Visual Pinball Shortcuts

Introduction

The following keyboard shortcuts do useful things whilst a game is running. In all instances, the keys I'm describing here are to do with the underlying ROM operation, not gameplay (i.e. I'm not explaining how to use the flippers with the SHIFT keys - hopefully that's pretty obvious). Just one quick final note: any of these keys that wants to pop up a new dialogue box will not work if you are running the game in Exclusive Fullscreen.

Make sure this option is not checked in Visual Pinball settings (Preferences -> Video/Graphics Options):

F1 - loads the vPinMame options

• Skip Pinball Startup Test does exactly that. Check this to skip the slow tests when you load the table.
• Double Display Size does exactly that. Use this to make the DMD larger for an LCD display
• Cabinet Mode Don't display the vPinMame splash screen on table launch, and allow the DMD to be placed on a second or third monitor
• Show DMD/Display window Uncheck this if in Desktop mode and the table has its own inbuilt DMD (otherwise you get two DMDs shown at once)
• Use External DMD (dll) check this if you want to use Flex DMD and/or Freezy's DMD extensions to drive a real DMD display, or if you want to use altcolor ROMs
• Sound mode 0 (the digit zero) will use the default sounds; other values can be used to use alternative sounds instead. 1 is for altsound and 2 is for pinsound
• Emulation Fast Frames Default is -1, but can be changed to X in which case vPinMame will emulate the first X frames as fast as possible, leading to a quicker startup (usually this value is in the 100s to 1000s range)

F2

Shows the key mappings in use

F3

Restarts the ROMs. This is useful if you have been making changes in the ROM and want to quickly exit without backing out through loads of menu pages.

F6

Loads the ROM dipswitch options. Most of the time this doesn't really do anything more interesting than allow you to set the country that that game thinks its in (which I think will adjust the currency and time/date formats). However, some games (e.g. The Addams Family by g5k) will have additional settings you can change here. It seems that the trend now, however, is to put these options into the game script instead.

F11

Shows graphics rendering information (including FPS). You can tab through increasingly detailed reporting by pressing F11 multiple times.

End

Toggles the 'virtual' coin door. On table start the ROM will assume the coin door is "closed". Once toggled "open", the system keys associated with the ROM can be used. These are usually mapped to the numbers 7,8,9 and 0 and can be used to move around the ROM menu