well said! These old fuddy duddies in their rockers need to get with the times! Pinball has to evolve to move forward. If it still has flippers and pinballs in it, then it will still be pinball as we know it... and hopefully more successful.

LCD is going to be great, just wait and see.

^^

Thank you. I cannot wait either. I am sure there were people out there complaining about those newfangled gizmos called flippers when they were added.

And I am pretty sure Apple is not gonna collapse like GM just cause Mr. Jobs passed away.

I don't personally have any problem with the evolution of pinball. In fact, I look forward to it, but I still don't think LCD will negatively affect the price of DMD pins from the 90's.

No one is complaining ! We just stated that the value of the 90 DMD will not go down because of a stupid LCD screen !!

Get with the thread already people !!

Jim

Exactly.

Nothing like a straw man argument.

Isn't it REALLY late to even consider that. He died ages ago (aka over a month ago). It's sort of old news, and everyone already knows that Apple is surviving well even without him.

(BTW I was one of the people to put a post-it note on an apple store window when he died. )

I wonder what DMD animators will do now.

I guess they'll have to go back to college and learn a new trade.

Go to work programming for the Color DMD project.

the one thing that I hope JJP includes in the game is internet capability for tourny tech like golden tee or big buck hunter. THAT would be a game changer for the industry and get a lot of people excited. Best part is that the tech is already there and available, they would just have to work it in. If they are not planning on it, I think that would be a great idea to lobby them with...

That would be sweet indeed!

Now picture the glass off and a high score of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 you get the picture.

It would be cool until some jackass gives your pin a virus. Unfortunately you know it would happen eventually. I do like the basic premise, especially in a closed network. Something like an arcade with all the pins linked up.

That would suck. I could see them leaving a port open that would allow you to "link" to other pins nearby for tournys if you bought a transmitter/receiver setup. I think there has to be a cutoff for them at some point.

I would really enjoy a pinball machine that could go online and play my friends in different parts of the world .

Jim

SEGA did internet pinball tournament with games like Golden Cue back in 1998.

Never played one of them (and they only made a dozen or so GC), so I don't know if it was a game changer or not.

I see Stern has internet tournament with their pinball at least as far back as 2000:

http://www.ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=4492&picno=3723&zoom=1

Virus aside, and I don't think that would be a viable excuse to not include this technology. It could also be easy to do a save and dump. Add a USB port and a little extra memory, save all the info as a locked file to upload onto a server to decrypt = instant online database. Wouldn't even need to have online access in the machine itslef for that. Make it to where you can only register games under specific rule sets and invalid if the game becomes "broken" in anyway. Think of it in the ways that they keep stats online for games such as Modern Warfare, BF3, etc

We all talk about grand champ scores, competing, who's the best, etc. I think JJP should find out who really IS the best at their game and can easily make the software to do it. The only way to innovate is with technology and they are going the next step with LCD, but this would set a standard across the board. If they don't do it, I'm sure Stern will do it properly shortly.

*edit to add*

Vid, I have seen those before, but it wasn't accessible by the home users, nor was it pushed.

And as far as the origional question goes, I sure hope so...

Video games have computer animated cut scenes, why couldn't they do that to advance a mode?

Dire Straits "Money for Nothing" graphics are better than the DMD stuff we have now.

There will always be game changers out there and I think LCD is one of them.....

Go out to Vegas an check out older slot machines versus the newer one armed bandits......

The LCD will bring many more people to the pinball market, if it's done right...

Some will want to play the older machines but more, the newbies, will want the newer machines and technology...

No two machines play exactly alike so a tournament between remote players is not fair. One machine could be at 6 degrees and another at 7, and many other differences such as leveling, bad switches, and weak or worn flippers would factor in (and etc. etc.).

Well said, since that video was made in 1985 if I'm not mistaken and there were no DMDs.

yep. wayyy too many variables for that kind of competition. Pin tournaments need to be played on the same exact machine, in person.

The technology has potential to improve according to the LCD. But, making games immersive is key. Already noted on the thread, part of pinball is having each machine in unique variation, set up a certain way, so it's doubtful that internet scoring is the future of pinball. As noted above, there are too many variables, and reducing them to make scoring fair would make pinball like a video game. And people are spending thousands on pinball machines, not video games. No one in the pinball market is looking for the game to turn into a video game. When it does...it often seems dated, like DMD games seem dated on Johnny Mnemonic and others. Like the best virtual emulation seems dated.

What the LCD does offer is a way to improve the playing experience of traditional pinball. Not in a gimmicky way, like a touchscreen near the flippers. What a LCD could do is expand game time and provide a platform for programming. Now you have DMD animations that are short and repetitive. Games are typically fairly long. Maybe having such a repetitive set of animations isn't the future of pinball, where home use is very important to the American market. If a machine is used for home use, it would be more immersive, to the point where a game could be made to last for hours, or even days. LCD technology, combined with more sophisticated programming, could make that a reality. (Last for days, as in, shoot the ball into a ball lock, or auto-save, leave the machine in sleep mode, come back and resume the game...hours or days later.) Have much longer sets of video or animation, that could trigger to the tune of GBs worth of data. Videos that play according to the theme in a unique manner, according to the duration of play. An LCD screen would make pinball more sophisticated, while operating in the traditional backglass manner. Games could choose between tournament, coin-op, and home use modes, all with different characteristics. This could be done with an LCD as the driving force of choice making, saving, and menu items on the pinball. Not as a game-within-a-game. Pinball machines are discrete units that favor the sophistication of chance over sprites and levels. Video games are solved and pinball machines are not. The LCD will provide a menu, a backdrop, and a platform to provide unique and novel video clips as a reward, and a way for much more complicated games and programming decisions to be enacted. But, the LCD has to stay in the background, and not overtake the game itself.

I think this could go one of two ways -
1) LCD equipped pins are received well, they make a ton of them, and the DMD pins fall in price
2) The LCD pins flop, and the remaining manufacturers fold as a result. DMD prices skyrocket due to scarcity of decent examples of games due to an aging and limited pool of machines to pull from.

So, either way, we're all going to be antique dealers in 10 years.

The biggest obstacle right now for pinball in my opinion is price. If the new machines keep going up into the 6-7 thousand range and above, there will be very few takers. I see no reason for the price to go up with LCD. That technology is dirt cheap in the small screen sizes such as 29". Additionally, the video can be mostly grabbed directly from existing film/movies/tv/animated cartoons.
The manufacturers better be very careful about greed. A small profit margin is better than being out of business and killing a niche industry.

Also, it seems stupid for Stern to keep secrets as to which titles will be coming out now that WOZ and probably one other pin will be released by JJP in 2012. Buyers get anxious and jump on the first thing that gets their interest and then find out later that the other company is making a title they would have preferred to own, but then it could be too late to have finances lined up to afford.
I know that Stern is afraid they will hurt sales of Transformers or another new title, but each title potentially grabs a totally different audience. I am 43 years old and don't know jack about transformers other than they are convertable robots. The cartoons were either not around when I was a little kid or were just after my cartoon days and thus I was only mildly exposed to Transformers. Now if they came out with a Forrest Gump or Harry Potter LCD pin I would be all over it because they are titles that I have been exposed to in the last 20 years.

What Jim said: Exactly !

Now this is a very interesting post to me... As you may or may not know, for my two years between Stern and JJP, I worked at Play Mechanix, specifically on CoinUp (BBH's online software). How is it you judge how excited people are over online play? I'm genuinely curious as to your take on this.

keefer, you're with JJP now correct? I'll be happy to go into more detail if you'd like.

True, but with technology they could tell what angle the PF was at, and most pins have auto checking error tests it can run. But honestly come on, would you be playing on a broken transformers trying to get top score? Its the same as a console. You wouldnt play on a broken xbox or use a half working controller to try and get a top score. Life isn't ever going to be fair, but having the option is going to further the business.

You forgot about the guy that removes the glass just so he can win at all cost.

haha well there could be a sensor for it. But ya there will never be a perfect solution. But like what they did on XBL and how you can hack those games with a jtag xbox, you clear the scores so often or if a score is that ridiculous you delete it.

It's about time that LCDs replace DMDs on new pins. We've had basically the same DMDs for 20 years now; in that time we went from score reels in the mid-70s to four 6-digit numeric displays to four 7-digit numeric displays (1980) to two 7-character alphanumeric and two 7-digit numeric displays (1986) to two 16-character alphanumeric displays (1989) to DMDs. It was probably time to move on from DMDs back when Pinball 2000 came out, but its failure gave DMDs another decade of service.

Yes, that's correct.
I guess my initial reaction to your post was the enthusiasm I saw from my vantage point did not match with what you see/saw.

As per hacking, store the MD5 hashes of every file in the filesystem on the CPU itself in encrypted form. 256 bit encryption. Have JJP send an encrypyted version of the encryption key over an encrypted SLL protocol. The encryption key for THAT key is retrieved over a secure 3G data network. Encryption keys received over the network change on a daily basis. THEN you play.

haha. Well you wouldnt need 3g, but LAN or WAN connection would work. You know most places have it now already for a POS system or network in their store/house. Just as Arcades went from proprietary to PC based (h2overdrive, terminator etc from raw thrillz) pinball has had pc like boards and microcontrollers forever. Just add one in there for online scoring Man I would love to have that. Make the competition hard

I think the real potential of networked pinball lies not in tournaments, but in head-to-head play against your friends. Imagine starting the game simultaneously, and then racing against each other to achieve certain goals. How cool would it be if things that you did on your game directly affected the other player's table? For example, you complete a set of drop targets and your opponent's flippers go to half strength for 30 seconds. You reach a certain score first and it locks off a section of your opponent's playfield. I'm talking about a radical departure from anything that has been done before in pinball.

Would a LED mod be available for DMD pins? I mean some of us are already substituting PF and GI lights with LED's why not get the DMD out as well consume less power and have maybe 256 colors or more?!

They have color lcd screens now

http://www.colordmd.com/

There are also LED displays for older pins like pinscore.

http://www.pinscore.com/

Sweeeeeeet!

These are the kinds of things that it could open up. Gweeen, you got a great head and we're thinking alike on this... There are a lot of other things I've scratched out on my notepad in pondering this, and this is right up the alley along the stuff I've been putting down. This tech is something that I think should be either explored by the current developers, and if not they are not going to, maybe there is room for someone else out there to make games.

Here's the deal though, the companies could do this but it would need to be made accessible. If they gave us a brand new game, basic game (2 ramps, 3 banks of drops, bumpers, rollovers, couple of u turns, etc - simple, leaving the bells and modes behind) and integrated the current tech we have (not to mention the tech of tomorrow) to make it competitive other than solely on site, it would work, be embraced, and revolutionize. It would be easy for those in the know to do. A game like that would see the same profit return as a game like WOZ, sell for a 1/3 of the price, but move 3 times the product which means a greater accessibility to the general public. And that is part of the whole thing right, bringing the silverball to more people?

Keefer, trust your gut. It's not just enthusiasm that is there, but the logic and knowledge about how to pull it off...

How do you compare gameplay on two different machines (of the same title) to each other? Surely you've played multiple examples of the same game in various states of (dis)repair. Not to mention other stuff like how steep is it set, leaning one direction, glass on/off, stronger/weaker coils installed.

oh yes, all of that has to be taken into account for. it's been mentioned above about sensors and all that. code can be written to detect the amount of electricity which is fired by a coil, therefore keeping the standard easy to maintain. as far as pitch goes, set up a laser level and write it into the code. if the bevel of the games doesn't fit inside the "rules set" for the code (in order to make it an "official" game, you see) then it doesn't register in the database. if all the games have to be set and maintained to realistic standards, people/operators will do it. wax and shine, that is another story...

but on top of that, inside this new tech talk, it's also about creating head to head game play. think about a game you can play, and activating sequences/making shots/dropping flags affected the game play and mechanics on an identical machine sitting next to it. if I drop flag #1 on bank A of my machine, it raises the corresponding flag on my "opponents" machine. gotta get all of the flags dropped to score some real points, while you're both shooting for the same targets...

_{Post edited by ruairidh : because who doesn't?}

Color DMD's are LCDs too! I think they have the potential but that will depend on the game.

Absolutely not.