# Launch Backgrounds

When you launch a game, PinballY normally displays a series of status messages ("Loading game", "Running", etc) in the main playfield window, drawn with a plain gray background. If you prefer, you can replace the gray background with a custom image or video, simply by dropping an image or video file into one of the Media subfolders, as outlined below.

## Using transparent images

If you use a PNG image that's completely transparent as the custom background image, it'll have the effect of making PinballY continue to show the current table's background video or image while the game loads. The gray background that PinballY shows by default is actually superimposed in front of the table background, so substituting a transparent image will allow the table background to remain visible through the loading process. For your convenience, the PinballY distribution includes a simple transparent PNG file, called Transparent.png, located in the main Media folder. To use it as a transparent background for the launch screen, you can simply copy this file into the Media > Images folder and rename it as shown below.

PNG images can also be partially transparent or translucent, so you can use this feature to superimpose images on top of the table background.

Double wheel image: If you use a transparent launch background image, you'll probably notice that two copies of the wheel image are displayed during the launch, one on top of the other. One of these wheel images comes from the normal game wheel, and the other one comes from the "launch overlay" that PinballY displays in front of everything else. The overlay includes the wheel image for the game being launched along with a message giving the launch status ("Loading", etc). Normally, when you're using the default opaque launch background, the regular game wheel gets covered up entirely by the opaque background, so you don't see the double image - you just see the one that's part of the overlay. But when you replace the default opaque background with complete transparency, the original wheel image shows through, so you see what appears to be a doubled-up wheel image. The double image looks kind of ugly, so you'll almost certainly want to get rid of it. To do so, you just need a little Javascript - you can find more details on this in the worked example "Seamless" Game Launch, but here's the Javascript you need - just copy this into a file called Main.js in your PinballY Scripts folder:

mainWindow.on("launchoverlayshow", ev => { mainWindow.showWheel(false); mainWindow.setUnderlay(""); ev.preventDefault(); }); mainWindow.on("launchoverlayhide", ev => { mainWindow.showWheel(true); });

## More than just background images

Using a custom background image or video is an easy way to achieve some simple effects, but you can do much more extensive customizations to the launch screens using Javascript. For example, instead of hiding the game wheel as suggested above, you could get rid of the launch overlay screen entirely, or you could change the way it looks by displaying your own custom text and/or graphics. See Seamless Game Launch in the Worked Examples section for some examples.

## Folder location

Custom background images go in the Images folder within your main Media folder.

Custom background videos go in the Videos folder within your main Media folder.

See Media folder location for more on where that folder is located.

A video file takes precedence. If you supply both a custom video file and a custom image, the video will be displayed and the image will be ignored.

## File names

The filename for a custom launch video or image is always Game Launch Background.ext, where .ext is one of the standard image file or video file extensions.

## File types

For image files, the extension can be any of the standard image file suffixes: .png, .apng, .jpg, .jpeg, or .gif.

For video files, the extension .ext can be any of the supported video file suffixes: .mpg, .f4v, .mkv, .wmv, .m4v, or .avi.