Pinup player does not activate

[pinball]

When trying to run Pin Up Player nothing seems to be happening.

This is a two screen setup. The playfield is on a 1080 Television while the backglass is on a 24″ HDMI monitor. The only gaming software installed is visual pinball x 10.6.1 with freezy, Future Pinball and Bam (original
BAM (original config no add ons) , fx3 with freezy, and freezy 1.8. In terms of PinUpPlayer the only software I plan to use it with is visual pinball x and pinup popper. This configuration
was fully working and has a full system backup prior to installing the PUP software. I have currently downloaded
the PinUp player and popper 1.4.5 install and insured all files are unblocked. Currently I have only attempted to install the player portion since it is a dependency of popper.

Below are the instructions I wrote for myself based on Nailbuster’s 1.4 install on you tube.

 

1.Download pinupplayer/popper 1.4.5 install
2.PinUpPlayer_install_xxxx_.zip (1.4.5) (!!!!!!!!!!!!make sure unblocked before doing anything)
3.Make PinUpSystem directory on C:
4.Copy files from .zip to PinUpSystem directory
5.Run PinupPlayerRegister.bat as admin
6. Pinup Player display that comes up after running PinupPlayerRegister.bat
a. drag from playfield to backglass so you don’t have to work sideways on playfield
b. fit to screen so it matches the size of the pup pack display
c. Refresh screen to show target screen (came up automatically)
d. Set everything to off in the PinUp displays form except backglass and playfield.
e. create a plugin folder in tables directory
f. create a shortcut to pinupsystem and copy to plugin
g. copy puppack vpinmame files from pinupsystem folder to vpinmame
h. right click and run as administrator pupdmdcontrolregister.bat
i copy files pupack b2s files to table directory
7. Go to DmdDevice.ini and edit
a. go to [pinup] section of DMDDevice.ini and make sure enabled = true
8. Open up a visual pinball table with a b2s backglass.
9. Start table and when backglass comes up right click and make sure
a. activate backglass is checked
b. error without backglass unchecked
a. hit save settings
d. close game and reopen display window by right clicking on backglass
e. hit plugins button at bottom of screen and check to see if pinup plugins is active ( will not come up no matter what I do. (Always gray)
f. hit f1 to make sure use external dll is checked
g. Download a puppack for a table
h. Put in PinUpSystem ->Puppackvideo folder the puppack.
i. put b2s file in tables to backb2s (newly created) folder so it does not come up when restarting table
10. Restart the table and hope for the best.

The pinup player template did not come up but freezy did on the second screen while trying to load star trek tng v 1.4 vpx (sttng). The playfield also came up on the TV monitor which is screen 1.
I tried to play the game with the playfield, freezy and pupack and saw no performance degradation so either pup pack crashed or never was started.

Looking at Nailbuster’s debugging page and other blogs for PupPack 1.4.x I peformed the following tests.

1. Check to see if DMDDevice [pinup] was set to enabled = true -> Yes
2. check to see if when right clicking b2s backglass (put file back for test) that activate back glass is checked and error without backglass is unchecked. -> Yes
a. Restarted machine with b2s file removed again and freezy and playfield came up as expected but the PuPack screen showed no indications of loading. Also the check plugins button is grayed out.
3. Checked the pupack test file in VPMame which had a PUPLog.txt

20210121 18:40:06 Open called
20210121 18:40:06 Set Game Name thread sttng_l7
20210121 18:40:09 Start Thread Matching
20210121 18:40:09 create PuPCap
20210121 18:40:09 Init Game name:sttng_l7
20210121 18:40:09 Create Object Display
20210121 18:40:09 imagedir:C:\PinUPSystem\PuPVideos\sttng_l7\PuPCapture
20210121 18:40:09 num images 207
20210121 18:52:17 Free Object Display

According to Nailbusters documentation this is normal and shows no sign of error.

4. I checked in the table directory of visual pinball x for a folder named plugin with a link to the PinUpSystem directory. -> Yes

5. I ran the test program pinupplayertest.exe of which a simple form comes up. When hitting the VLC test button absolutely nothing happens. I don’t know if this has anything to do with it but in the pupvideo’s directory
there are two folders. The first is elvis which I don’t have a clue how it got there but is completely empty. Don’t know if this is a bug or not but I have not played elvis on my virutal pin so I have no clue how it got
there. The second is sttng_l7 pupack pack which I placed in that folder. When hitting puptestplayer button I get a message stating everything is ok.

6. The next test did was to run PinUpPackEditor. I tried to load elvis since I thought it might be a test file for testing but nothing happened. Since the folder is completely empty that wasn’t a surprise.
I did manage to load sttng_l7 and a file list came up. I went to the trigger list tab and tested about 20 different id’s on the testing tab. It looks like the actions I ran came up with video for that
task so I’m assuming VLC is running with PinUpPackEditor form.

7. I also another program called PinUpPlayerTest pack which seemed like a duplication of PinUpPackEditor.ext test section and this worked fine also. I didn’t go through as many because it was much easier using
the pack editor.

 

8. Put Visual Pinball in low graphics mode from the Preferences section (Original configuration was at the highest setting) -> No difference

9. Under video/graphic Performance and TroubleShooting FPSLimiter/Vsynch is set to one. There is a setting underneath called Maximum frame setting. It is also
set to one but I did not see any instructions anywhere to change that but looking at that I wonder?

10. After all that I wondered if something was locked. I did a visual check through file manager and found nothing so to be certain I restored the ssd back to pre pup installation state and ran the process again making sure that
making sure everything was unblocked. Same results

11. I noticed in the sttng_l7 pup pack there were config files for 2 monitor setup with no dmd.
I replaced the original ones in sttng_l7 with the outside config files. -> No difference. I put the original ones back

12. I ran a cpu stress test when running the puppack through PinUpPackEditor while using task manager. It seemed the CPU at rest was running at 1-2% and when running various triggers the number jumped to
between 7-15% percent. I did not check the GPU stress level but other than the card being AMD which doesn’t seem to be a problem in any other program it is hard to believe that it’s performance is causing
issues but who knows.

Any ideas where I can look next. Nailbuster’s instructions were quite clear so I’m not sure what the issue is here.

 

 

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[NailBuster]

that’s a very detailed post :)  I like it…

BUT,  i stopped at this:  e. hit plugins button at bottom of screen and check to see if pinup plugins is active ( will not come up no matter what I do. (Always gray)

that is where you needed to stop and fix.  That’s not really a pinup issue as its mostly a b2s/security one….

the two most common reasons for b2s plugins not working….. 1>  you spelt “plugins” wrong or wrong location.  2>  90% of time its windows blocked files…check all pinup files again.

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[pinball]

Thank you for your reply.

I unblocked every file on the PC using powershell code. I understand the security risks of doing this but PinUp still refuses to come up and this is nothing more than a gaming machine so not life and death if I screw it up.

I  downloaded Visual Studio 2019 community edition.  Similarly I got the b2s code from github. I’m not a very experienced Microsoft developer  so there is going to be a learning curve on how to use it.  I’m more of a python, C++ and QT developer so this is totally different than what I am used to. I rarely use windows but it seems that it is the only platform Visual Pinball X will run on.

I managed to get the compiler running for b2s. The only error I got out of the compiler  is that it is looking for file values in c:\games\visual pinball\table.

directory.  Unfortunately my b2s server is located for  Visual Pinball  in c:\visual pinball\table  .

Next steps is to keep plugging away. The more I become familiar with Visual Studio the better the chance I have to find what is causing the failure.

Furthermore, if you could be so kind as to define what security one is. I tried to Google it and nothing of substance came up.

Thank you and Best Wishes

Sunrunner

 

 

 

 

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[pinball]

Both PinUp Popper and Player are now working correctly. Here’s what I did to get them working

1. Installed .Net 3.5 (which includes version 3.0 and 2.0)  This is not by default installed  in Windows 10 professional 64 bit.

2. Installed the last version of DOF and registered it. ( I had an older one on the cabinet)

3.  Reinstalled Player and  Popper. Although the source which originally downloaded from  said the version was 1.4 when loading 1.4.5 things worked much better.

4. Installed FlexDMD. Apparently UltraDMD was abandoned by the original developer in 2016 FlexDMD uses the same libraries as UltraDMD and is being maintained to this date.  Woz (Wizard of Oz)  would not load until I did this.

5. Loaded Visual Studio 2019 community edition and reviewed the code to determine where the failures were.

The challenges I acquired really had very little to do with blocked files  or  folders not being named correctly.  It had more to do with versions not being the latest and up to date. Similarly, I was missing critical system files which the .net 3.5 install handled.

Thanks to Terry Red for mentioning that you have to plow through a lot of information if one wishes to fix the install errors.

Thanks to Nailbuster for pointing out until I fixed the Plugins button  there was very little need to go further until fixed.

Best Wishes to All

Thanks to Major Frenchy  for making me aware that UltraDMD is not supported while FlexDMD is.

 

 

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