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What is Virtual Pinball Backup ManagerVirtual Pinball Backup Manager (VPBM) is designed to manage backups of individual Virtual Pinball games within a Pinup System/Baller Installer installation.
VPBM currently supports Visual Pinball (VPX) and Future Pinball emulators.
VPBM supports backup and restore of a wide range of game related content, including:
- Pinup System specific
- Pinup database settings
- Pinup media files
- Pup Packs
- VPX specific
- B2S (backglass) files
- B2S settings
- POV (point-of-view) files
- Flex DMD/Ultra DMD files and folders
- VPReg.stg entries
- Custom user text files
- VPinMAME ROMs
- VpinMAME VPMAlias.txt entries
- VPinMAME altcolor and altsound
- VPinMAME NVRAM (including offset handling)
- All stored game specific registry settings found in 'Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Freeware\Visual PinMame'
- Future Pinball specific
- Game libraries - (via custom filters)
NOTE: Additional filter rules can be setup by users to include additional content not met by the default rules
The contents of a games backup can easily be viewed within the application using the tree view, while an integrated Quick View bar provides users a quick visual indication of the presence of critical files.
Pinup database game details are displayed, as is Pinup media, in a manner consistent with how media is displayed within Pinup Menu Setup.
VPBM is not designed to replace Pinup System, in fact it depends on it to function - rather it tries to add features that make managing game files and settings easier by providing an individual game backup and support for comparing this backup to the installed game.
VPBM has been designed to quickly highlight to users when a games backup has fallen out of synch with the currently installed version of the game, allowing users to use the functions provides to address the inconsistencies.
VPBM backup files are encrypted and locked to the machine that they were created on, however a mechanism is provided to share game backups with up to two known alternate hosts. For information on this feature, refer to the Alternate Host Identifier 1 and Alternate Host Identifier 2 settings described in Application Settings. This process does not allow games to be exported and shared universally.
Integrated help is provided, with the various menus and application panels making up the application each having their own help buttons. Quick links to this help is provided below.
- Application Settings
- Emulator and Filter Settings
- Backup File Management
- File Menu
- Utilities Menu
- Help Menu
- Installed Games Panel
- Selected Game Display Control Panel
- Selected Game Content Panel
- Selected Game Pinup Details Panel
- Selected Game Pinup Media Panel
- Selected Game Filter Variables Panel
- Seelcted Game Custom Filters Panel
VPBM provides built in command line support of all major functions. This allows VPBM to be used by tools such as VPin Studio.
Integrated command line help is available and can be viewed by opening a Command Prompt, navigating to the VPBM folder and running the command: "vPinBackupManager --help".
Download the latest stable release of VPBM from the releases section of the VPBM Github repo. The self installing MSI is used for a clean installation.
Once installed a self updater will check for available updates upon startup and allow the user to trigger an update (see Updates section below).
VPBM contains built in update functionality. At startup, if connected to the internet, VPBM searches for any available updates. If an update is found, VPBM displays an indication of the update in the status bar.
Clicking on the red text in the status bar will trigger a dialog confirming you wish to proceed with the update and provide two methods of performing the update - automatic and manual.
- An automatic update requires a single button click, but could present issues if Antivirus or Windows Defender block the update zip being downloaded from https://github.com/mmattner/vPinBackupManagerApp/releases/latest.
- A manual update provides the user a set of steps to manually download the update pack and manually check it before performing the update with a supplied install script. To assist with this process the above link is copied into the clipboard for the user to paste into their browser of choice.
Clicking Yes launches the auto updater. As per the description the updater will take several minutes to complete (depending on internet speed). During this time VPBM will download the appropriate update zip (as found here) before shutting down, unzipping the update and restarting.
If the user clicks No, they are prevented a dialog containing the steps to perform a manual download (shown below). At this point they can either click OK and ignore the steps, or they can work through the steps to update the application version.
Users can report bugs or make feature requests on Github using the following link.
VPBM is being used by VPin Studio to provide backup and restore functionality.
VPin Studio documentation can be found here.
VPin Studio can be downloaded here.
Virtual Pinball Backup Manager WIKI