Instruction Card Options

Instruction card popup location: Selects the window where the instruction card popup will appear when you use the "Instructions" command in the main menu. If the window you select is closed when you try to bring up an instruction card, the popup will appear in the main playfield window instead.

Note that this doesn't affect the separate Instruction Card window, which is designed to be positioned on a dedicated instruction card monitor on your pin cab apron. If you don't have a dedicated monitor for that, you can just close the Instruction Card window so that it doesn't take up any display space. (To close it, right-click in the window and select Close from its menu.)

Include .swf (Shockwave Flash) files when searching for instruction card images: If this box is checked, PinballY will include Shockwave Flash (.swf) files when searching for instruction card images, along with the normal set of image file types (.png, .jpg, .jpeg). If this box isn't checked, .swf files will be ignored.

This option is essentially obsolete, because it was primarily for the benefit of people who didn't want to install Adobe Flash Player on their systems. Adobe Flash Player itself is now completely obsolete (as of the start of 2021), so this is no longer a factor - no one should have Flash Player installed any more. As of PinballY version 1.1 Beta 5, PinballY displays SWF files with its own built-in mini-renderer, so there's no need for Flash Player any more. If you disable SWF display in the past because you didn't want to install Flash Player, you can now re-enable SWF if you like, since doing so will no longer trigger any errors about a missing plug-in.

(In case you're worried that the built-in SWF renderer might bring the security risks that made many people wary of installing Flash Player, I don't think it will: the problems with Flash Player mostly arose from its scripting capability, which is deliberately not implemented in the PinballY mini-renderer. The PinballY SWF renderer is completely original, open-source code that you can inspect for yourself, and it's very stripped down to support only the minimal subset of SWF static graphics capabilities that the extant HyperPin Media Pack instruction cards rely on. There should be little to no security risk in this small subset of features.)