# Editing a Game's Details

PinballY keeps track of some extra information for each game in your collection. This includes descriptive information about the game (title, manufacturer, year of release), plus internal information that PinballY uses to customize how the game is displayed and launched.

You can edit most of these details directly through the main PinballY wheel user interface:

- Bring up the Operator Menu
- Select Game Setup
- Select Edit Game Details

That will display the Game Details dialog:

## Setting up a new game

If a game hasn't been configured yet, the main menu will include the Game Setup command when the game is selected in the wheel. You can use this command to reach the Game Setup menu, where you can select Edit Game Details to bring up the Game Details dialog.

When you first open this dialog for a game that hasn't been configured yet, most of the fields will be blank. The only ones that are normally pre-filled are the Title, which will contain the file name of the table file, and possibly the System, which PinballY can usually guess from the folder path where the game file was found. In cases where you've set up two or more systems that share the same table folder, though, the system will be ambiguous, so PinballY won't be able to guess and will leave the System field blank.

Filling in the form from IPDB data: Take a close look at the Title field, and you'll notice that there's a little drop-list arrow next to it. Click the arrow to bring up a list of possible matches from IPDB. PinballY has a built-in list of titles from IPDB that it tries to match to the filename.

Matching the filename to a real machine's title requires a bit of guesswork on PinballY's part, since table file names tend to be a bit cryptic. They often use initials or abbreviations, and usually have a bunch of other information apart from the title packed into them, such as the author's nickname, table version numbers, system version numbers, etc. The list that pops up usually has five or ten possible matches, and of course only one of these can be right (if the right match is there at all). That's why PinballY doesn't just pick one on its own: it needs your human intervention to make the final decision.

If the drop list contains the correct match for the game you're setting up, simply choose that title from the list, and the program will automatically use it to fill in not just the title but also the other information available from IPDB: the IPPD game number, manufacturer, year, and table type.

Filling in the details manually: If you can't find the right match for the game in the title drop list, or if there's anything you disagree with in the pre-populated data, you can simply type values into any of the fields manually.

Choosing the system: If the System box isn't already filled in, you'll have to specify the system manually. The program figures out which system or systems are associated with the table folder where the file is located; if there's only one system using that table folder, the program automatically selects that system, since that's the only one it could be. But if you've set things up so that there are two or more systems sharing the same table folder, PinballY can't guess at the system based on the file path alone. In that case, you'll have to specify the system manually. Simply use the drop list to select the system that you want to be used when the game is launched.

## Editing an existing game

After a game has been set up the first time, PinballY removes the Game Setup command from the main menu. Most people don't want to see a bunch of administrative options on the main menu during normal play; once a game has been set up, it's considered to be ready for normal play. But Game Setup is always available through the Operator Menu:

- Navigate to the game in the wheel
- Bring up the Operator Menu
- Select Game Setup
- Select Edit Game Details

## Details on the fields

Title: The title of the game. PinballY uses this to display the game's name in the wheel UI. This also serves as part of the "key" that identifies the game in the XML database (the title is combined with the manufacturer name and year to form the full ID).

IPDB ID: If the game is a re-creation of a real table that has an entry on IPDB, you can fill this in with the game's ID on IPDB. The ID is a number that IPDB uses as its database key to identify the game. PinballY doesn't currently do much with this information, but I think it's a good piece of information to store for future reference.

If you look up the game on IPDB through a search, you'll find the ID number listed right at the top of the listing:

Manufacturer: The name of the manufacturer that marketed the game, such as Williams or Gottlieb. For purely virtual tables (that never existed as real games), you might use the software publisher or author here.

Release year: The year of release of the original real pinball machine, or the year the software was published for a purely virtual table. Use a full four-digit year number here (e.g., 1995, not 95).

System: The game player system that PinballY should use to launch the game. The drop list will only allow you to choose systems that are associated with the table folder where the file is located.

Table type: The IPDB table type classification:

- ME (pure mechanical), for very old games without any electronic scoring system
- EM (electromechanical), for games from about the 1950s through 1970s that worked like old mechanical adding machines, with score reels or individual scoring lights
- SS (solid state), for games from the late 1970s onwards that use microprocessors to control the game and display scores with digital displays (segmented or dot matrix)

High score display: The style to use for the synthesized high score displays that PinballY shows in the DMD window.

- Auto: PinballY chooses the appropriate style based on the machine's release year and table type
- DMD: Dot-matrix style, like machines in the 1990s and later
- Alpha: 16-segment alphanumeric style, like machines in the 1980s
- TT: Typewriter style, meant to resemble the sort of hand-made sticky notes that you might have used to record high scores on old EM games that didn't keep track of high scores themselves
- None: Suppress the automatic DMD window high score display for this game entirely. (This doesn't prevent you from viewing the high scores with the High Score command in the main menu; it just prevents PinballY from showing its synthesized high score display in the DMD window.)

ROM name: The name of the ROM for this game. This is only applicable to games that use VPinMAME, and Visual Pinball is currently the only system that uses VPinMAME, so you can leave this blank for games based on other systems. PinballY uses this information when fetching high scores from ROM-based games, and to inform DOF which game is loaded on the wheel (to select game-dependent DOF effects, such as flipper button colors and undercab lighting colors). "Default" lets PinballY pick the ROM automatically based on the list of tables in the DOF configuration. You can select a specific ROM if the automatic selection is wrong.

Date added: The date that you added the game to your system, in MM/DD/YYYY format (month/day/year). This is automatically populated with today's date the first time you set up a game, but you can set a different date if you actually installed the game earlier and are just now setting it up in PinballY. This is used primarily for the sake of the "Date Added" filters, to let you select games that were added within or outside of a certain time horizon.

Grid Row x Col: The coordinates of the game in the "grid" for the game system's game selection UI. Enter this as row x col, as in 3x4 for row 3, column 4.

This is only displayed if the selected system uses the grid position somewhere in its startup keys script (see Startup Keys in System Options).

The grid position is an idiosyncratic feature designed mostly for Farsight's The Pinball Arcade, which doesn't provide a way to launch a game directly from an outside program, but always requires you to go through its own internal game selection menu every time it starts. PinballY lets you define a series of keystrokes (the Startup Keys setting mentioned above) to send to the game system just after launching to try to navigate to the right game. Since Farsight arranges their game selection UI as a rectangular grid, the key script had to know how many "down" and "right" arrow keys to send to get to any given game; that's what the grid position entry is for.

Show when running: This lets you tell PinballY to continue showing the background image or video in any of the secondary windows while the playing this game. Normally, PinballY blanks all of its windows while a game is running, since the assumption is that the game will take over the entire display while it's running. You don't want PinballY wasting CPU time and video memory by continuing to play back videos in windows that are covered up by the running game. However, some game systems and some individual games only use a portion of the display; for example, most systems don't display anything at all in the "Topper" monitor, if you have one, and some games don't include any backglass or DMD graphics. In these cases, you might prefer to let PinballY keep showing its graphics in the display areas that the game system doesn't use, so that there's something more interesting in those areas than blank black backgrounds. Simply check the box for each window that you want PinballY to keep open while the game is running. PinballY will continue showing its image or video in that window during play.

PinballY also forces each selected window into the "topmost" window layer during game execution, in an attempt to keep the PinballY window in front of any window the game displays in the same area. This lets you not just use the PinballY windows to fill in for missing graphics, but also to replace any graphics the game would normally display that you don't like. For example, some systems do display backglass graphics, but only display boring still images there; you might prefer to show the PinballY backglass video throughout play instead for a more realistic appearance. The automatic "topmost" layering helps ensure that the PinballY window will appear in front of the game system's window, effectively replacing it on the screen.

## Where are the details stored on my disk?

The details for a game are split between two files:

- The basic descriptive items (title, manufacturer, release year) are stored in the XML database file where the game's entry is stored. The exact file name and location of a particular game's XML entry depends upon which system the game is associated with. See Table Database for details on how these files are arranged.
- Other items are stored in PinballY's "game statistics" database file, GameStats.csv, which you can find in the main PinballY install folder. See Table Statistics for details.