I'm sure you could decompile much of the code.. but with everything its about input vs reward. Doing something like changing a few values by bit flipping would be simple.. reworking the code or fixing bugs is way more because you wouldn't just swap some values, but would require pushing around a lot more changes. Hacking something to run something completely new, is actually easier than hacking it to rework what is already there. Having to have a devkit setup too is also a hinderance verse being able to run a debugger right on your PC, etc.

Effort vs reward...

I hope this include X-Men. BIGGEST issue is that the game dead ends. After you beat Dark Phoenix, there is no reset of the villain inserts. Same applies to Danger Room. There is no reset of the heroes to let you get there again. There should NOT be dead ends in pinball.

How hard would it be to reduce the number of required drones on Iron Man from 28 to 14 to start DoDMB? Assuming one had the source code of course.

I'll be incredibly conservative and say less than an hour. If it's programmed well less than 10 minutes.

So you're assuming that everyone agrees with this change. And that the reason not to do it is laziness or something. I think perhaps the programmers don't agree that this is a good change. I don't. The entire community doesn't. And iron man Ve is selling fine without.

But to answer your question, if I was the programmer on this project, changing this counter would take only a few minutes followed by some testing.

So even decompiling this doesn't produce very friendly assembly. You lose any intelligent variable names and code comments. Further, you'd need to spend significant time to set up a tool chain to cross compile this. Im not sure what the architecture is for say SAM or if there are vendor provided compilers already. The programmers are working in C not decomposed assembly. So this is a ton more difficult. At least the guy that did the data east Star Wars was decompiling assembly written code not some C code that a compiler "optimized".

Australians, the only people on the planet that are more polite then Canadians

Alright, I'll bite: why not? I haven't heard people say leave it like it is, impossible to get to... I can't believe Lyman meant to code a mode no one, even the best players in the world, can get to. (And we are talking about the Multiball, not the hurry up...).

To satisfy both it would be nice if it were adjustable in the menu - of course that would take more time than 10 minutes

I don't think the thread is about competition... Stern has a tendency to leave code unfinished, or best case scenario take 1.5 years to finish so by the time someone says "yes this is a finally a good game" Stern has sold out of LE's, stopped producing Premiums, and in some cases has stopped running even Pro models. It's a shitty way to do business, and they are trying to fix it.

The question left is simple: "show me the code!" XM unfinished, IM has a few blatant leftovers that that Stern didn't even bother addressing when they came out with the VE, etc, and so forth. When we see games coded by someone besides Lyman getting polished off, then we can say Stern as a company has actually made progress.

Taking the high road Quarter.

Some people just aren't worth the effort.

Disagree. Premiums are always still available after the code is done.
At least is was for all the pins I can think of.
No?

I tend to agree Chambahz. TWD is this way with prem and pro. So was met, ACDC, mustang, star trek, ... all the recent releases I've been around for afaik have been available as the code updates mature.

I could agree with this. As for development, it wouldn't take much more time to add it as a configuration option . I guarantee they already have functions that they can call to add a variable to the menus.

And this cant seriously be more than a couple of hours of coding at the most?

IF (DarkPhoenixMode.IsFinished || DangerRoomMode.IsFinished)
{
ResetAllModes()
}

etc

Actually, even easier than that. If danger room is finished than reset all heroes to off.

If dark phoenix mode is played, reset all villain inserts to off. Because they removed the final wizard mode, they are separate goals and have no dependencies on each other.

Those kinds of changes typically are dumb simple even without the source code if the code doesn't have protections against modified code and you can use a debugger. But since the code runs on an embedded platform, it takes either more effort to setup something to step through the code or a heck of a lot more brute force tries to find the right location. But since Sam is emulated in pinmame... I have to imagine that should make it easier to monitor and find the right memory locations if the debugging were there or were added

This is pretty much the case for all efforts that start with decompiled assembly... But it still is done from time to time. Harder... But not impossible. Plus we already have a pic based emulation of the platform in pinmame... Hack in some step wise debugging and register monitoring... Find your memory location and hack away

Austin did it less than three weeks after getting iron man...

Jump to 22mins . And he doesn't cheat... He just lives for these kinds of challenges.

I'm fairly certain Lyman wouldn't mind adding options. He rarely does. He had no issues adding a ball save to Crank It Up for instance. People asked, he obliged, no weirdness. And we're not talking about a lot of work if you have the source and are familiar with it. Doesn't have to even be the new default, just an option to turn it down, no big deal.

I do not believe he owns Iron Man though. No way to test it even if he spent some time over a weekend. So while the actual work might be easy, the logistics are tricky.

And I don't know even if say, someone loaned him an Iron Man, he did the tweaks and tested them, and then handed the code to Stern and they said "hey, great job, let's get this out" if they even could, or if that means Disney has to approve. Maybe not if it's just "numbers" and not "creative".

Just pointing out that there are always levels to this stuff. The work might be easy, but the logistics surrounding it often aren't.

He closed the outlanes, set it to five balls, and I believe he said he adjusted the pitch...still super impressive no doubt (I would not be able to accomplish it still) but it just isn't the same as seeing it done in a tournament.

LOL, okay, got it. You view DoDMB as being a unicorn you will one day get to so you still strive to get to it.

I do not view it as attainable. Id like to one day see the mode. I'd like an option to reduce the drones in half, it would still be hard as heck because whiplash is tough as nails to complete.

We will agree to disagree, but I feel your argument is basically one of, "I like things as they are don't try and improve them for others", which is certainly fine but I don't think a game exists that doesn't need some more polish and DoDMB needs a setting adjustment so that mor than 0.01% of players can make it.

Uh no. The game is set on 3 ball, but he is playing extra balls. The lanes are not closed, they are just on the easier holes vs wide open like we would setup for tournament. The game is not slowed down... You can watch it. And you didn't say doing it in a tournament... Just that it was so impossible. You should never see these super wizard modes in a tournament period. Austin just plays games until he masters them.

I'll check it out again. Speaking of the extra balls though, that is another area where some polish wouldn't hurt the code of Iron Man...

True, but if one isn't there one does not know how the game is set up in someone else's house.

I think enough people feel the same as me (that DoDMB is not attainable for them) that a code setting adjustment is reasonable so the number of drones needed can be adjusted.

You forget the bloody Frenchs

Programmer pet peeve: People estimating what a change to a completely foreign code base will entail.

Their food is good but I never understand what they're saying

And you live in Ottawa? You should be ashamed.

I know, I dropped French in grade nine. I should have kept it going just for the women

Yah. Grade 9 is when most Canadians drop French. I still have horrible memories of conjugating verbs.

I do plan to put my daughter into French immersion though

Wouldnt Stern be able and willing to borrow him an Iron Man for an improvement? Cant see what they loose by doing that..

That's true! I learned Greek for the...um...

Myself, I've never really had a thing for French women; but to each his own.....

Celine_Dion.jpg

Celine Dion is not French but Canadian (thanks god we're not guilty of that. Blame us for many things, but not Celine Dion)

The entire program needs to be retested and burned in. Where I work a major for sale automotive diagnostic software package was released but a few last-minute "simple" bug fixes were implemented without a complete retest. The software ended up recalibrating certain things such as odometer pulses/mile/kilometers as well as other critical functions. A major clusterfuck. Safety-related automotive control modules. Our "experts" some with 25+ years experience though there was no way the areas they changed would have any effect on other parts of the software package were dead wrong.

Imagine if a simple patch somehow allowed certain pulse-only solenoids to come on and stay on in a pinball machine. If a fuse was incorrect or not low current rated enough to blow, a thermal event might even be possible.

She's so friggin' harry that I thought she must be French Canadian.

But she's French Canadian

It really depends on what the change is and how the software is architected. Modifying a counter used for just a drone count wouldn't need extensive complete retesting. If each unit is precompiled and the other units that control say solenoid power etc aren't even recompiled, then there is prob no need for a thorough retest. There are many cases and you can't make a single blanket statement based on one experience.

image.jpeg

They are not "off kilter" completely.
The process must revert back to their time commitment for code of what they did in games such as TSPP and LOTR for example.
They pushed pretty hard to fix the problems based on operator feedback, and limited numbers of collectors who bought the games NIB.
NIB box sales for private collectors for both titles was much less than today (not considering the re-runs).

Stern continues to rush code out the door at times, and not always even fully play rest games on location, and let designers take notes.
It is just not happening anymore.
Two weeks is not enough time on location, and you cannot just do it on the factory floor with people that are familiar or designed the game.
That is not a proper evaluation.
It's hard to be objective.
They even used to "call in" good players and announce, "hey we are putting a sample game at X location, would you come by and play it and give us feedback"?

When the code is weak, you cannot "blow it off" and say that day "we will fix it later".
BLY/WMS got into trouble doing that too, especially during the final years starting in 1995.

Would that be like a thermal nuclear event???

That's what our team of *experts* basically said. It was a costly mistake.

That's how we politely/less shockingly say: "fire". This is a touchy subject in the automotive world and can be pretty sensitive with commercial devices used in a home environment.

I am not quite sure how threads like this are tolerated on Pinside and not realized to be considered flat out trolling.

Sorry but ANYONE starting a thread that brings about tons of posts in the past week and only has 2 total posts int he whole thread obviously trolled the whole site. This thread is obviously troll bait from the start based on the topic alone. Can someone explain why this sort of posting behavior seems to continually get a pass?

If a member wants to tell lies and provoke conversation then they should be part of the conversation instead of leveraging their inside knowledge and making up thread content without backing it up and then disappearing.

Exactly what Pinside was created for.And you just called Jared a troll.Hes a Stern employee.Watch your back,the Stern gang might roll up on ya.

A published statement from a industry vendor's PR group is considered 'trolling' ? Go home hilton.. you're drunk.

well, then he should actually engage in the conversation... With out him continuing to engage in the conversation it quickly becomes trolling and speculative claims without fact (now against Pinside ToS)

"Make speculative claims without fact: Speculation and opinions are fun to share and discuss, but avoid stating speculation as fact. Any claims of fact or allegations made on the forum must be supported by evidence and/or a trustworthy source. Moderators reserve the right to modify or remove claims of fact that lack proper supporting evidence."

These are all speculative claims where in fact evidence supports the opposite. I am not sure how that is not considered trolling?

History shows us that is in fact not the case. They may be starting a new trend with GoT, but a trend is not made with n=1.

I have lots of metadata to show the opposite of this from both an owner for home use and operator of many games for general public use. Or more accurately, they maybe stepping up to the game for 3-5 minutes and ONLY playing once and then walking away because the code sucked (saw it happen with WWE and sold for a quick loss when realized how bad it was).

Again just pure speculative claim without evidence of any of this happening.

I am all for the new ToS rule of being respectful to industry, but I would like to see them be respectful in return. If not, I expect them to be called out on it. This thread was all troll bait when it was placed to bring about reaction but not conversation (I worded that poorly before). Conversation is good but when industry shows up to spread BS and lacks the evidence to back it up and then promptly exits stage left, that is nothing more than trolling. If industry wants to now use Pinside as another PR platform then they should be expected to engage in the community with discussion.

Been there........done that

So true. Jared not responding to this thread as the conversation evolves is disappointing.