Ok, so you know that Timeshock Ultra and Pinball FX2 have outstanding multiple display support and work perfectly with 3 displays:
- Playfield (large portrait 16:9)
- Backglass (midsize landscape 4:3 if you can still find or salvage one)
- DMD (small specialized ultrawide)
Well, The Pinball Arcade, despite being otherwise awesome, has zero multiple monitor support. Zero! Sad, really. But there is hope! This excellent mod:
Allows you to at minimum get dynamic backglasses working, that is, as you select a table the appropriate backglass automatically loads on a second monitor. In theory you can also move the DMD to a third monitor as well, but I found this ultra hacky and hard to get working reliably.
I also have something of a heretical opinion here, after messing around with the freecam mod a lot (which does get the DMD on another monitor, but is very very tweaky), I decided that I wanted the DMD to remain on the playfield monitor for a variety of reasons:
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Not having to hackily shift the playfield up to “hide” or “shift” the DMD to another monitor because TPA offers no proper way to select a DMD monitor, makes life a whooole lot easier. That is why the camera hack requires oddball resolutions, to hack around the DMD issues.
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I kinda like the DMD on the playfield itself, ala Cirqus Voltaire. I do think this is ultimately easier to read and a better experience for the pinball player than having the DMD on the backglass where you have to constantly look “up” a fair bit to read it while playing.
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In 16:9 portrait mode you have so much room at the top of the playfield that overlaying a DMD up there really does not obstruct any playfield table items you’re actively looking at.
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The mild movement of the table camera in default TPA portrait is kinda useful in that you no longer need to compromise the view to make sure the plunger is visible, etcetera. The view can stay mostly static / locked and only switch over to close in on the plunger when you are shooting the ball. Because otherwise why would you look at that bottom right part of the table in normal gameplay at all?
Here is how to enable auto backglass support using the TPA freecam mod – in settings.ini tweak the following settings
FreeCameraMode=0
AutoLoadCamFile=0
CabinetMode=1
BGMonitor=X
WindowStretch=0
DMDMonitor=1
(Where X is your backglass monitor number of course!!)
This essentially disables all camera controls, so what you end up with is a nice dynamic backglass changer, and the default built in TPA portrait camera, which IMO is quite good just press the view shift button to shift it to locked and you are gold.
Don’t forget to populate the cam mod /backglass folder with backglass images at the desired monitor resolution, per-table. Also, remember that both TPA and freecam mod executables must start with Admin access!
