So Jan has made some updates to MPF for the OPP platform, and I really need to move to using that version. I had some old MPF code that ran an attract mode slideshow and a bunch of other stuff, but it was all really preliminary. I could never get the slideshows to work after moving to newer branch of MPF, and I don’t really know if it is that important. I’ve decided to just throw out all the stuff that I have so far (excluding my main configuration yaml file which has all the hardware definitions in it) and start from scratch. Hopefully that will make things a little bit simpler since I don’t need to deal with all the stuff the converter added to the files.
To update to 0.32, I ran the following command (remember, I don’t have Python in my path so I need to add some extra stuff flags to get everything to work) :
c:\Python34\python.exe -m pip install mpf –upgrade –pre
To run the actual code:
c:\Python34\python.exe -m mpf both
The checked-in code in the repository svn\MPF\SS3 folder is using 0.32. You can start a game, it plays a couple of sound, goes into skillshot mode, and that is about it. Making the skillshot correctly adds the score, but it doesn’t play a clip from the sound pool because the mode ends before it can play the clip.
I’m just not getting into the MPF groove. One issue I had was I couldn’t get the scores to show up. After trying to find the information in the documentation (I’m sure it is there somewhere), I eventually found an example in Brian’s code that had the correct value to use in the yaml. I just don’t feel very efficient working with it yet. I’m considering shelving it until there are a couple of examples of fully running games, so I’m not just hunting and pecking to figure out how to make it work. The hassle of figuring it out would be worth it if I was trying to do more interesting things than emulate an early 80s pinball machine. The reality is I have a static picture displayed on the backbox with a couple of scores shown in front like the old numeric displays.
I guess that it means that I have to dust off the OPP framework and get that running for the Gen2 boards. That means adding a couple of new commands and such, but it shouldn’t be that difficult. The code is written in Python with a little engine in the background, but it is much simpler for me to get something up and working quickly with it. I just got a PiZero and it would be a good little project to get that running the framework.
That’s all. Just felt that I needed to get an update out since it has been over a month. Looks like Expo was an interesting event this year. Hopefully that will bleed over into other pinball events including Pintastic this year.
Open Pinball Project 