Mission Pinball Strikes Again

The Mission Pinball Framework is a complex creature I've written about many times. Recently there has been an upgrade; version 0.80 has a major change in how graphics, and sound are implemented.

Previously there was mc, the inhouse media "thing" developed by the MPF people. It worked a bit like a spreadsheet program with the sheets being strung together in implausible ways, from many many files. The MPF people made it so that you could use other things as well. One was Godot.

Now we have Godot completely replacing mc. The old stuff is deprecated, so if you want bugfixes, you should be looking at v0.80 and Godot, because there are lots of bugs to be fixed in MPF. 

So Godot is a good choice - a fine piece of software. I attempted to install it on Debian, a nice stable Linux platform, and ended up making a bug report because it does not work for me. 6 hours of installing and testing and I have a workaround. Reminds me of the first time I tried to install MPF, it was a buggy version and would never have worked. Fast forward to today, and with Gnome, in Debian 12 running in a VM, Godot is buggy and would never have worked. 

You can read something about my previous adventures in MPF Distribution.

Anyway, this recent change to Godot means I needed to revisit what I run MPF on - Godot has it's own requirements. Hardware, operating system, etc. are all up for grabs, and the testing is painful. 

The MPF documentation is in a shambles at the moment, missing, wrong, or assuming significant systems understanding just to get stuff installed. I think the MPF people enjoy making pinball-software more than they enjoy making pinball-machines.