Eg. "C:\Program Files\Visual Pinball\VPLaunch.exe" -play -"C:\Program Files\Visual Pinball\Tables\Addams Family, The (Midway) (1992) (Boris) (Beta 0.4 Last VP).vpt"

Pressing ESC will close VPinball.exe without causing the error

EDIT: Uploaded a new version of VPLaunch - fixed a major bug plus added desktop hiding

[mrclean]

I'm getting close but here are my problems thus far... i can't get the table to rotate! If i change the orientation of my resolution manually then other emulators will suffer including MAME until changing back this defeats my purpose of what i want to do. I guess im still wondering if there is a way to rotate the table in the script it self

[headkaze]

I'm getting close but here are my problems thus far... i can't get the table to rotate! If i change the orientation of my resolution manually then other emulators will suffer including MAME until changing back this defeats my purpose of what i want to do. I guess im still wondering if there is a way to rotate the table in the script it self

Download iRotate and use

Code: [Select]

C:\Program Files\iRotate\iRotate.exe /rotate=90
to rotate the screen 90 degrees, then to return it back:

Code: [Select]

C:\Program Files\iRotate\iRotate.exe /rotate=0

[mrclean]

yeah that also defeats what im trying to do i have ati program that basically will do the same thing however im trying to hide windows so if im playing lets say MAME.. and exit it and then run this program to rotate it defeats the purpose of my front end. I then need to revert back to landscape view which is why id like to be able to do this in the script of each individual table. I was able to do it with the method of ati however i want it to automatically roll left / counter clockwise for me does this make any sense? ? and manually/physically i rotate my monitor from 4:3 to vert mode.. when exiting vplaunch by the way it seems to of fixed that crash issue.. so thank you for that its just when exiting id also like it to automatically go back to 4:3 maybe im not explaining it well. Maybe you know of a way to create a script / code that would rotate it?? and then rotate it back when exiting vplauncher / visual pinball

[headkaze]

yeah that also defeats what im trying to do i have ati program that basically will do the same thing however im trying to hide windows so if im playing lets say MAME.. and exit it and then run this program to rotate it defeats the purpose of my front end. I then need to revert back to landscape view which is why id like to be able to do this in the script of each individual table. I was able to do it with the method of ati however i want it to automatically roll left / counter clockwise for me does this make any sense? ? and manually/physically i rotate my monitor from 4:3 to vert mode.. when exiting vplaunch by the way it seems to of fixed that crash issue.. so thank you for that its just when exiting id also like it to automatically go back to 4:3 maybe im not explaining it well. Maybe you know of a way to create a script / code that would rotate it?? and then rotate it back when exiting vplauncher / visual pinball

If you using MaLa you should be able to use it's "launch before" and "launch after" command line feature to rotate the screen before and after running Visual Pinball that's what I was trying to say. That's why I gave you the command line to do it, so you can run it from the FE without having to do anything manually.

[mrclean]

ok that totally worked thank you! however i just now need to figure out the correct resolution because my monitor is 1280x1024 ive tried various settings and it seems windowed / you can see mala behind it sometimes it gets too small so what setting/resolution when i have my 4:3 rotated should it be in... again while in 4:3 it remains in 1280x1024

[headkaze]

ok that totally worked thank you! however i just now need to figure out the correct resolution because my monitor is 1280x1024 ive tried various settings and it seems windowed / you can see mala behind it sometimes it gets too small so what setting/resolution when i have my 4:3 rotated should it be in... again while in 4:3 it remains in 1280x1024

I don't see the point in rotating a 4:3 monitor, the whole idea is to have a widescreen LCD and play the tables in portrait mode. Anyway judging by those instructions on the website you have to set the resolution in Visual Pinball while your screen is rotated. So rotate your screen, open up VP, set the display to 1024x1280 which is what your screen resolution should be rotated.

I haven't actually played with the rotation stuff yet myself. I'll save that step for when and if I get a 16:9 LCD for making an actual pinball machine. Seems like a really cool project to do though.

[mrclean]

visual pinball does not have that as an option / resolution im getting an awkward screen squeezed slightly bottom you can still see MaLa background


video option on this one was 1280x1024

these are my choices under video settings in visual pinball:




Again my screen resolution on my lcd is 1280x1024.. but when rotating it i think it would be 1024:1280 but that is not an option in visual pinball video settings and i dont have / see any config file to change it

[Tim N.]

To verify, have you gotten this to work without using Mala? Meaning... You have rotated your monitor using ATI's software before opening Visual Pinball and selecting resolution there? I believe Visual Pinball simply reads registry settings that are output by your video card... So if your video card is rotated and the rotated resolutions are available in your desktop choices in Windows control panel, then those same resolutions are available in Visual Pinball.

Can you confirm that once you rotate your desktop settings, those new rotated settings are available in the display control panel?

Even if you get this going properly, it sounds like you may have a difficult task ahead of you in regards to scripting these resolution settings via Mala and sharing this setup with your other Mame stuff. For some reason I want to say that VP defaults back to a base setting once the modified resolution is no longer available. This is shown exactly in your picture. Your resolution on your display and VP aren't matched up (Which you say you can't do right now)....

I am glad people are using the work log I created, this is by far one of my favorite projects to do and it is fun seeing others projects. I have done over 15 Mame machines and this one was definitely the most time consuming from start to finish....

[headkaze]

Hey Tim great to see you back on the boards, I really though you were gone for a while there.

I didn't realise that webpage was done by you, thanks alot for that it is going to be a great help for my own project.

I hope you don't mind but I sent you an e-mail with a couple of questions. I am getting really serious about starting this project now!

[VespaGuy]

I'm curious to know mrclean makes out. I have mame running in portrait mode in a cocktail cab set up for head-to-head two player. I'd love to add visual pinball oriented vertically, but so far it seems like an awful lot of trouble.