Overview

Why, What, How

Why

I got tired of spending countless hours maintaining the assorted Visual Pinball file collections (front end media, tables, backglasses, etc) every other week. What I really wanted was a ClrMamePro equivalent for Visual Pinball where these tasks can be automated.

Which gave rise to this project.. ClrVpin.

What

• A fast lightweight desktop application using WPF, written in c# targetting the latest .net framework (v5).
• Designed (and tested) for
  • .net5 on Win10, but in theory it will work against other flavours of Windows and even Linux if that's your thing.
  • PinballY using the PinballX database file(s), but in theory will work against PinballY's native database file(s) too.

How

Mapping out the manual workflows involved in maintaining the VP collectiona and then automating them.

ClrMamePro

Simlarities

• Workflow
  1. Run Scannner - confirm your collection is 'clean' (based on user preferences)
  2. Run Rebuilder - import new files.
  3. Re-run Scanner - remove any potential duplicate files from previous rebuilder stage (based on user preferences).
• Windows
  1. Statistics
  2. Results (scanner only) - with right click context menus
  3. Logging

Differences

• The 'source of truth' is YOUR OWN front end database(s) (e.g. from PinballX). This is primarily because unlike Mame (and the various media frontend collections), there are no agreed '.dat' files that can be used.

  --> That said, it's worth noting this may be enhanced to (somehow) include the google sheets file in the near future (refer Roadmap)

• Windows

  1. Material UI and dark theme
  2. Explorer - to explorer your collection
  3. Settings - additional Virtual Pinball specific settings