[EXE] Customize luminosity per shade

[aetios50]

Hello,

I want to thx freezy and the others contributers for this incredible work you made guys for permitting us to use DMD on our Pincab.

I don't have any bugs but I just want to share my gaming experience on the table Rogue One in Pinball FX2.

In fact, i don't know if it's the color or the quality of game's DMD, but Every DOTS seems to have the same level of yellow and this affects the rendering's quality. I can barely notice this when I have to save the score... it's very difficult to read letters.

Is there a solution by changing a parameter ?

Best regards

[freezy]

Looks okay to me? Can you post a screenshot of yours?

[aetios50]

[aetios50]

i think the problem comes from the darkest yellow which doesn't render as wanted. So it seems too much equal to the shiny one.

[freezy]

I see. I actually only ever could make out three different shades with Pinball FX2, so a way to customize luminosity for each shade might be a good feature.

[aetios50]

That would be great indeed 😋 Thx for your time

[Wob76]

Hi, just wondering if this is related to my issue. Mine looks more like an alignment or scaling issue between the virtual DMD and the pin2dmd. The attached picture shows the original pinballfx2 DMD, the dmdext virtual DMD and the pin2dmd. Some animations are worse than others.

I'm using the latest dmdext with 2.37 pin2dmd firmware. The dmdext test image looks perfect.

I also find Pro Pinball has a similar washy look about it, using either dmdext or their supplied solution.

Thanks, Wob

[aetios50]

It seems to be the same problem than me. I saw in pin2dmd editor, we can modify the palette of each color. I will give it a try to see if it a better.

[freezy]

@Wob76: Yeah yours looks definitely weird. I've created a build with no RGB support for PIN2DMD displays. Can you run dmdext test with it and post a photo of it? You can download it here:

dmdext-pin2dmd-gray-only.zip

Basically what's happening when sending 2-bit grayscale frames to PIN2DMD (what Pinball FX2 is doing) is that it sends a 4-bit frame with the four 2-bit values at position 0x0, 0x1, 0x4 and 0xf of the 16 4-bit shades.

@lucky01: I suppose this mapping only works when frame-by-frame coloring is in place? Otherwise I probably should distribute this in a linear way, right? Or does PIN2DMD have a 2-bit mode?

@aetios50: Which DMD do you have?

[Wob76]

@freezy - I'll give this a try when I get home tonight and report the results.

[aetios50]

@freezy : i ve got a pin2dmd from pinballsp

[freezy]

Oh okay so you two probably have the same problem indeed. @aetios50 could you try the dmdext test with the binary posted above as well?

[Wob76]

Here is the results for the test exe, and from the standard exe for reference.

Test exe

1.5.2

edit: I really don't know why GitHub keeps rotating my photo's, they are the right way up on my computer.

[freezy]

Thanks! I think I somehow screwed up that test build though. Could you retry with this one?

dmdext-pin2dmd-gray-only-v2.zip

If it's what I suspect it is, you'll have another test build with fixed luminosities later.

EDIT: Console output would be useful as well, like in your second screenshot.

[Wob76]

No problem, new test.

Let me know if I can do anything further.

[aetios50]

@freezy I will test this tonight.

[Wob76]

@freezy: Just wondering if you have had a change to look at this any further?

[freezy]

Nope, not yet. I hope that I'll have some time this weekend.

[Wob76]

Thanks, waiting with baited breath, but I understand these things take time.

[Wob76]

Just wondering if you have had a chance to have a further look at this issue?

[aetios50]

@freezy, any news about this issue ?

[freezy]

TBH it's a bit of a pain to debug because I don't have a PIN2DMD. I've looked at the code and talked to Lucky1 and in general what I'm doing seems to be correct. However there seems to be a bug causing this low contrast.

I've build a version that uses yellow, orange, red and blue as the four colors in Pinball FX2. It's done at the source, so I wonder how it looks on your PIN2DMD. A photo would be appreciated. You can download it here:

dmdext-48-test.1.zip

Let me know how Pinball FX2 looks with this one. Please also provide the log, i.e. what's displayed in the console where you're running dmdext.

[aetios50]

Hey thx freeze. So I tried your last file and I obtained this : https://youtu.be/NiHHNFW9ATA

Sorry I don't know how to have the log file.

I hope that can help

[freezy]

Thanks. When you execute dmdext, there's a bunch of info printed out, right? That's the log. I'd need to see that as well in order to make sure it's rendering in the correct mode.

[aetios50]

I took a picture of the "log"

Is that what you're talking about ?

[freezy]

Yes, thanks. You can also just select the text and copy/paste it here.

[freezy]

So now I'm hard-coding the colors at output level. Please screenshot or video where you see three colors:

~dmdext-48-test.2.zip~

I've changed them to be more distinctive, they are now yellow, red, cyan and magenta.

EDIT: Sorry, screwed something up. Ignore test.2 and use test.3:

dmdext-48-test.3.zip

[freezy]

Let me know when you tested with test3 please.

[freezy]

Closing, feel free to reopen when you have time to debug.

[aetios50]

Don t need to reopen. I've got a lot of progress with the last pin2dmd firmware (2.51).

Thx for all.