Not sure if anyone will know the answer to this because it's quite a niche use, but I've got Visual Pinball working with PinDMD and the Pixelcade, but I have to manually stop the server that starts with BigBox first before opening Visual Pinball or else VP has issues connecting to the Pixelcade display.
Of course, this leaves me unable to start pinball from within BigBox - not the biggest deal in the world, but I'd like my cab to be "all-in-one", and needing to back out of BB to open VisualPinball in order to get DMD functionality breaks the flow a bit.
Is there a known solution to this? Anything I could try? I know Launchbox is pretty extensible, so maybe I can make it run that server shutdown command immediately before launching pinball, although I haven't tried messing with that yet.
Love the updates, by the way. I recently updated the Pixelcade software and was pleasantly surprised to see that some console images that were stretched that I'd "fixed" myself at one point or another (N64, a few others) were now properly sized. Happy to see the updates! I'm hoping I get a bit of free time to fill in a few more holes in my collection in the future. I'll be sure to share them.
there is an .exe included with the latest Pixelcade called "Exit Pixelcade", that will shutdown the Pixelcade listener. So if you can find a way to call that when launching Pinball and then launch the pixelcade listener again when going back to arcade mode, that should do what you need. I have this integration for Hyperspin but never got around to doing this in BB. Would love to know if you find a way to do this in BB, thanks
@alinke2000
Sounds good, I'll give it a shot. I asked around on the Launchbox Discord and it seems like it might be easy enough with a script. From what I can tell, LB might have the ability to run AHK scripts standalone, so it should be easy enough to run that exe before starting Visual Pinball.
I'll report back here after I have time to mess with it tomorrow.
AHK script is how I did it in HyperSpin but any script hooks that LB/BB has should suffice
@alinke2000
Yep, looks like it's quite easy. There's literally a space in each emulator to put AHS scripts. I'm new to AutoHotKey, but I have this simple thing and it seems to work:
Run, F:\Path\To\Pixelcade\pixelcade_quit.exe /hide
Sleep, 1000
Not sure if the "sleep" is needed, but I figured I'd give Visual Pinball a second to get situated before starting, to make absolutely sure that the server is stopped.
very cool, thanks for sharing