Notes on Future Pinball

jaaem

I was able to get Future Pinball working well on x86. I noticed a bunch of half-answered threads, so hopefully this will help. Here are some notes in no particular order

The wiki says to delete “saves/fpinball” if having problems. DO NOT DO THAT. There is a symlink to the system directory, and I wiped the system directory deleting from windows and had to restore from backup.

Make sure your games are in folders with the same name as the table. This helps for most games and allows them to load. So “Moulin Rouge” would be in : “\\BATOCERA\share\roms\fpinball\Moulin Rouge\Moulin Rouge.fpt” . Some tables still crash, but there are a ton of working ones out there! Try loading the tables in the config application, you can see if there is an error much more quickly. Often you just need to move libraries out of the library subdirectory and into the main rom folder. Other times libraries are just missing. If load in emulation station, you may not see the error and the table will just crash. Even if it works in the config program, it may still crash when loading from emulation station. Not sure why, something with wine that some games will not run from the command line. I tried turning off “Load Image into Playfield editor” and in table “Display Playfield Image in Editor” and it does not help. Edit: Fix for this in post below

You need to enter a coin and hit start before the ball drops.

I saw some people had issues with multiple controllers. From emulation station, Hit F1, Go Applications, Fbinball Config, on the right top disable all but your first controller. Click between the controllers and it should prompt you to save configuration. Write down the controller 1 configuration to have for reference (see below). The default controller mapping is on the batocera wiki. Be sure to make any changes when a game is not loaded.

Now, load a game from emulation station. Hopefully it loads. If you are happy with the default controls you are done.

I was not happy with the default controls! I have an arcade controller with pinball buttons on the sides and I wanted to use them for the flippers. Each side of the arcade controller (player 1 and player2) is treated as a different controller. However, batocera is being “helpful” by ALWAYS overwriting the first controller configuration with the defaults. Since you wrote down the default configuration of controller 1 above, you will have it if need to revert. First, we need to disable batocera from being “helpful”. You need to ssh in and edit /usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/configgen/generators/fpinball/fpinballGenerator.py (this is for batocera v34, if you upgrade the python directory may change). In v34, go to line 67 and make it say “if nplayer <=1 and 0:” . You are adding the “and 0 (zero)” before the colon. This disables the next section of code which overwrites your config. Do a batocera-save-overlay to lock in the change or just don’t reboot if testing. Go back to emulation station, hit F1 and go into the fpinball config. Set your controllers as you like. I kept the default, but made left flipper the button I wanted on the player 1 controller (the side flipper button) and disabled the right flipper. Then I activate controller 2, make sure everything is “none” except the button I want for right flipper. I had to experiment, because buttons are not always the same numbers as evtest says they are.

Just working on finding a way to scrape meta data. I have been finding screenshots (or make them on a windows system, and manually edit the meta data. It would be nice is emulation station had a switch for future pinball to disable automatic controller overwrites. edit: scraping works for some games. screenscaper has some wheels and vidoes.

Enjoy playing, this is a really nice pinball platform and a tons of retro/new tables available. Thank you to devs for including it! I never knew about it.

Atari

jaaem

The wiki says to delete “saves/fpinball” if having problems. DO NOT DO THAT. There is a symlink to the system directory, and I wiped the system directory deleting from windows and had to restore from backup.

That was added as another user had reported that by doing that it solved their issue of not being able to launch the game. Either way, these files will get regenerated once the table is launched again (otherwise… how would they get created in the first place? There are no files in the save directory when you first flash Batocera) so it is a safe action.

I will add your other tips to the wiki though, they seem quite helpful.

Also yes, Future Pinball is quite a neglected system in Batocera. Hopefully another dev will pick up interest in it once again.

jaaem

Atari The issue is: \\batocera\share\saves\fpinball\dosdevices\CQFO6Q~M\users\root\Documents and \\BATOCERA\share\saves\fpinball\drive_c\users\root\Documents point to \userdata\system\ . When I deleted in windows, windows followed the symlink and deleted by system directory!

Still hoping someone else figures out why the games don’t launch from the command line. Tried both btrfs and ext4, no difference. Just need to accept the fact that some tables will not load from command line.

edit: It seems some tables just need to be their original name. For instance “Aerosmith (Mark1)(1.0).fpt” loads fine, but same file called “Aerosmith.fpt” does not. Weird. To figure out the table name, load the config utility. Load the game manually, go to Menu Bar->Table->Table Info . Rename the file the same as the Table Name: field, adding the .fpt. Now tables should load. Tried on a few problem tables, and seems to work consistently. If that doesn’t work, add some text in parathesis, like Game.fpt -> Game (My Game).fpt . Not sure why this helps, but it did on a table I couldn’t load. After more testing, seems like naming files “Game (some text).fpt” solved my problems, no need to match the table name. I have been using the game year as ’some text"

I’m so happy with this system now, it is alot of fun.

Edit:

If you have too many controllers (or maybe two names the same) not sure, future pinball will crash after the loading screen. The way I fixed this was to unbind any unneeded controller. Unbind a controller when using fpinball and rebind it when done.

in \\BATOCERA\share\system\configs\emulationstation\scripts\game-start\

create a file 03-controller.sh and chmod 755 it

#!/bin/bash

string=$1

tmp=${string#*roms/}

system=${tmp%/*}

system=${system%/*}

if [ "$system" = "fpinball" ]; then

echo '3-5.4' > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/unbind

exit 0

fi

then make below file and chmod 755 it.

\\BATOCERA\share\system\configs\emulationstation\scripts\game-end\

just have the unbind line (as this does get system name passed it)

#!/bin/bash

# check if /sys/bus/usb/devices/3-5.4/driver does not exist, rebind if does not exist

FILE=/sys/bus/usb/devices/3-5.4/driver

if [ ! -f "$FILE" ]; then

echo '3-5.4' > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/bind

fi

you need to replace the ‘3-5.4’ with the ID of the controller you don’t want. You can find this by running

for device in $(ls /sys/bus/usb/devices/*/product); do echo $device;cat $device;done

Atari

jaaem Yeah, that’s a WINE virtual drive. It gets recreated when you run fpinball again. The system folder for that matter too.

Separately, I do know that Windows explorer has been reported to have a bug where it deletes the incorrect directory if using the folder tree to do the deletion. I myself have never experienced this, but it would be enough to convince me to not use the Windows explorer to delete folders. You can do so from Batocera’s built-in folders to do so.

admin_woosah

What’s your experiences with save states for tables in Future Pinball under Batocera? I’m having this annoying issue where I can’t get high scores to stay persistent within the fpRAM folder because the contents of the whole fpinball directory reset on reboot and purge the records.

Also, it looks like EmulationStation isn’t creating the save state for me but I was able to get the .fpRAM file to generate from the applications view (F1 - Applications - fpinball_config). Another oddity I came across is that even though this location generated a .fpram file after game play I still could not get the table settings to register that the fpram file was “found”. For example, open a table and then at the top go to Table > Table Info. Within the prompt on the right side I get a message "Non Volatile RAM Defaults (fpRAM file not found)…

Not sure if there is a python config doing some cleaning on reboot and trying to be “helpful” but I’d greatly appreciate any configs I should try tinkering to get the save states to stay persistent.

jaaem

admin_woosah Save’s do not work. I think it is because the fpram directory is /usr/fpinball/fpRAM which is reset every boot. A while back, I tried some symlink trickery and editing the config gen to call a version in userdata, but still could not get it to save. I bet it can be done, but I don’t know enough about wine.

admin_woosah

jaaem Yea I was thinking the same thing and possibly a backup/restore of the fpram file. For now I’m just dual booting windows and playing that way.

Atari

A dev has noticed this issue and is looking into it.

The key to fixing most problems are knowing they exist in the first place.

jaaem

Atari I see the commit on github. Nice! Look forward to new beta.

As we discussed on discord months ago, I still think the fpinballGenerator.py should not overwrite the controls. Controls should be set via the GUI and not overwritten. It is an easy hack to prevent the overwrite if not acceptable to incorperate

Atari

jaaem The controls are automatically configured. I’d hate to see that go.

Sorthious

@Atari , maybe there could be an IF statement added to fpinballGenerator.py to see if a player configuration exists. If it exists, load the player configuration, if it doesn’t then set up the default configuration; that way you have the best of both worlds!

admin_woosah

Just wanted to confirm on this thread that the save state fix is applied in v36. Thanks again to the devs for looking into this and adjusting the configuration!

jaaem

And I think v37 will bring using pad2key to remap keys more easily. Haven’t tried it yet.