I love having people over to play pinball, but I always feel like pinball would be more addictive with a way to track one's own personal bests. the games themselves of course have various leaderboards, but unless i reset them all the time, visitors are unlikely to make any of the high scores, and even then, those high score lists aren't particularly visible or persistent.

So, I spent an evening a few weeks back putting together a high score app for my gameroom, so that anyone who visits can record any score they're proud of, and maybe try to beat it next time they come over.

IMG_1112 (resized).JPG

IMG_1113 (resized).JPG

You just tap a game and it prompts you to enter your initials and your score. To update a score, you just tap on that score and enter a new score. It keeps one score per person and automatically sorts them highest to lowest. I admit it doesn't do much that a whiteboard and a dry erase marker couldn't do, but I think it looks cool and I had fun making it.

I really like how the font styling came out on each of them.

Last night I got to try it out on guests for the first time. I didn't know if they'd be interested in using it, but after just a little bit of encouragement, they really took to it and started recording all their scores and checking the app trying to beat each others' personal bests. They stuck around competing to record better and better scores until after 2am! Even my daughter played more pinball than I've ever seen her play before, excited to track and improve her scores.

It also prompted a lot more questions than usual about strategies and rules and so forth.

Overall, I'm pretty psyched about how successful this was at getting people to do more than play a couple balls and then wander away. I think something like this would be a great addition to any game room.

I'm currently running it on a 12" Surface Pro touchscreen on a stand on a table, but I'm considering putting it on a larger touchscreen monitor mounted on a wall.

Hmm, I suppose I could genericize it pretty easily, and make it work for either orientation. Glad to see there's some interest!

Okay, so I am making this generic and a lot more robust and configurable.

You can add your own game image, background image, and arbitrary CSS font styles for each game -- CSS styles is how I added the glow and shadow effects to some of those fonts.

Any arbitrary number of games can be added, and the screen will scroll horizontally if they don't all fit. There's a setting for whether or not to display the horizontal scrollbar, and a setting for how wide you want the columns to be, so it will work equally well in either portrait or landscape depending on how you configure it.

It works on touchscreens such as the iPad, or on a traditional computer with a mouse. In fact it should work on phones too for that matter, but I haven't tested that yet.

Vertically, each column scrolls independently.

I don't think I can include copyrighted graphics, so you'll have to provide your own images, but that's optional anyway -- If nothing is specified, it just displays the game name and default styles:

unstyled (resized).png

scroll (resized).png

Oh, and obviously the name of the arcade is configurable too, and can be either a graphic or text.

Setup and configuration will require no knowledge of coding or software, other than the optional ability to upload a graphic for each game or use snippets of CSS to style the fonts.

sweet! this is exactly what i was picturing when i started designing it!

yeah, it works fine on iPad!

it just runs through the browser in full-screen mode, so any device with a browser and internet can run it, even one of those $100 stick PCs. it's just HTML and CSS (with a database and some code on the back end).

I originally just made it for myself, but now i'm getting it ready for mass consumption. today i'm working on the configuration screen so people don't have to muck around in the code to change stuff. Should be super easy to set up when i'm done.

yep, absolutely. they will have to log in to have the ability to change scores, though.

i should clarify -- the login aspect is just to keep different peoples' game rooms separated. once a screen is logged in, anyone can walk up to that screen and record a score for any game in that game room. it's not like every player needs their own login.

the idea is that it will be used amongst people who are friends, and won't be screwing with other peoples' scores or the app's settings. i mean if you trust someone enough to be in your basement and playing your games, i think it's reasonable to assume they won't be malicious towards your high score board.

Yep, and in fact that was my original idea for implementation. The screenshots in the OP are basically that setup - just hitting tomcat on localhost, with a local backend database. it works perfectly for what it is, but after some consideration, I changed my approach.

For one thing, it would be impossible to make that setup work across a wide variety of platforms and devices. i'd rather not have an inbox full of PMs asking for help setting up Tomcat on Android or MySQL on an iPod Nano.

but more importantly, it would mean the only people who could use it would be serious tinkers whose idea of fun is configuring a Raspberry Pi to be a web and database server.

Instead, I'm gonna host it from a central website. you just log in, and it displays the high scores board for your game room. no worrying about installation or hardware. this way, any device with an internet connection and a web browser can use it, and anyone who can use a web browser can set it up and get it running with ease.

this approach also has a bunch of other advantages as well, such as making your game room high score list available remotely.

PS - here's a teaser screenshot of the banner configuration screen!

banner-screenshot (resized).png

(you type what you want the banner to say, you pick from a dropdown list of preset styles, and then optionally you can modify the CSS of that style, and upload your own background image ... all that stuff is optional, though)

i hear what you are saying, but why require people to have a Raspberry Pi to use it? hosting it myself opens it up to literally anybody.

thanks for asking! yes i've been working pretty hard on this. the version i originally showed was pretty much hard-coded for my gameroom. I've been working on customization options and other features.

Here is a quick preview video showing off a little bit of what it can do:

in the video, i'm using my finger and some popup keyboards i wrote into the app, but it also works fine with a physical keyboard and mouse. you can turn off the popup keyboards in the options. i'm trying to anticipate any setup someone might have.

Unfortunately, the popup keyboards are washed out in the video and you can't see them very well. you'll have to take my word for it that they're clear in person.

it's hard for me to estimate. figuring out the number of hours of development remaining is one thing, but that's only half of the equation. it's also hard to estimate how many hours per week i can spend on it, since it comes third behind family and work on my priority list.

i hope to have it ready for a group of beta testers in about three weeks.

yeah the surface pro is 11 inches i think ... in the video it's running on a pretty large 24-inch touchscreen monitor i bought. it was about $250.

Not sure, I don't have one to test. It works my on my iPad 2 and iPad Mini, though.

Currently, you can adjust the row width through the advanced options. You can also configure the text sizes. So if you have a big screen, you could fit a lot of games across it in Landscape mode by making the text and column width smaller. For larger collections, though, scrolling to see them all is going to have to be a necessity for Version 1.0.

Right now, you can't display two (or more) rows of games. It may seem like a simple thing to implement, but as you begin to consider not just the layout code but the UI for configuring it, database schema updates for saving the settings, and so on, the number of hours of development and testing required goes up and up. Another problem with feature creep is that if features are not handled with a lot of forethought and planning, the usability and overall quality of the product can go downhill quickly.

And as you said, I have to draw the line somewhere on features, or it will literally never get done.

But I can definitely see multiple rows being really really useful for large collections! I'm maintaining a list of enhancements for a future "Version 2.0", if this thing succeeds. A wider variety of display layouts, such as displaying two or more rows of games, is definitely near the top of that list.

I can't wait to get this thing into beta, so I can get perspectives on how it works in game rooms other than mine. Beta testing is generally not a phase where new features are solicited for the current iteration of a product (it's generally for tweaking and fixing existing features), but it can be very useful for helping determine the best paths for future development.

Alright, back to work...

haha well my kids use them FAR more than they do the pins!

quick update ... things are proceeding ... I had to re-write the whole thing in a different language. i stupidly thought servlet containers would be standard issue for web hosts these days. nope. duh. oh well. it's working just fine in PHP now. database is online. features are all there.

it's mostly bug fixes and security issues that are still in progress.

it's coming, i promise!

Oh hi! Had friends over tonight using it!

I'm sorry it's not quiiiite ready for mass consumption yet, but it's getting there very soon!

Thanks man! Working on it right now, actually

It will work on iOS devices. Not through the App Store, though - through the web browser.

iPhone support might not make version 1.0, but it will work fine on iPads. It's really intended as a bulletin board type thing, and the phone just doesn't have the real estate for its standard layout. I will have to come up with another layout. I can do it, but it is time consuming, and I don't want to delay the whole project to support devices it wasn't really designed for anyway.

Ideally, the bigger the better, in my opinion.

While an iPad2 by itself should work, Apple does not allow external touchscreen control of its devices. You can use a dongle to mirror the iPad to a larger display, but the larger display's touchscreen will not be able to control the iPad. Just mirror it.

My setup right now is a 24" touchscreen i bought off Amazon for about $250, and i'm using it in portrait mode. If you have more than 4 games, you might want landscape mode instead. I'm using an old laptop to run it.

It also works flawlessly on my Surface Pro.

Part of the beta process will be figuring out what the cheapest possible configuration is that can run the thing.

yes! You can name a column whatever you want.

Yes! You can add whatever background and header art you want to each column. If you know CSS, you can change the fonts too, or pick from a large set of pre-made "styles" that i'm creating.

Speaking of these style presets i'm making -- many games will automatically apply a style when you type them in -- so if you create a column for "Twilight Zone" or "Medieval Madness" it will automatically be styled for that game (minus the header image -- I don't think I can legally supply copyrighted translite images -- you will simply have to add your own). I can't do an automatic style for EVERY pinball machine, but I'm targeting the most popular and most common titles for these pre-made styles.

Oh and I'm happy to announce I'll be starting the BETA TEST within a week. If anyone would like to volunteer to help test it out, please PM me, and i'll keep you in mind. Thanks!

oh man i am so excited ... the beta test is going to start Saturday ... i can't wait for other people to get to try it out for the first time! i've put a lot of work into this and there are several features and easter eggs that haven't been shown yet.

If you volunteered for the beta test and did not receive an email from me, please check your spam folder and then let me know. thank you!!

Score entry is not password protected. the settings screen (where you can add or delete games or mess with config) is going to be "lockable" by the owner. When setting up the app, you may be switching often between the settings screen and the main page. But once you're done, you can click a lock icon and then it requires your password to get back to settings again.

That's a feature that's already on the list for version 2.0, but it won't make it into this version.

It will be interesting to see if a Raspberry Pi is powerful enough. There's a fair amount of JavaScript behind the scenes of the site. I know web browsing in general is one of the things RPi struggles with.

Alright, the beta test has officially begun! If I PM'd you saying you were in the beta, but you haven't received an email from [email protected] with your credentials, let me know. have fun!

fifty (resized).png

Your account seems to be working okay to me. Maybe it was a temporary network glitch. I've noticed the web host i'm using has had occasional moments of extreme lag unrelated to my code. I have a ticket open.

This is a great suggestion. Lining up the bottom margin of the game titles is something that bothers me too! I will see if i can come up with something.

Yeah, When I put all these customization features in, I didn't know if they'd be worth the programming effort, but it looks like a lot of people are having fun messing around with the styles, so I am going to make that aspect more robust in the future -- coming soon will be a help popup that among other things lists all the valid fonts you can use. As for community-generated styles, hell yeah, great idea. I can't get that into the initial release but it's definitely something I want to develop.

Good question. Either is fine. I'm consolidating things into various lists for myself behind the scenes anyway. If you have a serious concern or security flaw or something like that, email might be more appropriate. Otherwise I'm happy to chat here.

Transparency works (either GIF or PNG).

As for a database of pinball title images, that would be super useful and save everyone a lot of time messing with fonts and CSS, and it looks way better! (and would save people time messing around with image editors)

My gut feeling, though, is that there's a possibility the IP owners of these backglass images and logos might object to me hosting a database of them. The images are only 250px wide, which is pretty tiny resolution, if that makes any difference. Any lawyers or IP experts out there want to weigh in?

Well, I guess I should clarify so that there's no confusion -- I do intend to charge something for it once it's ready for prime time. Don't worry, I don't want to do any kind of subscription-based crap. Just a one-time fee for lifetime access. Not trying to get rich -- I simply hope to at least cover my web hosting costs.

if you're talking about the scoreboxes in different columns being different sizes .. that's more or less by design. they're going to have different fonts and font sizes, and i'd rather have the score boxes grow and shrink to fit those fonts rather than risk the text not fitting in them. you could actually change that by editing the css for the scorebox yourself, and applying max-height and min-height values. something like: max-height: 120px ; min-height: 120px;

i am a nutcase who has spent hundreds of hours designing this, so yes i agree.

I think so. I have testers who have now reported it works on a first-generation iPad and on an Amazon Fire 7 tablet, as well as several other Android devices. It looks like the X96 has Chrome as its default browser. That should work fine.

That's my bad, referencing a Windows-specific font instead of the web fonts installed on the server...

thanks! i appreciate ALL feedback, especially bugs and suggestions!

there actually IS a "none" style that blanks out all the customizations -- it accidentally got disabled right before the beta and i didn't notice. that's another bug on the list, but an easy fix. (as a workaround, you can go to the advanced options and blank out the CSS - that will do that same thing.)

Ah, this is because you were using the "custom game" button in a way i didn't anticipate (but which makes sense -- see, this is why testing with other people is essential!) my *intention* was for people to type in the name of their custom game in the search window at the top, and then hit "create custom game". The app creates the custom game based on what's in that search field. I think I can fix this simply by reworking the visual clues on that screen a little bit and adding a validation check to the search field, and telling the user it can't be blank when hitting "create custom game".

This is what the "advanced options" are for. You can change the color of the text and the backgrounds with very basic CSS. I am hesitant to add too many more fields to that page, I really like the simplicity of it and I don't want it to get too cluttered and overwhelming.

That dropdown is necessary. It loads all the CSS customizations for the game's title, initials, scores, and scorebox (admittedly, you need to toggle the advanced options to see them). It also loads the display name of the game for editing, sets which game the upload background and upload header buttons apply to, and also sets up the preview pane.

Yeah, right now there are not NEARLY enough games with custom styles. I'm doing my best on that front, but other things have taken priority. it's very time consuming to create game-specific styles (like an hour per style, at least, considering the fiddling and testing and font-searching, converting the font to the correct format, updating the database, stylesheet, and so forth), and there are literally thousands of different pinball machines out there. I definitely want to get several hundred pre-set styles in there eventually at least, so that all the most popular and most common games are covered, but i simply haven't had hundreds of hours to devote to that task. Someone earlier suggested the ability for users to submit their own custom styles that other users could browse. i love this idea. of course developing that isn't something i can do overnight, either. All i can do is ask for patience.

I could develop a database table that contains the backglass for each game. That would save me and others a shitload of time, but the problem is the last thing i want is to take on the risk that some overzealous IP holder contacts my web hosting company and in response they delete my site and wipe the database. (the code and schema are backed up elsewhere, but still, let's not have that happen). I am holding off doing any development on that idea, as cool as it would be, until i have some certainty about its legality. i don't have time to develop features that might end up being illegal.

yeah, that depends on the game. for example, the style for "Black Hole" is designed so that up to 7 numbers will fit -- because you're really not going to get in the tens of millions on that game. Meanwhile, when I made Attack From Mars, I made sure that text style could fit multi-trillions in the same window. So yeah if you are applying the "Black Hole" style to a game that can score billions, you will see some clipping. the good news is the font size is easy to change by clicking "Toggle Advanced Options" and changing the font size value in there.

hmm. on PC, there should be a horizontal scrollbar at the bottom. see this image:

scrollbar (resized).jpg

is that not appearing on your setup? if not, please let me know what OS version and browser you're using.

yeah -- mobile devices consider themselves to be in "fullscreen" mode all the time, and thus don't do anything when you request it. that button (and reminder) is basically for desktops and laptops. I suppose I could disable both if it detects it's running on a mobile device. there's another item for the to-do list.

Keep up the good work and this will be a great addition to every gameroom.

Thanks! keep the feedback coming!

i've notived slowdowns too, and it's unrelated to any of my code. I think my web host just gets bogged down at certain hours. :/ I will switch providers if it doesn't improve.

This is a neat idea, but unfortunately, there is literally no way to do this for real -- in general, there is no way for a server to reach out and contact a client through http, and there is definitely no workable solution across all the devices that i'm supporting. I could fake it by having the browser poll the server every X seconds and refresh if it detects a change in the database, but that would be very hard to implement (i'd have to put a timer on literally every user action so that the page doesn't refresh while someone is scrolling or inputing a score or doing anything else), it would be taxing on my database, and would probably not work all that well anyway, unfortunately. I hate being negative about a suggestion, though. Please keep any ideas coming!

Pretty sure this is working correctly, but there are several usability issues you're bumping up against that are causing confusion:
1. The scale shouldn't have any effect on non-mobile devices such as laptops. (that's why it's called "mobile scaling factor")
2. When you change a text box setting, it doesn't actually *save* that setting until you click somewhere outside of that text box. (the reason is I want to save settings changes automatically, but I can't do a trip to the server on every single keypress...) Also, note that on mobile devices, you must either close the keyboard or press some kind of clickable object to initiate the save (for some reason clicking the background area doesn't work). This is definitely not perfect ... but I could fix it by making the mobile scale option a slider instead of a text box. another item on the to-do list.
3. You may need to manually zoom out to see the new scale size - when I change the value and refresh the page, my phone seems to "remember" the previous zoom level, but allows me to zoom out to see the new one as well.

can you recall what exactly you were doing when this happened? That busy popup definitely still needs some work. I'll be redoing it soon.

type better.

Entering "0" will clear a score. you could also delete the game entirely and recreate it. I realize neither of these are perfect solutions. The ability to clear all scores for a particular game is already on my feature request list, though, and since you're the second person to request it, it's moving up in priority.

Hmm, I cannot reproduce this error. Duplicate scores seem to work fine for me. Did you mean duplicate initials? Duplicate initials being ignored is a known bug that I'm addressing ASAP.

That's weird! Is it possible you suffered a seizure right as you pushed the "create game" button?? (i kid, i kid)

By clicking super fast on the create game button, I was able to create a bunch of them at once .. that's no bueno. Definitely a bug. Not sure it's super-high priority, though. I'll get to it, but in the meantime I have to say "please don't do that".

Yeah, some of the styles have background images applied to the scorebox itself (Indy 500 does as well) ... and while you can upload background images for a game's column, you can't (at this time) add a background image to the scorebox. There are various ways you could do it if you're clever, but no easy way through the current interface. If there's demand, I could add it to the list of feature requests.

screenshot (resized).jpg

that looks great, Herg! also, i didn't realize the scaling factor doesn't work during "fullscreen" -- my personal mobile devices are all iOS, and iOS does not respect the fullscreen option, so i can't directly test the two in conjunction. so thank you for your testing.

noted, i'll look into it.

working on a fix for that for sure. i think you're the third or fourth person who's mentioned it.

yeah, this is where it gets tricky ... i need to take another pass at this. I should be able to get things mostly lined up properly without everyone messing with CSS for the same reason of lining things up.

okay, beta testers, I fixed a bunch of issues last night:

- Made all score boxes the same size, so that they line up. (user can override this in the css)
- Made the height of the title of the game a fixed height, so that they all line up.
- Adjusted many of the style presets to accommodate the layout change.
- Added option to change the height of the game titles. (useful if you are using logo images instead of text)
- Fixed issue with game name capitalization being inconsistent in style dropdown list.
- Removed period from "password changed" and other messages. (someone requested this!)
- Fixed bug where duplicate initials are ignored - it now prompts the user for what to do.
- Reworked the Game Creation screen so users will not create games with blank names.
- Added a style called "(none)" that resets all styles for that game.
- Many other minor tweaks and improvements

the bad news is a lot of your previously-created games will look messed up. you should be able to fix this by going to settings, selecting the game, and re-applying whatever style you were using. unfortunately, any custom-created styles will probably need to be redone. (but this new layout should reduce the need for custom styles anyway.) again, sorry for any hassle, but this is a beta test. thank you guys for your patience!

all the scoreboxes line up now without you having to customize them like crazy

the new game title height option

If you try to create a blank game, it now says this.

If you enter initials that already exist, it prompts you what to do. (clicking on the scorebox you want to update avoids this message)

no need to re-report bugs you already reported -- they're still on the list.

enter "0" for the score to delete it.

okay, i fixed your settings and I believe i've squashed that rather nasty bug. double-quotes should no longer break custom CSS! (you may need to clear your browser cache to get the change)

Okay, so fonts is an issue that's still a work in progress. There are a number of custom fonts (several dozen) installed on the server, and you can reference them through the CSS. The catch is you have no way of knowing what they are, other than looking at the CSS of some of the existing styles. I will remedy that before the end of the beta (really more of an alpha, technically, to acknowledge any software pedants out there). My plan now is to include a popup window next to the CSS boxes that lists all the available fonts and gives some other basic tips.

You can also reference any font you have installed on the device you're viewing it from. So if your PC has some crazy font you like installed, you can reference that font, and it will show up for you (but it won't show up when accessed from any devices that don't have that font installed). So if you are using it in your game room from a laptop, you can install any font you want on that laptop and then just reference those fonts. meanwhile, the server-installed fonts will work for everyone.

Oh wow... that would be amazing. The preferred width is 250px. Height can be variable, but no more than 184px.

I have yet to find the upper limit for number of games ... that is a good test case. It's probably over 100, though. You probably won't be able to fit 25 games on one screen (well, maybe if you have a huge screen i guess) but it scrolls horizontally to reveal any games that don't fit on the screen.

The ideal viewing device (in my opinion) is a large touchscreen monitor mounted on a wall. You can power the screen by a mini PC or old laptop. I'm still in the discovery phase of figuring out what the best solution is. Maybe a Raspberry Pi would work, or one of those stick PCs.

But the system is turning out to be pretty flexible. A Surface Pro works great. iPad 2 or higher works. Herg is running it on an Amazon Fire 7. It also works fine on any PC or Mac. It doesn't have to be a touchscreen - keyboard/mouse can be used if you want. It even works on my phone, although it's not really made for that.

Nah, not yet. But I am getting a lot of questions about that, so development might evolve in that direction for version 2.0. I feel like there's already a whole lot of software out there for tournaments. This is filling a different and more vacant niche for now.

When it's done. :/ There are still a lot of bugs and half-finished features. This week is literally the first time anyone other than me has used the thing, and I'm learning a ton. The last thing I want to do is sour peoples' enthusiasm by releasing an incomplete product.

:O the animated header! That whole setup looks great!

Impact shouldn't be in there - I know I used it but it's not actually installed.

yeah, this is an issue right now. it's on the list of things i gotta fix.

oooh that's a cool idea. what if i made it so if it was idle for X seconds, it started slowly scrolling left and right to show off all the games?

idle scroll animation feature is live.

scroll (resized).jpg

i know, i know, i should be fixing bugs, not adding new features.

I don't really want to do that, because that adds extra server load for every person using that feature, and the load is proportional to how often it updates. The scroll doesn't require any trip back to the server.

(Obviously, wait time and scroll speed are configurable)

images are no more than 250px wide, and no more than 184px high.

that looks really cool! you are definitely on the right track. in the app, the game title and the background are two separate images, though.

okay, one more thing -- while the game titles are 250px, the game background should be at least 265px - there's a margin on it. also, like herg, said, the same background image is used on the score entry screen, which is about 430px wide. (it will repeat if it's narrower)

scoreInput (resized).jpg

can't wait to see your setup once you get access.

everyone designs their own .... for now. (dun dun dun)

Same.

good. if you look at the scrolling video i posted upthread, at the beginning, you see four backglass images -- BH, STTNG, WOZ, and GB -- those are 250x184.

i kinda think Herg's logos look even better, though, because they're not as tall (just my opinion)

i think they look decent.

bhScoreEntry (resized).jpg

184 pixels. But you can adjust that in the options tab! Also I believe the latest version does have a note about optimal image size.

435px wide (or so) .. and however tall your screen is.

i can't modify fonts, but there are CSS styles for letter spacing such as "letter-spacing: 2px" if you want the letters to be further apart. also, yes, HTML does not render more than one space consecutively. you MIGHT be able to hard code space with the HTML symbol for a space -- " " -- i haven't tested that though.

edit: pinside edited out the code for a space! you will have to google it. [ampersand]nbsp;

yep that's a bug ... i'm not sure how high priority though. I have to draw the line somewhere at minimum screen resolution to support. currently i'm designing towards a minimum resolution of 1000 pixels wide, which covers almost all non-phone devices. (although not necessarily in portrait mode ... i could take a look ...)

yep that's a bug ... that colorpicker library i'm using is kinda buggy. i may swap it out for a different one. it's on the list, thanks!

that looks great!

Attention cheapskates!

It's running on a Pi3 in that video!

It fits about 7 games at a time at 1080p. Anyone want to try it on a 4K screen?

IMG_1472 (resized).JPG

Although you can also zoom out in the browser ....

IMG_1473 (resized).JPG

Still in beta. The last thing I want to do is dampen people's' enthusiasm by releasing a buggy and incomplete product. (Although having said that, there are many features that will get added over time after release).

Thanks, but you should see my bugs and to-do list, haha ...

getting very close to release! perhaps another week or so.

Yep, Raspberry Pi 3 will work, although scrolling is a little bit choppy with my HD 24" touchscreen (and setup was a little annoying - touchscreen support is not exactly plug and play on it). Personally, I'd want something with a wee bit more horsepower, but it does work 100%.

Most tablets work. First-gen iPads do not, because Apple stopped supporting them and the browser on them is too old for some of iScored's features.

iScored is awesome on a Miscrosoft Surface Pro, but that is probably too expensive to use as a dedicate wall-mounted device.

The ideal setup in my opinion is probably a large touchscreen hooked up to a stick computer like the Intel Compute Stick or ASUS Chromebit or something. I expect a lot of people will simply use an old laptop they have lying around, and that works great too.

A touchscreen generally requires an HDMI (or DVI) port plus a spare USB port to carry the touch data. So if the stick has a spare USB port, then yes, it should work fine.

beta testers: check your email!

You can go to Banner and click advanced settings and put in height: 5px; (also blank out the banner text, or make it tiny)

Any less than that and you start to lose the nav button.

hmm, you might have some stale javascript code cached. I recently switched to a customized version of bootstrap, and a lot of devices cache external javascript files for a long time .. clearing your cache might help.

Hmmm. Since you only have 3 games, it's making the columns wider than normal in order to fill the screen. Either make your images wider, or buy more pinball machines!

you could also set the no-repeat flag in the CSS to stop the tiling, but that would look terrible. you'd just have blackness to the right of the image instead of the repeat. That's just the way HTML backgrounds work.

You could also force the columns to be a specific width, but then they wouldn't fill up the screen.

Can you use the device in portrait mode instead of landscape?

The background images are not rescaled. The game logo images are rescaled to 250px width.

Correct, the size of the background image does not affect the width of the column. The column width is the screen width divided by the number of games, with a minimum width of about 265px (at which point you start to get horizontal scrolling). The score entry pop up is always about 435px wide.

herg's idea of a dummy game on either side might be the best suggestion. (other than my suggestion of buying more pins )

dummy games (resized).jpg

new thread is here!

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/announcing-iscored-the-game-room-score-tracking-app

also, the site is open for business! https://www.iScored.info

That's what happens when the browser used doesn't support the "display: flex" property. Is there a way to go into your TV's settings and update the browser or the TV's firmware? the following browsers should work:

Chrome 29.0 and up
Internet Explorer 11.0 and up
Firefox 28.0 and up
Safari 9.0 and up
Opera 17.0 and up

Any browser version released since about 2013 should work. (incidentally, this is why first-gen iPads don't work, because Apple stopped support in 2012)

it's really not meant for use on an iPhone. the screen is too small and i'm not sure if scrolling works properly. plus you'd have to refresh the main screen manually.

to expand this thought: i think eventually development might evolve in this kind of direction, where people submit scores through their phone. We will see what demand dictates. but in its current form, it's not really supported.

that's a neat concept. Seems like it should work for iScored. It's Android ... so as long as the browser is up to date, you should be fine.

it will be interesting to see how precise and responsive that method of touchscreen is. i look forward to hearing your review.

hey guys just an FYI i will be updating the app very soon with an auto-refresh option.

i intended to have the "community styles" thing done by now, but a hard drive crash has stalled that effort, and it's taking longer than expected to recover the data.

hopefully auto-refresh will tide people over until i can complete that feature.

Hello! It's been a couple weeks, so here is an update:

Auto-refresh is now live. (I thought I mentioned this last week but apparently not!)

autoRefresh (resized).png

Let me know if you experience any problems with this new feature.

Also, I removed the Cryptocurrency miner option. It was disabled by default, and explained well on the options screen, and it only ran if the user opted in, but I decided I didn't want to risk anyone mistakenly thinking I was trying to pull something shady. It is a shame, though, because I made almost 3 whole cents from you guys over the last month with it. But sadly i've put an end of that lucrative gravy train.

And finally ... the data recovery is finally complete. They are shipping my data to me now, and within a few days, I should be able to finish that dang Community Styles option i've been promising for way too long.

It does require an active internet connection. It doesn't need much bandwidth to operate, though, once the page is initially loaded. When you enter or update a score, it doesn't refresh the whole page. it just updates that one score.