Summary of how to set up Visual Pinball X

These are the notes I wrote for myself on how to setup VPX and its various sub-components. You might find something useful in here. Or not.

Installation

Download and run the all-in-one installer from VP Forums.

Display

Make sure this is set to the native resolution of the playfield screen. Sometimes VPX gets confused and sets the playfield to the backglass screen - see below for how to fix

Always use FS back-drop settings (Cabinet/Rotated screen usage)

This always launches tables in full-screen portrait configuration (rather than in desktop landscape configuration). Should always be checked if using a cabinet or portrait-rotated playfield monitor

Anti-aliasing

Adjust to your liking. Some claim that at 4K you can disable as the pixels are so small anyway. I can certainly see the difference on a 2K screen so leave it at Quality FXAA.

Ball aspect ratio

I have to set this to "Don't stretch the ball": either of the other two options result in really strange shaped or over-sized pinballs

Performance and troubleshooting

• FPS Limiter / Vsync: 0 is off, 1 is on and 2 is adaptive on.
• Maximum Prerendered Frames: 0 is off, other numbers set the max prerendered frames.
• I have never been able to see a difference with either of these settings but perhaps that's because I have a fast GPU

Fullscreen

• Force Exclusive FullScreen: Use this to optimize performance, but be aware that once it's on, the mouse won't work, so things like the F1 and F6 menus in-game won't work. Enabling this does strange things to my frame-rate: it often caps the monitor at 60 Hz (even though it's capable of 185 Hz); there are complicated interplays between this setting, Nvidia control panel settings for the GPU and the monitor's own display settings
• Force 10-bit monitor support: I can't see any difference though in principal it should increase the colour depth

1. Load a table
2. In VPX, enter Backglass properties, then Camera tab, and decide whether to run the table in Desktop mode or full-screen. If running in a cabinet, check in the table script whether there is a Cabinet Mode option: if there is, enable it
3. Hit F6 to enter the PoV editor. Switch through the PoV settings using left and right CTRL; adjust values using left and right SHIFT. Suggested starting settings (for cabinet mode)
• Inclination: 6°
• Field of View: 20
• Layback: 60
• Rotation: 0 (for me, as I have the playfield display set up in portrait mode) - most other people seem to have it in landscape mode, so they set this to 270 to allow the playfield to display correctly
• X/Y scale: adjust to fill screen
• X-offset / Y-offset: adjust to fill the screen
• Z-offset: adjust to fill screen
4. Quit out of the PoV editor and save the table. Then run the table (F5) to test. Iterate with F6 again if needed. I typically have to flip back and forth between x-offset and x-scale to get it right, then flip between y-offset and y-scale to get that right.
5. My process (based on a Portrait setup - so X-scale is left-right, Y-scale is up-down. People running in a Landscape setup would have to switch the two axes)
• Tweak inclination, field of view and layback so that the flippers look like they're being viewed from roughly above; often the default values expose too much of the rear (aka side that is closest to the player) of the flippers which isn't what you'd see in real life where you're more-or-less looking down on the flippers from above. Other things to take into account: a) can I see all the rollover lights at the top of the playfield? (if not, adjust until I can because otherwise I'll have trouble completing them) b) If there is an upper flipper, can I see enough of the ball travel path to that flipper (from an orbit, usually) to react in time and make shots? This is an issue, for instance, with the right upper flipper in the Flintstones, where the right orbit can be hidden by some of the table decoration without careful tweaking, meaning you don't have enough time to react when the ball approaches the flipper c) Do the toys on the playfield (if there are any) look OK?
• Adjust X scale until playfield fills screen left-to-right. May have to tweak the X-offset to centre table (some tables are built slightly off-centre). Try to tweak so cabinet sides are just off-screen
• Adjust the Y-scale until the playfield fills screen top-to-bottom. Usually need to tweak the Y-offset so that the drain is just visible at the bottom of the screen and the top rails/rollovers are clearly visible at the top
6. Some people suggest that the x:y:z ratio should be left as close to 1 as possible, to avoid distorting the table, and just using the x, y and z offsets to get the screen filled. I think this is up to personal preference - I like having the screen filled by the table and any particular distortion that this creates is not visible or noticeable to me.

• Load a table in VPX and hit F5 to run it
• Whilst running, hit F1 to open ROM settings
• Click 'Skip Pinball Startup Test'
• Make sure Use Sound and Use Samples are selected
• Enable Cabinet Mode
• Unclick "Show DMD/Display Window" and click "Use external DMD (dll)" [assuming Freezy DMD is installed - see section below]
• Choose colorize DMD if you have downloaded altcolor files (see below)
• ROMs save adjustments in nvram files, but the overall ROM settings (from the F1 key during play) are saved in the registry in HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Freeware/VisualPinMame. It's possible to set up F1 defaults here so that you don't manually have to set new tables. Also, if upgrading or changing PC, export these registry keys then re-import them to the new setup to keep all the settings and not have to manually fix everything

Note, see also this page for more on ROM options

Bally/Williams/Midway

End key to open door, 8 and 9 to adjust volume

Capcom

7 to enter service menu, Shift to cycle until you see Set Volume, 1 to select, then Shift keys to adjust volume. 7 to exit

Data East/Sega v3 and v3b

7 to enter menu, continue to press 7 until you see "Expand Adjustments", 1 to change Expand Adjusts to "Yes", then 7 to find Volume Adjustment/Background Music Volume, then 1 to adjust the volume, 7 repeatedly to return, or F3

• Works with Lethal Weapon 3, Star Wars, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Jurassic Park, Last Action Hero, Tales From the Crypt, Tommy - Pinball Wizard, WWF Royal Rumble, Guns 'N Roses, Maverick, Frankenstein

Data East/Sega v3b, Stern

8 and 9 to adjust the volume. Wait 30 seconds for table to reset, or F3

• Apollo 13, Godzilla, Golden Cue, Goldeneye, Harley Davidson, Independence Day, Jurassic Park 2 - Lost World, Lost In Space, South Park, Space Jam, Star Wars Trilogy, Starship Troopers, Twister, X-Files, Viper Night Driving
• Striker Xtreme, Sharkey's Shootout, High Roller Casino, Austin Powers, Monopoly, NFL, Playboy, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Titanic, Wack-a-Doodle-Doo, Monopoly Redemption
• Simpsons Pinball Party, Terminator 3 - Rise of the Machines

Tables that cannot have volume adjusted (they had analogue controls): Batman, Batman Forever, Baywatch, Checkpoint, Hook, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles, Star Trek 25th Anniversary. Note that all Gottlieb tables had analogue controls so cannot be adjusted via the ROM. For these latter, you can reduce the volume by hitting F12 during play, and setting a number below zero; but you can't increase volumes this way.

Source

In VPX Settings - Audio you can balance the table and ROM sounds. My results suggest that you want to have the table sounds around 50% or lower and the ROM sounds at 90% in this dialogue. Then in the ROMs themselves, increase volume to 25-28. Anything higher can cause sounds to crackle.

See also a more detailed guide on VPForums.

ROM Settings Adjustments

Make sure you have the coin door "open" by hitting End key.

Data East

7 to enter menu, then 7 to move through. Hit 8 once to reverse direction, then 7 again to move. Use 1 to change the selected value. You will have a set of Audit options first, which you can quickly run through by holding 7 down. When you get to Adjustments, there are a few (around 12), then the last option is to Expand Adjustments Menu. Use 1 to do this, then you'll get a whole new set of adjustments to tweak

Capcom

7 to enter service menu, flipper to cycle, 1 to select, 7 to go back

Some tables share a ROM, but this means that high-scores and any ROM settings will apply commonly across the shared tables. To overcome this, vPinMAME (v. 3.3b or later) allows you to set up ROM aliases, as follows:

1. Edit the VPMAlias.txt file in the vPinMAME folder in following way [alias,rom] without the square brackets, so for example congoNew,congo_2l
2. Open the table and modify the script to use the new alias (search for "Const cGameName=") and replace the existing rom name with your new alias
3. Still in the script, search for ".GameName = cGameName" and add this line below it:
   NVOffset (1)
4. If there are multiple tables, each with a different alias, the NVOffset must increment by one in each (i.e. NVOffset(2), NVOffset(3) etc)

Some tables have had more modern sound packs created to replace those that are saved in the original ROM. To use, download the zip file and save it to the altsound folder in vPinMAME\altsounds\ . Then load and launch the table in VPX and access the ROM options (F1); set alternative sound file to 1 (it normally has 0, which means 'use the ROM original sound files'). A one-stop location for lots of altsound packs is altsound.vpin24.com

Pinsound

This is another way of having alternative sounds for a table, but requires installation of yet another piece of software, so I haven't bothered yet. Latest version of PinSound doesn't work with VPX. Need to use version 18.8.3 or 18.8.2. In ROM settings (F1) need to set the alternative sound file to 2

If it doesn't already exist, create a folder inside vPinMAME called 'altcolor'. Download the altcolor files for a specific ROM from VP Forums or VP Universe. Inside the altcolor folder, create a new folder with the same name as the ROM you want to colorise. Extract the altcolor files into this last folder. Rename them if necessary so they are just called pin2dmd.pal and pin2dmd.vni (they SHOULD NOT have any other name. Make sure that the ROM settings are set to colorize the DMD (see ROM options above)

Before running a table, open the table script and look at the top for any user-adjustable options. Modern tables will contain lots of choices about which toys to enable, colours for flippers, cabinet mode / VR mode / desktop mode (the latter adjusts how the table is drawn to optimise for different use cases). Whilst running a table, hit F6 to access the ROM dipswitches. The first screen just selects a country option: no need to change. Some tables have a second screen that follows this, which allows you to turn on (or off) various toys on the playfield. More modern tables often put these options in the script itself, rather than in an F6 sub-menu

If the various monitors disconnect or come on in a different order to normal, windows and/or VPX may assign different display numbers to them, which can mess up VPX as the backglass will appear on the playfield and the playfield will appear on the backglass, or other weird things. If this happens:

1. In VPX, video settings, set the playfield back to the correct monitor (it will have switched to using the backglass monitor)
2. Run B2SSetup in the Tables folder and make sure the backglass is set to the correct monitor number (it will have switched to using the playfield monitor)

Miscellaneous

Lookup Tables (LUT)

Lookup Tables can be used to adjust the lighting of a table - basically make it lighter, darker, or change the colour and saturation. For it to work, LUT code has to be included in the table script. NBA Fastbreak table apparently has great LUT code from Flupper so consider copying this to other tables

In-game ball control

You can manually move the ball around to practice shots. To do this, start a game (in VPX, not using a front-end), then press D to open the Debug window. Move this out of the way and ensure Ball control is checked. Click on the playfield with the left mouse button to bring the ball to the cursor. Position the ball where you want, then tap a flipper to unfreeze it and resume play. It may be necessary in VPX Preferences->Configures Keys, Nudget etc to check "Ensure mouse handling during play".

Missing Sound Manager

The Sound Manager in VPX (Table->Sound Manager, or F2) can be used to edit the sounds on a table. Sometimes, it spontaneously goes walkies and positions itself miles offscreen. To get it back, close VPX, open Regedit and go to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Visual Pinball\VP10\Editor

Delete the keys SoundMngPosY and SoundMngPosX

VPX script upgrades

Fleep sounds: enables SSF , i.e. moves sounds around the audioscape based on the position of the ball or sound on the playfield

Flupper: upgraded flashers on the playfield

nFozzy physics: more realistic flipper physics, allowing more control of the ball and flipper tricks (e.g. tap passes) - these often start with the flipper button pressed, then released and almost instantly pressed again, to cause a light tap on the flipper itself