vpxtool

Cross-platform console based utility for the vpinball ecosystem

Join #vpxtool on "Virtual Pinball Chat" discord for support and questions.

Install

Download the latest release for your operating system at https://github.com/francisdb/vpxtool/releases, extract it and if wanted copy or symlink the binary to $HOME/bin to put in on your path

macOS

After extracting the archive you will have to remove the quarantine flag through System Settings / Privacy & Security / Allow Anyway button or on the command line as shown below.

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine vpxtool

Usage

Show help

> vpxtool --help
Extracts and assembles vpx files

Usage: vpxtool [COMMAND]

Commands:
  info        Show information about a vpx file
  diff        Prints out a diff between the vbs in the vpx and the sidecar vbs
  frontend    Acts as a frontend for launching vpx files
  index       Indexes a directory of vpx files
  script      Cat the vpx script
  ls          List directory contents without extracting the vpx file
  extract     Extracts a vpx file
  extractvbs  Extracts the vbs from a vpx file next to it
  importvbs   Imports the vbs next to it into a vpx file
  verify      Verify the structure of a vpx file
  assemble    Assembles a vpx file
  new         Creates a minimal empty new vpx file
  help        Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -h, --help     Print help
  -V, --version  Print version

Show help for a specific command

> vpxtool frontend --help`
Acts as a frontend for launching vpx files

Usage: vpxtool frontend [OPTIONS] [VPXROOTPATH]

Arguments:
  [VPXROOTPATH]  The path to the root directory of vpx files [default: /Users/francisdb/vpinball/tables]

Options:
  -r, --recursive  Recursively index subdirectories
  -h, --help       Print help

Frontend

Vpxtool can act as a frontend for launching vpx files. It will index a directory of vpx files and then present a menu to launch them.

Configuration

A configuration file will be written to store the Visual Pinball executable location.

To show the current config location use the following command

vpxtool config show

Configuring a custom editor

When actions are invoked that open an editor the default editor configured for your system will be used. In case you want to override this with a specific editor you can add the following line to the config file:

# use Visual Studio Code as default editor
editor = "code"

Projects using vpxtool

• https://github.com/syd711/vpin-studio
• https://github.com/mpcarr/aztec-quest
• https://github.com/francisdb/vpinball-example-table-extracted

References / Research

Other related projects that read assemble vpx files:

• https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball
• https://github.com/vpdb/vpx-js
• https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine
• https://github.com/stojy/ClrVpin
• https://github.com/vbousquet/vpx_lightmapper

An example vpx managed in github with some imagemagick scripts to compose textures

https://github.com/vbousquet/flexdmd/tree/master/FlexDemo

Building

The project uses the default rust build tool cargo. To get going read the docs on installation and first steps at https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/

cargo build --release