MPF 0.52 has been released

02 Feb 2019 - jab

MPF 0.52 has been released as maintenance release with new features, bugfixes, refactorings and no breaking changes.

MPF 0.52 Has Been Released

Today, we release MPF 0.52 as a maintainance release to 0.51. 0.51 users should be able to upgrade with no changes to their config. This post only mentions some highlights and you can alternatively read the full release notes in the MPF docs.

Python 3.7 Support and newer Ruamel

MPF 0.52 supports Python 3.7 which will hit mainstream soon. It improves performance in some areas. Additionally, we updated to a newer version of our YAML parsing library which should yield some startup performance improvements.

Polishing

Some areas received polishing:

• System 11 got some improvements. For instance, AC relays become default on during the game and default off in attract.
• OPP verifies the firmware to match on all boards
• Improved USB/I2C latency on the P3-Roc
• Communication to the P-Roc moved to a separate thread
• Placeholders work in a lot more places now
• Better errors on startup and shutdown

New Hardware Support

A few new hardware platforms are supported in 0.52:

• SPI Bit Bang for the Spike Trough (and similar hardware)
• Raspberry Pi DMD support
• Pololu Tic Stepper Controller

Upgrade instructions

To upgrade, use pip:

pip install --upgrade mpf mpf-mc

Note: if you installed mpf with pip3 or kivy -m pip3, you’ll need to use the same pip command as you did then.

If you use MPF Monitor, that will need an upgrade too

pip install --upgrade mpf-monitor

• If you were using a workaround for “use_sound_setting”, it is no longer necessary as that bug has been fixed
• If you have switches tagged as “playfield_active” and use them in a device, you will need to remove those tags (MPF will complain on startup)

Documentation

We extended the documentation. The config reference for almost all devices has been completed. We added a section about game design and how to lay out your modes. We documented common modes based on questions in our forum. Please ask there if you are missing anything.