Hide unconfigured games: Check this box if you don't want unconfigured games to be displayed in the main game wheel list by default.
PinballY always searches the "Tables" folder for each system to find all game files, whether or not you've set up the bibliographic information (title, manufacturer, year) and whether or not you've added any media items for the game. Normally, PinballY shows all of these files in the game wheel list. Games that haven't been configured yet are easy to spot because they use default background images and just show the raw filename in place of a title.
The point of showing the unconfigured items in the main list is to make setup easier, by letting you see at a glance exactly which games need your attention in terms of entering bibliography data or downloading media. However, you might prefer to hide these when you're just playing, or when you're showing off your cab to friends. Check this box to keep them out of the main list.
When the box is checked, you can still view all of the unconfigured games at any time, by selecting "Show Unconfigured Games" from the Operator Menu. That switches to a filtered list showing only the unconfigured items.
Note you can also explicitly hide individual games, using the "Hide Game" command in the Game Setup menu (reachable from the Operator Menu). You can use this to remove listings for files that you don't even intend to set up in the future, such as old backup copies or testing copies.
Enable underlay display: Check this box to enable the wheel underlay. The underlay is an image that's displayed near the bottom of the main playfield window, in the area where the "wheel" icons are shown. It's only there for cosmetics, to let you display a graphical backdrop of your choice for the game wheel area. See Underlay for details on this feature.
This checkbox doesn't affect Javascript access to the underlay. Javascript can still display underlay images even if you un-check this box. This box only prevents PinballY from automatically displaying an underlay each time you select a new game.
Underlay sizing: These settings control the layout of the underlay image. All of these sizes are expressed as percentages of the window height. You can enter the values with "%" signs, and they're shown that way for clarity, but the "%" signs aren't required; it doesn't affect the interpretation if they're omitted.
As with the other values, this is a percentage of the height of the window, so it effectively sets a maximum "aspect ratio" for the image. That is, it sets a limit on how far the image can be distorted by horizontal stretching.
The default setting for this value is an extremely large value, chosen to be large enough that it'll never be reached in practice. That makes it effectively an "infinity" setting, which is to say, no maximum cap at all.
Why would you want to use this? It's mostly for people who are running in "landscape" mode, like on a typical desktop PC, where the main monitor is oriented so that it's wider than it is tall. Pin cab users usually do the opposite - "portrait" mode, where the main monitor is turned so that it's taller than it is wide. In landscape mode, a normally proportioned playfield image only fills a narrow area in the middle of the screen, so stretching the underlay image to the full width would make it ridiculously stretched out. The maximum width lets you maintain a more appropriate aspect ratio. If you're using landscape mode, you might want to try a setting around 56.25% (9/16), since that will keep the image proportioned about the same as a typical playfield image.
See Underlay for more details on the underlay feature.
Paging Mode: This lets you control how the Next Page and Previous Page commands treat games with non-alphabetic titles, such as 2001 or 8 Ball.
The Next/Previous Page buttons let you navigate through letter groups: so if you're on a game that starts with A, let's say Aladdin's Castle, and you press Next Page, the wheel navigates straight to the first game starting with B, perhaps Bad Cats. This option affects what happens when you get to the games after "Z", where the games with non-alphabetic titles are sorted. There are three options to choose from:
This option is a little nicer than the default just because there are only a handful of "digit" games out there that it makes a lot of sense to skip through them as a block when you're trying to navigate quickly.
Auto-repeat rate: This lets you set a custom repeat rate when holding down one of the wheel navigation buttons (Next, Previous, Next Page, Previous Page). When you press and hold one of the navigation buttons, it'll step through games at the rate you set here. By default, the navigation commands simply repeat at the same rate as ordinary keyboard keys, as set in the Windows control panel for the keyboard. Some people find that a comfortable repeat rate for the keyboard is too fast or too slow for wheel navigation, though. This option lets you set the wheel navigation rate separately from the keyboard rate.
The repeat rate is set as a delay time between repeats, in milliseconds. The simplest thing you can enter here is a number of milliseconds, as in 500 (for 500ms, which is the same as 1/2 of a second - there are 1000 milliseconds in one second). If you prefer to be more scientific in your notation, you can tag on ms to the end of the time, as in 500ms, to say explicitly that the time is in milliseconds. You can also use s to express the time in seconds, so you can say something like 0.05s, which is the same as 50ms or 50 millisecond.
Here's where this option gets more interesting: you can specify a whole sequence of delay times, by separating them with commas. When you press and hold a key, the delay times will be applied one at a time. You can use this, for example, to set up a "ramp" that makes the key repeat more and more quickly the longer you hold it down:
Here's what the setting above does when you press, say, the Next button. Pressing the button immediately carries out one Next command, spinning the wheel one stop to the right. (The first command on pressing the button takes place immediately. The delays only apply to the auto-repeated copies of the command from holding the button down.) The system then waits for the first delay time in the list, 500ms. If you're still holding the button down at that point, the first auto-repeat command occurs, so the wheel spins one more stop to the right. The system then waits for the next interval in the list, 400ms, and spins one more stop. Then on to the next interval, 300ms, and one more spin, and so on. Upon reaching the last entry in the list, 100ms, the system just keeps repeating at that final rate for as long as you hold down the button.
You can indicate that one of the time intervals should be used more than once by adding an asterisk (*) and the number of repeats, as in 500ms*3. That means that three repeats occur at 500ms intervals, before moving on to the next item in the list.
As mentioned earlier, if you leave this setting empty, the normal Windows keyboard repeat times are used. You can also incorporate the Windows repeat times explicitly, by using the symbols KbDelay and KbRate in lieu of numeric time intervals. KbDelay is the initial delay that Windows uses when you first press a key, before auto-repeat starts, and KbRate is the repeat interval after that. The default setting is equivalent to writing this: