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Best way to learn how to program P-ROC?

Carl Spiby

Carl Spiby

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I understand from talking to @myPinballs at the NLP that P-ROC uses a mixture of C and Python for the scripts, is there any way to have a go at creating something without having a physical P-ROC board available and plugged in to a machine? Can it be emulated on Visual Pinball?

Thanks
 
Best way to learn like most things is to dive in at the deep end. Most P-ROC projects are using the framework with the catchy name of "pyprocgame". It's python based and a number of people (Jim and I included) publish their code for others to see/steal/whatever. P-ROC has it's own forum and we're a friendly bunch.

http://pinballcontrollers.com/forum

As for development without actually having a P-ROC, yes! There is a "bridge" between pyprocgame and Visual Pinball which a few people have started using. My project is a rewrite for F14 Tomcat (with DMD) and for months this year my actual machine was in pieces waiting for a new playfield. In my pinside thread starting here :

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/t...-and-on-going-development/page/2#post-1682997

You can see I got my code up and running with the VP table.

One or two people have skipped Python and used C (or maybe VB, I forget) but there isn't much demo code out there compared to Python. There is also a second Python based framework called MPF which is still under development, their website is here :

https://missionpinball.com/framework/

That's still work in progress although it's coming along quite nicely. It aims to make a number of things in pinball programming really simple compared to pyprocgame, the jury is out on how successful that will be although the guys working on it have a lot of energy at the moment. The downside of their project is that they plan no Visual Pinball link at the moment. An upside is that their framework will work (when it's ready) on more than one hardware platform. They're setting it up for the P-ROC and also the new FAST hardware from fastpinball (which is what the WPC 2.0 stuff will in theory use one day).

Hope that helps a bit. If you're planning on dabbling and have at least some programming background, I'd suggest joining the pinballcontrollers forum, downloading the Judge Dredd table and new code that was done a couple of years back and playing it on Visual Pinball. It'll cost you nowt and you can tinker around with the code to see how it hangs together.

Mark
 
Carl Spiby said:
I understand from talking to @myPinballs at the NLP that P-ROC uses a mixture of C and Python for the scripts, is there any way to have a go at creating something without having a physical P-ROC board available and plugged in to a machine? Can it be emulated on Visual Pinball?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Great to see your interest in what i was showing back at the nlp 2014. Mark (as usual) is pretty much spot on with the advice. There are quite a few example projects to view (http://pinballcontrollers.com/wiki/List_of_P-ROC_Open_Source_projects) and you can connect up to visual pinball to try things out without the need for real hardware. Obviously you can't beat a real table, but vp does save on the fuses, when you first start out!!

Let us know how you get on and what project you are thinking about undertaking :)

One other thing about p-roc is that you can still run original code via pinmame to, when you do install the real hardware. Mark has done massive amounts of work in this area. So you won't ever 'lose' the williams implementation of the game if you do 'update/upgrade' it
 
I have made Visual pinball table templates ready to just be scripted with pyprocgame python if you want them. Also have written help how to set it all up. I had to write the help so others could run my tables on their virtual cabs as alot of the setup you will find elsewhere is outdated.

You could more or less just concentrate on learning how to script the game with these templates and help, otherwise its a LONG winded process trying to find out how!

 
I'd be really interested in the template and 'how to' that you've written Dave if you could provide a link to them?

I spoke to Mark about this stuff a while back and it's piqued my interest as an ex-developer. Certainly something i'd be interested at looking into.
 
No probs Pete. If you are not in any big rush, there is a newer VP coming very soon and I'll more than likely update the templates to use that. Currently the table is using the beta Physmod.
 
No worries, I added the base code anyway with that post.

I think I meant to say you could need an updated VGAdmd because had to make a few changes there for VP. Mostly for removing the frame from the dmd window (pygame) and was problems saving game data and the settings menu.
 
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