Request for Segmented Displays

GeorgeH

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Is anyone other than me bothered by the flashing of segmented displays? It is like a horizontal black line that rolls down through the display from top to bottom like in the following screenshot. I don't know how difficult it would be for @ravarcade to change it but I wish there was a way to turn this off.

Seg.png

I found a video of someone repairing a Bally display and you can see it pulse a bit but it doesn't look like the above. To see the display, you have to advance the video to 18:05 minutes. The display blinks in the video but you can see the pulse when the display is lit.


I found another video of a display that is not on a pinball table but the same type where the author says the flicker is caused by a strobe effect where the display blinks at 4 frames per second which the eye cannot see and interacts with the frame rate of the camera. ...So in reality, gas segmented displays don't actually appear to flicker to the human eye when not shot by a camera.


My point of all this discussion is that real gas segmented displays don't appear to blink on and off at all. They are like fluorescent lights that blink on and off so fast that you can't tell they are blinking. Recording a video of a gas segmented display sets up a strobe effect that makes the blink appear to slow down. For those that watch old Western movies that have horse drawn carriages, you might have noticed that the wheels on a carriage have times when they appear to rotate backwards. It is because of the strobe effect of the camera on the wheels.
 
Could you give me an example table to test out?

Can't remember seeing this issue before.
 
I am glad you asked. I was looking for a similar table to tell you about and tried "Funhouse". I noticed the flash occurs less often than it does on "Space Shuttle" which got me curious. Then I tried "Road Girls" that I think you have played and it flashes less often than "Space Shuttle" also. So I started looking through the FP manual and found a parameter called "Boredom Delay". It says you can change this without changing the contents of what is being displayed although it does not say what it does. It says you can set this parameter to 0 and the effect won't happen. I decided to set it to 0 to see what happens. Surprisingly, the flashing stopped. The flash occured so frequently on "Space Shuttle" that it was driving me nuts. On future tables, I will always set this parameter to 0.

Anyway, if you want to see the effect, try "Road Girls". The effect won't start until the display is idle for 3 seconds so you should probably start the table because the display is always changing during the attract mode.

@ravarcade No need to make any changes. I found a way to fix it without modifying BAM.
 
I am glad you asked. I was looking for a similar table to tell you about and tried "Funhouse". I noticed the flash occurs less often than it does on "Space Shuttle" which got me curious. Then I tried "Road Girls" that I think you have played and it flashes less often than "Space Shuttle" also. So I started looking through the FP manual and found a parameter called "Boredom Delay". It says you can change this without changing the contents of what is being displayed although it does not say what it does. It says you can set this parameter to 0 and the effect won't happen. I decided to set it to 0 to see what happens. Surprisingly, the flashing stopped. The flash occured so frequently on "Space Shuttle" that it was driving me nuts. On future tables, I will always set this parameter to 0.

Anyway, if you want to see the effect, try "Road Girls". The effect won't start until the display is idle for 3 seconds so you should probably start the table because the display is always changing during the attract mode.

@ravarcade No need to make any changes. I found a way to fix it without modifying BAM.
I'm overloaded "to the nines" at the moment, but give me a day or two, please!
 
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