Pro Pinball: Timeshock! Tips

Like many older titles of this type, they are designed to be run on
display hardware that is 4:3 aspect and can natively support a 640x480
(and other 4:3) fullscreen resolutions. For a lot of us with newer widescreen
16:9/10 display hardware, this means running things in 'windowed' mode
(Emulate a virtual desktop). Doing that in itself is easy enough (see below),
but using the GOG version (or anything I guess that uses DOSbox) means things
can get 'clumsy'. The best idea is to manually set 640x480 as the default size,
and that way the game window pops-up mid-screen.


Use cxsetup to configure the bottle using winecfg to run in windowed
mode ('Emulate a virtual desktop');

0. Start  cxsetup

1. Highlight the bottle you installed the game into

2. Click on 'Configure' => 'Control Panel' => 'winecfg' -- the Wine Configuration GUI will appear






3. Now click on 'Graphics' tab => tick  'Emulate a virtual desktop'






4. After enabling virtual desktop mode, you will see 'Desktop size' element becomes active => change this to 640 x 480





5. Click on 'Apply' => 'Ok' => 'Ok'

6. Exit cxsetup - play the game!


GOG version: Using the included 'Graphic mode setup.exe', alters the
display rendering mode used by the bundled version of DOSbox. As this
uses the SDL sdk to get the job done, in linux at least I found changing
the default setting from 'surface' to 'Opengl' very really does give the best
result. Understand, it's the windows port of DOSbox you're actually working
with here, and it's relying on the various compatibilities afforded it, by the
crossover/wine environment itself ; for example, it's probably not the best
idea to select 'directx' or 'ddraw' here, because wine is not so complete
in those regards. There should be a screenshot of the GUI selector for
Graphic mode setup.exe - it doesn't work quite the way it should. Using
the dropdown menu, select the renderer of choice so it appears in the box.
The 'save' button remains un-highlighted ; clicking on the 'Launch' button
appears to do nothing, but it does save the new configuration to disk. Next
time you launch the game normally, the new rendering engine is used.


0. Start  cxsetup

1. Highlight the bottle you installed the game into

2. Click on 'Configure' => 'Control Panel' => 'Run'

3. Click on the 'Browse' button -- use the file requester that pops-up
   to navigate to "Graphics mode setup.exe" inside the selected bottle.

4. Once you have this file selected, click on 'Open' => 'Run'  -- the
   graphics mode settings GUI will appear (see screenshot)

5. Using the drop-down menu, select the renderer of choice, then click
   on 'Launch' -- this will cause the setup GUI/wine window to close.

6. Exit cxsetup.

Now start the game again, and it should start with the renderer chosen above


Note: Using the Opengl renderer, absolutely swallows the mouse, in fact
it disappears altogether once you click in the game window, and the only
way to really get it back (to my desktop) was to use the Ctrl-Fx keyboard
sequence (where x is the number of which desktop I want to switch to). I
think this behaviour was actually desirable in the end...