hey... the .patch attachment was rejected! but now I renamed it to .diff and it is supposed to work fine. 😀

Great work! 😉
After some modifying I got it to work with Pinball Dreams 1 & 2, Epic Pinball and Psycho Pinball (mammoth tables, 819 pixels in height 😁 ).

Thanks alot for this patch!

wow! great! Can you post your version of the patch too, please? I am a lot interested about it.

Well I don't have diff so I applied your patch manually to DOSBox 0.60 code because I can't get any newer to compile with MSVC 6. Only part in vga_draw.cpp is changed:

if (height==350) { // Pinball Fantasies
height = 608;
hackit = true;
} else if(height==200) { // Pinball Dreams 1 & 2
height = 534;
hackit = true;
} else if(height <= 367 && height > 354) { // Psycho Pinball
height = 819;
hackit = true;
} else if(height==240) { // Epic Pinball
height = 420;
hackit = true;
} else {
hackit = false;
}

Also this messed up graphichs for intro and other games. 😵

yes, I know it messes things up.

I have put this if height=350 there to avoid the messup. Thats because pinball fantasies uses a special screen resolution *only* when it displays the playfield.

I thought about adding a command line parameter for dosbox such as --pinball-fantasies to activate the hack

The idea is that we must have a way of knowing (at runtime) when whe should trick the game (to show the entire playfield) and when we should let it emulate correctly (to show the menus, presentation, etc).

Felipe, a quote from me from another thread:

Perhaps this patch can be extended so that it checks for the presence of psycho pinball in memory. A dirty hack would be to check if the executable name is _P_.EXE. This was (and perhaps is) a trick done by a lot of graphics drivers, which employ game specific cheats to improve framerates. Changing the name of some game to unrealtournament.exe radicly changed speed 😀

Perhaps this is an idea?

Also, this patch and the vertical tilt issue described in the other thread could be combined, but with the no-scroll as optional, because I can imagine you wouldn't want that, because it makes everything tiny.

From the tilt issue thread (continued here):

felipe.sanches wrote:

What else would you suggest for pinball enhancement?

I thought about faking multiball but it seems to be too hard to do. But not impossible. When we are playing between the software and the hardware that it expects to be running on, we can trick it with a lot of flexibility. We can build a middle layer on top of the original hardware.

Personally, I'd rather not have hacks that could be classified as cheats. The no-scroll hack is something I'd welcome, because those tables only scrolled because higher resolutions weren't available back then.

felipe.sanches wrote:

Let me tell you about some of the other tricks that i've been doing with pinball fantasies (maybe it works with other pinball games too)

I have successfully integrated dosbox with a set of LEDs on my parallel port. Then I sincronized the flashing of the LEDs with the flashing of some of the playfield lights. I got it sincronized with the P A R T Y lights for example.

How did you accomplish that? Are the party lights always located in the same memory block, which you read datafrom and send to your leds?

take a look at the explanation in the "Pinball enhancement Pack for Dosbox" thread

Has anyone got this patch working with Psycho Pinball in DosBOX 0.65? I'm running it on Gentoo, and I just get a black screen 🙁. Is it just me?

Pinball Fantasies runs perfectly with the patch. I don't have Epic or Dreams, so haven't tried them.

Does Psycho work for you with the non-patched dosbox 0.65 ?

This patch will only work on games that use the hardware scrolling technique. The only thing that we need is to define what is the resolution of the entire table for the desired game. Miki maus says that he got Psycho working, so we can suppose that psycho uses hardware scrolling. Have you used the values that miki maus has posted above?

Does Psycho work for you with the non-patched dosbox 0.65 ?

Yes...

Have you used the values that miki maus has posted above?

and yes. (I though that these would be obvious.)

I just get a black window with the patch, but the game keeps running - I can hear the sounds and even exit back to the menu (where I do get the graphics). Oh, and I think that the window isn't resized correctly, as with Pinball Fantasies and Illusions.

But setting that matter aside and moving to others, I also got Pinball Illusions working with the patch. Originally, it uses the same height as Pinball fantasies (i.e. 350), but has a different table + DMD + a black area between DMD & table height, which I think is 665, though I could be off by a pixel (I counted the pixels from a screenshot - is there a more elegant way to figure out the right values?). It seems to me if you use wrong values, you just get a part of the table cut off, or an area of extra black at the bottom of the table (or at least this is what happened with Pinball Illusions).

Actually, you could also run Pinball Illusions in 640x480 and 800x600 but that has never worked in DOSBox.

Also, as no-one hasn't noted (at least as I could notice), this patch causes DOSBox to crash if you go full-screen - not that anyone would have a monitor with the correct aspect ratio anyways 😉. I accidentally went fullscreen while the hack was active, not fun if you're making a new high-score 😜

Also, as there seem to be several games that could use this patch, but with different values, why not make a patch that takes a command line in the style of '--pinballhack 350-665'? Or call it --YScrollHack or whatever. Just put a list of known games that can use this with their correct values in your documentation. In my opinion, this would be better, because:

• 1) hard-coding the values screws up other applications using the same native height (unless you code some detection rutine to run the hack only with the right application, as already suggested, but that would be more complicated)
  2) nobody has an extensive list of pinballs and other games that can use this hack AFAIK
  3) A user can use this feature with any application
  4) It should be trivial to code, I'd think, though I can't code 😀
  5) One could opt (not) to run the hack as one pleases - no need to install the hacked and non-hacked version separately

Also, maybe there are games that can use a similar hack with horizontal resolution? I don't know any, but I would assume there are some platform games with a limited but scrolling game area.

Ah well, just my hew cents 😉

> is there a more elegant way to figure out the right values?

I am trying to figure out a way of doing it... but I think that you sugestion of using commandline is better.

>causes DOSBox to crash if you go full-screen

strange... for me it is working in fullscreen.

Contribution for Pinball Illusions 336x350 VGA (needed extending height a bit,maybe I missed it by few pixels):

if (height==350) { // Pinball Fantasies & Illusions
height = 608;
hackit = true;
if (width==336) height=672;

Is it possible for someone to test the no-scroll patch for Psycho Pinball that Miki lists above?

All I get is a black screen in Psycho Pinball with my dosbox compile while the Pinball Fantasies no-scroll patch works fine in the same dosbox.

This is the "no-scroll" patched dosbox 0.65 compiled for windows. Thanks, Daniel!

You will need SDL.dll
msvcp71.dll and
msvcr71.dll

in order to run this.

Use this SDL.dll

I have tried some other SDL.dll found for download on the net but it gives me an error. This one I know that works. It was also provided by Daniel. Thanks!

so how do i get this to work? what will i have to do? i'm a noob with things like this. please, help 😉

my pinball fantasies doesn't work in fullscreen, i mean, it crashes everytime you go from menu to a table or from table to menu.
it ain't so funny to play this game in a little window.

this game is awesome.

oh, i just figured it out.. it works, though it's quite small. i guess i will stick with the normal. it would be awesome to get the fullscreen working though!

Hi!

I just love bumping old threads, since I like old stuff like games and whisky 😉.

I had an urge to play some of the old pinball games today, and remembered this hack. It doesn't work with current dosbox version anymore, so I've made the changes to dosbox 0.74 with a bonus!

There seem to be some issues with fullresolution=original on some output devices. Experiment with different settings if you get a crash.

1#          pinhack: Enable pinball hacks to display whole table at once. Not enabled per default.
2# pinhackdoublewidth: Use doublewidth with pinhack. The original disables it, but you may find it better enabled, which is default.
3#    pinhackheight: The Y resolution (height) the pinball hack should trigger. Default is 350 (good for Pinball Fantasies).
4#     pinhackwidth: The X resolution (width) the pinball hack should trigger at. Is not checked by default or if set to 0..
5#   pinhackscaleto: The Y resolution (height) DOSBox will scale to if pinball hack is enabled and triggers..
6pinhack=true
7pinhackdoublewidth=true
8pinhackheight=350
9pinhackwidth=0
10pinhackscaleto=608

DISCLAIMER: I really know little about programming, so using this patch may blow up your DOSBox or worse. 😈

Cheers!