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Visual Pinball


stevaside

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Future Pinball seems to be working OK within LB, after I found a modifed Future Pinball exe that a member posted on here, desgined to get the games to auto play when selecting them

Visual Pinball though, all selecting a game on the wheel & pressing play does is open VP itself, requiring me to grab my keyboard & use the touchpad to go through it's menu, select the game in there & take the other steps to get it to run

Very dissapointed...I spent hours & hours the past couple weeks getting tables & all the images/vids needed to have a nice setup for LB & play them with my new arcade stick, but looks like it was kinda pointless.  I was sure I ran into an old thread that said VP should start the games in LB w no problem, unlike FP that needed the special emulator or scripts to achieve

I doubt a whole lot of ppl worry about pinball on here, but if anyone who does knows some way I could actually get these to work or at least if LB would be more pinball emulation friendly, I'd appreciate all feedback

Steve

Edited by stevaside
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On 8/30/2017 at 8:09 AM, massatomic said:

i use rocket launcher with my setup and it loads VP with no problems, i am guessing that there is a missing command line argument in you LB setup that is needed

Want to try that, have to figure out how to use it & set it up within LB I guess...VAGUELY remember using it when I briefly tried Hyperspin, but barely remember

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I  enjoy Future Pinball  tables as well thanks to the excellent modified launch executable posted by one of the members and it works very well with Launchbox. I agree there has not been as much focus on Pinball emulation. I would hope its possible in near future to see  better direct integration with both Future Pinball and Visual pinball, with full support for metadata. Right now I'm just using a generic box cover image for my box art.... I guess It's more up to the community to grow this and build a following for it... 

Edited by MazJohn [Mr Arcade]
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I'm the guy that made the Future Pinball Launcher. Glad it works well for you guys. Unfortunately Visual Pinball is not as simple to set up. For that I use Rocket Launcher, which is also not a simple thing to take on if you've never used it, but once it is set up, it works great for launching VP tables. I've come to the conclusion that the Launchbox team does not have much interest in any form of virtual pinball. That goes for the watered down pinball database, as well as making tables simple to set up. Maybe that will change in the future, but until then we are stuck setting all this stuff up the hard way. Sorry for the bad news. 

If there is any of interest in it, I might make a Visual Pinball/Rocketlauncher video tutorial, but it might be a while. There's another guy here that has done several rocketlauncher/launchbox tutorials. He goes by the name @pipes78. Maybe he'd be interested in making a VP/Rocketlauncher tutorial. I'm not sure if he is a pinhead though, so if not, you'll have to wait a bit for me to make one.

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Hey Jay thanks for the mention. All I have is Pinball fx2 however i have the same issue with it as op. it just boots up the game and i select the table from selction screen. I have tried a few methods to get it to work but does the same. I am running a non-steam "stand alone of the cracked variety " so maybe this is my issue????? Its the only variable that maybe differnet i think although only had a quick look at it. (its the Jan 2017 version if that makes any difference).

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Yeah the newer (ahem) non steam versions of PB fx2 don't allow for you to select a table externally like that. I know because I tried it. I tried an older version that I was able to get working, but it works via a script (Google search for Nukelauncher) that goes into the table selection screen and automatically selects the game for you. I think Rocketlauncher did this as well but with its own interface and it only worked with the older versions of fx2. I was unhappy using the old version because it didn't have all the tables, so I have the Steam version now (bought it during a sale) and had to send them an email asking them to unlock cab support for my copy. I had to send them a picture of my arcade cabinet so they knew I wasn't trying to resell it. Since they unlocked my copy I am now able to launch tables stand alone without the fx2 launcher. Unfortunately, for fx2 (Soon to be fx3) this was the only way I could figure it out.

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2 minutes ago, MadK9 said:

I have Future Pinballand Pinball FX (no steam)  working fine in Rocket Launcher with Bezels, Just gimmie a shout if ya need some help.

Cool. Maybe the Rocketlauncher guys updated the script to work with the newer FX2 tables, but I couldn't get it to work when I tried. I created a launcher for Future Pinball but I use Rocketlauncher now for that system, as well as Visual Pinball.

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Mines full upto date, latest release and works fine for me, (and yes i do own some tables) but i didn;t want steam on my cab so used a a*hem bypass.

 

Ye i used your loader at first was very good, but being a purist i wanted every emu in RL, and so far so good.

 

I will add this though, with FPinball i had the lost focus issue, and i scratched my head for ages with it, but i was running no Bezel, and put in a bezel and that seemed to fix it for me, 

Edited by MadK9
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1 hour ago, MadK9 said:

I will add this though, with FPinball i had the lost focus issue, and i scratched my head for ages with it, but i was running no Bezel, and put in a bezel and that seemed to fix it for me, 

That's good to know. I don't have bezels enabled on mine and do occasionally have to click a table to gain focus when they load. I'll have to try enabling bezels and see how it works for me. 

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10 hours ago, MazJohn [Mr Arcade] said:

I  enjoy Future Pinball  tables as well thanks to the excellent modified launch executable posted by one of the members and it works very well with Launchbox. I agree there has not been as much focus on Pinball emulation. I would hope its possible in near future to see  better direct integration with both Future Pinball and Visual pinball, with full support for metadata. Right now I'm just using a generic box cover image for my box art.... I guess It's more up to the community to grow this and build a following for it... 

I have a couple hundred backglass & cabinet images I spent a painful amount of time gathering from the web, If you or anyone else would like em, I could make a d/l link when I get some time..there was also a site I came across with tons of wheel art I could try to find again

Edited by stevaside
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On 9/8/2017 at 6:23 PM, stevaside said:

I have a couple hundred backglass & cabinet images I spent a painful amount of time gathering from the web, If you or anyone else would like em, I could make a d/l link when I get some time..there was also a site I came across with tons of wheel art I could try to find again

Hey Stevaside, thanks- Always appreciated.  What I've resorted to out of desperation is to start doing FP screenshots and screen caps... painful but I might work on it when time permits... having the time is the biggest challenge.. are there any tutorials known  to help get visual pinball working with  Launch box?  Thanks

Edited by MazJohn [Mr Arcade]
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  • 3 weeks later...
On 9/10/2017 at 4:17 PM, MazJohn [Mr Arcade] said:

 

Hey Stevaside, thanks- Always appreciated.  What I've resorted to out of desperation is to start doing FP screenshots and screen caps... painful but I might work on it when time permits... having the time is the biggest challenge.. are there any tutorials known  to help get visual pinball working with  Launch box?  Thanks

Not rly many tutorials from what i remember, but this member's advice made it easy to run...just enter in what he did in the screenshot in this thread, in the edit details tab &  u should be good for VP to run ur games right from the wheel with no BS. Never even needed Rocket Launcher after all

 

All I need now is to figure out how to use Joy 2 Key to run & use my joystick to control VP when I start it...setting all controls alone work well with the joystick alone, but not nudge which is crucial...apparently nudge can only be set to an analogue stick within VP, which my arcade stick is not..

And as far as the images, if u want them I will try to make a RAR with them all by later next week to send u

Edited by stevaside
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The thing with RocketLauncher is that you can point to all your tables - VP8, VP9, VPX, etc and it knows which exe to use to launch the tables. You can still set up the various exes and point the tables to their respective version of VP without RocketLauncher, but its a more manual process. Glad you figured it out.

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On 9/10/2017 at 4:17 PM, MazJohn [Mr Arcade] said:

 

Hey Stevaside, thanks- Always appreciated.  What I've resorted to out of desperation is to start doing FP screenshots and screen caps... painful but I might work on it when time permits... having the time is the biggest challenge.. are there any tutorials known  to help get visual pinball working with  Launch box?  Thanks

Here you go...In this post I added 2 download links containing around 200 of the best backglass + cabinet images I found for tables I have in FP & VP :)

 

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