1.1 Beta 10

This release fixes some media capture bugs that appeared in 1.1 Beta 9.

1.1.0 Beta 9

This release provides the ability to completely customize the FFMPEG command lines generated for media capture operations. You can use the options dialog to override all of the defaults for input device sources, codec outputs, and global FFMPEG parameters. There's also a new Javascript "precapture" event that lets you intercept the FFMPEG command line that PinballY constructs internally, and modify or replace it. The Javascript approach can be used for customizations that are beyond the scope of the template-style parameter overrides in the dialog box.

The big thing you can do with the new FFMPEG customization options is capture video from Exclusive Full-Screen windows, thanks to the newer "ddagrab" video capture mode that FFMPEG now supports. ddagrab mode requires setting custom video input options. The help section on the Media Capture FFMPEG setup has pre-built recipes for what to put in the dialog box to enable this mode. PinballY still doesn't use ddagrab as the default, because it's not as widely compatible as the older "gdigrab" mode, so you have to enable it explicitly through the dialog settings.

FFMPEG has such a ridiculously rich set of capabilities that it's not feasible for PinballY to even scratch the surface through dialog-box options. The new low-level access to the command line is the best way I can see to expose more of FFMPEG's functionality. It's not exactly a user-friendly approach to make you type in FFMPEG's cryptic command options, but the tradeoff is that it gives you access to just about everything FFMPEG can do.

1.1.0 Beta 8

This has some new options for how to terminate running games, and some changes to the procedures that PinballY uses to carry out the termination process, meant to improve reliability. It also has some fixes related to the "gamestarted" Javascript event, which sometimes didn't fire when it should have, due to a bug in PinballY.

For the 64-bit release, ffmpeg has been updated to the latest stable release version. The latest ffmpeg has some improved screen capture options that make it possible to capture video from games running in full-screen-exclusive video modes, which wasn't possible with older versions, but the PinballY default capture arguments still use the older options for the time being, because the newer mode only works with Windows 8 and later. I plan to add options to select the newer mode in the future.

1.1 Beta 7

For more information: http://mjrnet.org/pinscape/PinballY.php

This version is mostly a technology update: the program build has been moved to Visual Studio 2022 (tools v143), and the ChakraCore Javascript engine has been updated to the latest official release.

This release has one important functional change: it now fully supports 64-bit DOF installations. In the past, PinballY was built with the assumption that DOF was only a 32-bit program, because it was at the time PinballY was first created. This required the 64-bit version of PinballY to go to extra trouble to connect to DOF, since Windows doesn't make it easy to mix 32-bit and 64-bit code. PinballY 64-bit used a special extra program called a "proxy" to connect to 32-bit DOF. While this was great when everyone was using 32-bit DOF, a lot of people have since added 64-bit DOF builds to their system. Since PinballY was built for the 32-bit DOF only, this created problems for pure 64-bit setups. This release keeps the proxy for people that still need it, but it first tries to connect to the native 64-bit DOF, if it's installed. This should hopefully make PinballY compatible with any DOF configuration - 32-bit only, 64-bit only, or both.

I'm labeling this version a Beta mostly because of the technology changes. The Microsoft build tools and ChakraCore are both very stable products, so I don't expect the updates will create any problems, but these sorts of changes do occasionally turn up unexpected and often subtle bugs. Otherwise, I would have called this an official production release, because it's built on the same PinballY 1.1 code that's been in release for several years and appears to be very stable. If you do encounter any new weirdness with the Javascript engine, or with the program in general, it would be helpful if you could compare the behavior under the previous (Beta 6) release to determine if it's specific to this update.

1.1.0. Beta 6

This release contains an attempt at a fix to the sticky wheel-spin auto-repeat problem some people have reported (issue #203).

Downloads and more information: http://mjrnet.org/pinscape/PinballY.php
32-bit installer: http://mjrnet.org/pinscape/downloads/PinballY/PinballY-20220716.msi
64-bit installer: http://mjrnet.org/pinscape/downloads/PinballY/PinballY-64bit-20220716.msi