VPin Studio Preferences
The client settings page offers different options to adapt the appearance of the VPin Studio client, such as enabling/disabling the available emulators:
Emulator Settings
Additionally, the available Table Overview columns and sections can be toggled on/off:
Table Overview Settings
The Network Share
You can configure the system folder buttons (yellow icons) so that these are available on remote clients too.
The automatic shutdown option is a useful tool when you want to make sure that your VPin isn't turned on and idle for too long. If the VPin does not register a key input for n minutes, it will shutdown automatically. Note that this shutdown countdown is resetted for every HTTP request that is done by the VPin Studio.
The controller setup must be started on the cabinet itself. It configures the keys for the pause menu and overlay.
You can also bind a reset key which will kill all emulators and restart the frontend.
The pause menu is a custom menu that is used to pause VPX and show additional information about the table that is currently played.
The menu item are created using the existing assets from the "help", "other2" and "info" folders of PinUP Popper. Note that all assets from these folders are loaded and provided as individual menu items in the menu. These assets can be images or videos. The menu will show or play them once the menu is selected.
Additionally, the Virtual-Pinball-Spreadsheet is used to look up available tutorials for the table and provide YouTube menu entries for them.
Note that it is recommended to have Chrome installed on the VPin in order for the YouTube videos to be played. You can use the internal browser instead but there is currently the issue, that the loading spinner of YouTube won't disappear in this browser.
The pause menu can embed tutorial videos from YouTube. In order for these video to appear in the pause menu navigation, you have to make sure, that the VPS mapping table is set. You can do that inside the Table Data Manager or in the VPS sidebar section, because these tutorial videos are mapped in the Virtual Pinball Spreadsheet.
The overlay dashboard can be shown on startup of the VPin for via an additional button. The button for the overlay must have been mapped in the Controller preferences.
You can choose from different designs for your overlay. The designs differ in the widgets that are displayed. Additionally, you can choose a design with an embedded external URL. This can be used e.g. to embed a iscored.info dashboard.
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Note that inside the preferences, the cabinet's local repository cannot be customized. This repository must exist to create and restore backups. But the settings allow to create new HTTP repositories which point to a folder on a HTTP server. This folder may be protected with basic HTTP authentication, but this is optional.
To fill the HTTP repository with your backups, you have to upload your backups from your local backup folder to the configured HTTP server:
- Open a tool to upload files to your HTTP server, e.g. Total Commander if your server works with FTP.
- Open the folder "resources/archives/backups/Visual Pinball X" of your VPin Studio installation.
- Select all .vpinzip and all .json files and the descriptor.json for uploading OR use the Bundle option from the toolbar.
When finished, you can select the HTTP repository view in the VPin Studio's and you will the the tables you have uploaded. You now can first download and then install every of these tables anytime again.
IMPORTANT REMARKS
- The file descriptor.json contains the full list of tables to be displayed when the repository view for this folders is read. So if the files of the HTTP folder do not match with this file, adapt the JSON data inside it manually.
- You can only use the downloaded backups for the designated VPin installation. The VPBM archives only work with the configured target key, so you cannot distribute the archives to "random" installations.