Troubleshooting Tips

This section is a collection of tips for troubleshooting any problems you run into with PinballY.

General troubleshooting advice

In case your specific issue isn't listed elsewhere in this section, here are a few general tips you should be able to apply to just about any problem with the program.

Declaring settings bankruptcy (resetting all options)

If you feel like you've screwed up your settings beyond repair and you just want to reset everything, it's usually not necessary to go to the trouble of reinstalling the whole program.

In most cases, all you have to do is delete the file Settings.txt, found in your main PinballY install folder.

That file contains all of your option settings. I've been careful to avoid the unfortunately common practice in other Windows software of scattering settings all over the registry and hidden files and so on. PinballY keeps all user settings in that file. Deleting it is usually enough to restore factory settings. By the way, that file is a simple text file in human-readable format - it even has lots of comments explaining what's going on. Don't be afraid of opening it in Notepad if you want to see what's there.

Check the log file

Many problems can be solved by checking PinballY's log file. Every time you run PinballY, it creates a log file called PinballY.log in its main program folder. As the program runs, it writes a bunch of miscellaneous status reports to the log file about what it's trying to do. It also record technical details about many sorts of system errors here. The point is to save extra details that might be important in case of problems, without barraging you with technical status messages in the graphical UI.

You've probably experienced situations where too much information is as bad as no information at all. Too much can create a haystack that makes it hard to find the needle. PinballY therefore lets you control the amount of information reported in the log file, via the Log File page in the settings. That page lets you filter the type of actions that PinballY reports in the log. So before you consult the log file, you should go to the Log File options page and make sure that reporting is enabled for the subsystem that you're trying to troubleshoot. You might also want to turn off logging for unrelated areas, to minimize the amount of other reports that you have to sift through.

Asking for help/reporting bugs

If you can't find what you're looking for in this Troubleshooting section or elsewhere in the help files, try asking on the vpforums pin cab forum. I regularly monitor that group, so I should be able to help if someone else doesn't get to your question first.

For any problem that's pretty clearly a program bug, you can raise it on the forum, or you can file a bug report using the PinballY issue tracker on GitHub. Before filing a report, please read How to write a good bug report. Following that advice will improve the chances that I can find and fix the problem.

Some common problems (and suggested solutions)

The topics below list some of the more common problems that I've heard about, with suggestions for fixes or ways to gather more information. Scan through the list to see if you can find anything that sounds similar to any problems you're having.

I'm running PinballY in Admin mode, and...

...something's going wrong.

Simple answer: Don't run PinballY in Admin mode. If you're running PinballY by right-clicking the program file and selecting "Run as Administrator", please see the help section on Administrator Mode for instructions on what you should be doing instead.

But more importantly, you ideally shouldn't need to use Admin Mode at all with PinballY. There are two main reasons that most people think they need to use Admin Mode:

PinballY isn't finding my tables

The easiest way to figure out what's wrong when PinballY can't find some or all of your tables is to look at the log file. PinballY creates this file each time it runs, writing lots of extra technical details on what it's doing during the session. This can usually pinpoint what's going wrong during table searches.

To get detailed information on table searches:

Now read through the file for an account of where the program is looking for table files and what it's finding.

For a detailed explanation of exactly where PinballY looks for tables, see Files & Folders.

PinballY isn't showing media for my tables

As with table search problems, the log file is the first place to look when PinballY isn't finding your media files. If you're having trouble getting most or all of your media files displayed, try this:

Now read through the file for an account of where the program is looking for media files and what it's finding.

If you're having trouble with media for just a few specific games, try the built-in media list viewer:

That will display details on where the system is looking for the game's media, the filename(s) it's looking for, and the full names and locations for all of the matching files. You can check the file names that PinballY expects to find against the actual files on your disk, and likewise check the directory paths to make sure that you're placing the files where the program is looking for them.

For a detailed explanation of exactly where PinballY looks for media, see Files & Folders.

I have a VP X game, but I can only select VP 9 in the Edit Game Details box (not VP X!)

Here's the situation:

The most likely problem (and solution) is described in the topic PinballY thinks my Visual Pinball X tables are Visual Pinball 9 tables below.

PinballY thinks my Visual Pinball X tables are Visual Pinball 9 tables

Did you just migrate to PinballY from PinballX? And did you tell PinballY to use the table databases and media files you already had set up for PinballX? If so, here's what's probably wrong:

Your PinballX table database folder for Visual PinballX was probably called Visual Pinball

That might seem perfectly natural, especially if you only started playing around with VP games recently and mostly use VP X rather than the older VP 9 games. But PinballY doesn't know that! PinballY is set up by default to work with both VP 9 and VP X. In fact, it's set up to work with multiple versions of VP 9, since there are several sub-versions of VP 9 whose games require those specific versions (like VP 9.2 and "PhysMod 5"). To deal with this, the default settings in PinballY (the ones you get when you first install the program) use the following database folder names:

See the problem? When PinballY loads the system databases, it looks at the settings, and it sees that the database folder for Visual Pinball 9 is called Visual Pinball, so it looks at the tables listed there. But you put all of your VP X games there when you were using PinballX. So PinballY thinks that your VP X games are actually VP 9 games.

Here's the solution:

PinballY should now be in sync with your old PinballX settings. There's no need to move or rename any of the PinballX files. It's just a matter of changing the PinballY settings to match the folder names you're using.

PinballY doesn't have keyboard focus at system startup

Symptom: You've set up PinballY to start up automatically with Windows, but each time you start up the system, PinballY ignores key presses. You have to click on the PinballY window to give it keyboard focus.

Causes: If you're using Windows 10, this is probably due to a change that Microsoft made in Task Scheduler (which PinballY uses for startup launching). Microsoft changed Task Scheduler in Win 10 so that it doesn't give keyboard focus to the programs it launches. This might sound like a bug, and it kind of is for our purposes, but they did this intentionally because they consider auto-launch programs to be "background" tasks that shouldn't interrupt the user. It would have been nice if they'd provided an option setting one way or the other on that, but they didn't.

The only solution I've found to this issue is to make PinballY force keyboard focus into its own window at some time after it starts up. In the Startup options dialog, try checking the box for "Force keyboard focus to PinballY at startup". If that doesn't help, try increasing the delay time on the focus change.

If you're using a pre-Windows 10 system, Task Scheduler normally does give focus to newly launched tasks. The most common thing that can prevent PinballY from having keyboard is another program "stealing" focus by starting up shortly after PinballY does. In most cases, the most recently launched program gets focus, so if something launches after PinballY during your system startup process, it usually gets focus by taking it away from PinballY. To deal with this, try increasing the startup delay parameter in the Startup options dialog ("After logon, pause before starting PinballY").

PinballY won't save/restore my backglass window position

Symptom: Each time you start a new PinballY session, the backglass window (or one of the other windows) opens at the wrong position. It won't stay where you left it at the end of the last session.

The usual cause of this problem is that you're running some other program that's changing the screen resolution or monitor layout between sessions. For example, you might be using a program that rotates your monitors or changes the desktop resolution each time you run certain programs, or you might be using a remote access program that changes the screen resolution during remote sessions.

The reason PinballY moves the windows around in these situations is that it normally checks all of the restored window positions to make sure they're in the visible desktop area at program startup. If any windows are outside of the visible area, PinballY moves them into the visible area. This is intended to help with rare cases where you permanently change the desktop layout at the hardware level, such as when you add a new monitor or replace an old one with a new one of a different size. But it can be a nuisance if you routinely change your desktop layout at the software level, such as if you need to change the layout every time you run a certain application.

The easy fix that usually works is to tell PinballY to stop forcing windows into the visible desktop area at the start of every session:

If that still doesn't help, and the window that's not "sticking" to its proper position is in full-screen mode, there's a second option setting that might help:

If none of that helps, try turning on logging for Window layout setup (in the Log File section of the settings dialog). The next time you encounter the problem with a saved window position, exit PinballY and check the log file for details about window layout setup. That should explain why PinballY is making the decisions it's making about window placement, which hopefully will suggest an appropriate solution.

The Windows taskbar pops up every time a VP X game finishes

Try this:

What's going on: this checkbox makes VP ask Windows to turn off the feature inside Windows that lets it draw partially transparent transparent window frames and elements. VP lets you disable this because it can slow down your video card slightly; if you have a low-end video card, enabling composition might slow down your video card enough to cause hiccups in VP, so disabling it might make VP run more smoothly. The snag is that Windows automatically turns composition back on when VP exits, which has the annoying side effect of redrawing everything on the screen, which has the even more annoying side effect of bringing the taskbar to the foreground even if it was hidden.

PinballY can't do much about that, since Windows has ultimate control over what's on the screen. This is one of those situations where Windows asserts its authority and overrides whatever the applications would prefer. So the best way to avoid the problem is to tell VP not to make this change in the first place, so that Windows doesn't feel the need to redo the whole screen layout every time VP exits.

If you really need to disable desktop composition, it's better to disable it globally across your whole system, rather than switching it on and off in VP. To do this: In the Windows control panel, select System and Security, then System, then Advanced System Settings. Select the Advanced tab. Click the Settings button. In the Performance section, find "Enable desktop composition", and un-check the box.

Note that if you have Windows 8 or later, you should definitely un-check the option in VP, because it doesn't do anything anyway! Microsoft stopped letting applications control this after Windows 7. Applications can still make the API call (which VP does attempt), but Windows simply ignores it on Win 8 and later.