PinballY is a "front end" menu system/game selector for virtual pinball cabinets. A front end is a program that displays an arcade-style interface for scrolling through your virtual tables and selecting the one you'd like to play next. It makes your cab friendlier and gives it more of an arcade feel by hiding the Windows desktop, allowing you to access all functions through the basic set of pin cab buttons.
The program is designed to be easy to set up and use. It can automatically find your installed games for pinball player systems like Visual Pinball and Future Pinball, and it's equipped with automatic screen image and video capture functions so that you can easily set up video preview of each game while you're browing.
Please visit http://www.mjrnet.org/pinscape/PinballY.php for more information.
The release builds at the PinballY site include a Windows Setup (MSI) installer as well as a plain ZIP file distribution. Installing from the ZIP file is simply a matter of unpacking the archive into a folder on your hard disk. The program is self-contained and doesn't require any registry settings or other external system changes. The main reason to use the Setup version is that it avoids the annoying "blocked file" security issue that you get on some systems when unpacking Internet ZIP downloads.
Don't install in Program Files:
You can install the program in almost any folder, except that you
shouldn't put it within the Program Files folder. The program
writes to its own install folder to store some settings and database
files, in an effort to be self-contained and avoid scattering files
and registry settings across your system. But the Program Files
folder tree is protected, which makes this kind of self-contained
configuration impossible if you install the program there.
Please choose a location outside of Program Files, such as C:\PinballY.
The default settings are designed to work on most systems "out of the box", with little or no settings adjustments. In particular, the system will try to find installed pinball player programs like Visual Pinball and Future Pinball based on their file associations in the registry, so in most cases it should be able to find and launch your games with no additional setup. So you should be able to try out the program without a lot of initial setup work.
You can customize the screen layout by moving and resizing the windows in the normal fashion. Some windows (such as the instruction card and DMD window) are "borderless", meaning they lack the normal caption bar and sizing borders. You can move one of these windows by clicking the mouse anywhere within the window and dragging it. These windows also all have an invisible sizing border around the edges, so you can resize them by clicking and dragging near any edge.
All windows can be made full-screen on any monitor. Just position the window within the monitor that you want it to take over, right-click on the window, and select Full Screen from the menu. You can go back to regular windowed mode with the same menu command.
The program has many other settings that you can customize as well. Right-click in any window and select Options from the menu.
The program comes with fairly extensive help files. In the settings dialog, click the "?" icon at the top of the dialog to bring up help for the current settings page. You can also view the table of contents for the whole help system by right-clicking in any window and selecting Help from the menu.
If you want to build the system from source, it's fairly simple to do. The only build tool required is Visual Studio; I currently use the free Community Edition of Visual Studio 2017. You'll also need to set up a few other Microsoft SDKs, also freely available. Follow the instructions in "Build Environment Setup.txt", which you'll find in the Notes folder after cloning the git. You might also want to look through the other files in the Notes folder for more about the program's internals; some of these are just notes I made for my own future reference, but some have information on the program's design that might be helpful if you're planning to do any original work on the project.