He just means the number will be random unless you paid extra, it's not going to state that you picked it or not. (As I read it.)

There is zero chance they're going to ship with color.

I'd love to hear an update on the official statement over eventual color though.

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(Sorry, it just sounded funny when I saw it posted out of context.)

I don't see how that's even vaguely enforceable. Whatever indeed, I'm not signing up for some other forum just to see updates on products.

Stern doesn't even know which of their two buildings will build MMR, my impression is they're just waiting on PPS at this point.

I think there is going to be overlap actually. Jody told me the plan but I wasn't recording the call and now I can't remember the details, so I might be wrong.

Hmm, I thought the first rule of the PPS Forum is you do not register for the PPS forum.

If Rick wants a platform just keep a blog, which he does already. Post answers to readers emails or something. I just can't handle tracking another forum, even if I wanted to.

I'm waiting for the shitstorm when it's announced full color isn't actually coming myself.

I don't think they can do that actually. Because they're not running the code natively, they're emulating it. So they can modify the original ROM for small things, like taking off the Williams logo, but it would be a whole new architecture for the original code to output color information. And that's not happening under the emulation scenario.

I would expect that colorization is definitely not something you're guaranteed to see. It takes more horsepower than you might think, even though the resolution is very low it's encoding on the fly by recognizing what the information on the DMD is as it travels out to the display. It has to work in real time. ColorDMD has dedicated hardware to handle that. There might not be overhead on the processor that MMr is using to do that.

Has Rick talked about it or promised it since that long ago quote? That was made before it was clear that PPS wasn't really building the game, I'm not really sure he was in a position to promise that. I guess we'll see!

I'm not an expert. But I have talked to people who've cast doubt on it every happening. So I would just say that you should at least prepare for the possibility unless Rick is forthcoming with a definite yes answer.

We look at the weather outside and can't believe the rest of you aren't here!

I know people are frustrated, and I feel you, but imagine if the original plan that didn't involve Stern was still in effect. The one you bought into at Expo. Can you imagine how much slower things would be? At least once Stern gets the line rolling things will fly off it.

I love AFM. I wouldn't pay more than Stern Pro prices for it though.

Rick can charge whatever he wants. And we'll buy or not. Personally I wouldn't even pay $6.5k for a remake of AFM. The BOM isn't there. A Stern Pro has more stuff on the playfield. It's a fun game, great theme and sounds etc. But there's not a whole lot to it.

There's only one MM. That ship has sailed.

AFM is like a Vault Edition. Stern charged $4800 or so (street) for Iron Man VE. Old game, cheaper to do because they designed it already. It has as much or more stuff on it than AFM. If Rick can't do that model for it then I'm personally out as someone interested.

Cactus Canyon is only expensive because it's rare and the last game Williams did. Sell an "unlimited" amount and those two things vanish, so no way it's worth $8k. I don't care if you "finish" the code. We already know it won't be "Continued", so no point in calling it CCC when talking about it, that's not happening, epthegeek has said so.

Maybe people don't agree with me, but my take is if PPS/Whoever wants to keep building old games it's time to realize they're old games, they aren't made of gold, and it's time to price them like Stern, not Jpop.

MM and AFM aren't the same game, but they play pretty similar. Layouts feel close, lock shot is roughly the same, the center main target, be it castle or saucer, is the central goal, etc. I could totally understand wanting to only own one or the other, especially in a collection that wasn't that big.

MB is another fan layout, but it just doesn't play the same. You don't just chase after Frankenstein the way you do the saucer and castle to progress, the way you stack the characters makes the strategy different, so you shoot differently, and of course there's things like Dracula which is a unique toy.

They come from the same era and thinking, but I wouldn't lump all three into the same pot.

You're not missing much:

"Doug at CGC just called - first production game off the line is up and playing with no issues and in final test today at Stern!

[size=78%]We will get pictures Mon/Tues.[/size]

I (Rick) am flying out Monday to the Stern site to 'bless' the first one (either late monday or tuesday).

Production officially underway.

Rick"

Good lord jfh, of course you can be interested in it. But why not just sit back and wait until people get their games at this point? What more is there to be said now?

It's not like anyone is about to drop out now that they're rolling off the line finally if they've waited this long. Who are you arguing with really?

Um, this isn't Rick's forum, why is he dictating rules here about publicly posted information? Rick man, run your site however you like, but once you post pics to the internet that's that baby.

Looking good!

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Because I understand copyright law when it comes to the fair use of imagery, so please don't try and bully me. As I told you, take it up with Robin, this isn't your forum and you have no authority over me here.

Jack did the same thing to me (with no legal basis to be clear), and looked like an ass for it, but Robin caved to his wishes, I'm sure he'll do it for you too.

But I want to hear the rules from the people who run the site, not you. It's nothing personal, even if you're being ridiculous and trying your hardest to take your moment of victory and still find a way to make people sour. Seems silly, I say congrats on reaching the end of a lot of hard work.

This is where we discuss pinball. This is where the bulk of the buyers already are and have been from the beginning. So no, I'm not going to listen to this ridiculous notion that we're not going to share the pics here. If Robin wants to not allow it then fine, I'll respect his decision, but he needs to make it clear that posting photos here isn't allowed.

I can't believe we're even having this conversation, it's just silly.

Shrug. The dick move is expecting people to not share the photos. Post them to your own forum, make that the first place to get news, just like Stern does with Facebook. By all means! But to expect us to not be able to post and discuss the photos here? Crazy. Robin can make that call, if that's the kind of site he wants to run then let him say so, I'll respect his ruling either way.

I don't sell my pinball mods anywhere but Pinside. It's my contribution to the community. I'd never go to some other pinball forum where someone posted a picture of my translite design (happens all the time, people link me to it) and throw a tantrum that they take it down. That's preposterous. These are discussion forums, for goodness sake. Beyond that, from a business perspective, not wanting people to see and discuss my product is just backwards crazy town.

I'm sad that we're even having this discussion, is this really what it's come to? The premier pinball discussion forum on the internet reduced to deciding if it's okay to talk about photos of the return of Medieval Madness?

How is it devalued by posting a picture of it? I post nice high rez pictures right here for free. By all means, post a picture of it. Post it on your blog, in a forum, knock yourself out. I'd prefer people didn't try and sell the pictures I post. Just like I'm sure Rick wouldn't care for someone bootlegging Medieval Madness pinballs, in some Chinese factory. Or to be more realistic selling bootleg MM translites with the Williams logo for MMr machines.

And I support that 100%, he's got the license, he can control that. Please don't bootleg Rick's stuff.

But to say "don't show the pictures of the game, that are publicly posted on the internet, here, where the massive majority of my customers I've been talking to since day one hang out"?

Doesn't that strike you as incredibly lame? Again, if Robin says "my forum, don't do that" then what can I say but "okay"? Until then I don't take commands from people who aren't mods or admins here. And if someone thinks I'm a dick I'm okay with that. I'm not doing to be one, but so be it. I'm not even in on MMr, I just resent being told that photos are verboten. And I think people defending that policy are misguided on it.

Sounds like a plan to me!

Fair enough. Thanks Rick. Wish MMr and your future projects nothing but luck.

I had a new stack of emails from Rick today still freaking out that his copyright is being violated because his photos ended up in a forum discussion thread, and he tried to call me. Apparently has the wrong number or something, which is good, because I certainly don't want to have a conversation about it. So much for letting it go and being a reasonable person.

You win Rick, I certainly won't post your photos again. Mostly because I don't want to have to keep deleting your emails and PMs and who knows if you'll manage to hunt down my proper phone number eventually. We all know you love phone calls, but I don't have anything to say.

Let's be clear: If anyone thought I was disputing Rick's copyright I wasn't, it's his. All his.

Just another person who's happy to be all smiles and hands open on Pinside when it comes to asking for money, and then wants to get all cagey and control freaky when those same people have the audacity to want a little info on what's happening with all that money.

I'm still glad the games are rolling off the line, everyone who paid up deserves one. Hope they fix the LCD tearing and manage to colorize it and it all comes out awesome.

Don't thank him too soon, apparently he didn't actually get over it since he started harassing me again this morning.

Yup. I just posted a handful of public photos for the people who weren't going to go to another forum. So that customers and potential customers could see the good news with their own eyes. What a jerk!

Somehow Rick's decided I'm personally out to get him because of that. Which takes some crazy logic, but whatever. Then he posts that he's over it, and looks like the reasonable guy. I thanked him even. Nothing personal about. We moved on.

Was I being defiant and telling him to talk to Robin if he wanted the pics down? Sure. I don't take orders from someone else. But I'll respect Robin's decision if he thinks it's not fair game.

Now Rick is suddenly all on my dick again. I'm tired of getting emails from him, I CC'd Robin myself with a link to my post, what more does he want? I told him if he keeps sending them I'm going to just start posting them publicly to Pinside. I'll keep anything prior to that warning private to be ethical.

Own worst enemy, I swear.

You know how companies post pictures or videos on Facebook? Pics of their new game on the line for instance, Stern does that. Inevitably someone posts that they don't have a Facebook account and asks for someone to post the pics here. And someone is always nice enough to.

Does that somehow mean the company in question has lost the copyright to their work or is being materially harmed? Nope. They're probably delighted that their social media strategy is working and the images are being spread to the masses. No one is trying to sell MMr postcards here.

It boggles my mind that we're even still having this discussion days after I thought it was publicly resolved amicably.

Fair use is a tricky thing, it can often boil down to one of those "I know it when I see it" kind of judgement calls. There are general rules, but they're very transmutable.

Generally speaking though you want the usage to be transformative. Meaning that there should be some kind of criticism or commentary accompanying the images that makes their use an essential part of your thrust.

I didn't add any such thing. I certainly could have, I think everyone can agree I'm perfectly capable of typing too damn much.

Honestly it doesn't really matter. Because Robin can take down something whether it's fair use or not, we've seen that. He's not a copyright law judge, he's just running his forum how he sees fit. I don't always agree, see my argument with Jack, but I respect that it's his playground and his rules.

As for the rules of Rick's forum, he's free to enforce those as he sees fit there. He could ban my account for instance. It wouldn't be difficult to discover it there, I didn't hide it. What he doesn't get to dictate to me is what I post on Pinside. He needs to go through the official channels for that. I'm stubborn that way.

Meanwhile, here it is days later, and we're still talking about this stupid subject because out of the blue he decided to start contacting me about it again after saying he was dropping it. I was certainly over it, the point had been made, people had seen the pics, I'm struggling to figure out the reasoning for stirring it all up again. I mean, if you really want me to act like a dick then you can keep poking me until I give in and do so I guess.

Either way I will no longer be posting PPS photos here. My annoyance at people not being able to see what they deserved to has been outweighed by my apathy towards doing anything that promotes this project any further.

I hope the games come out great and everyone loves them, and Rick goes on to make more that people want and those go well too. Just to be super clear I have no agenda and no personal beef here. My hope is for happy pinheads, and if people make money making them happy then good for them.

The photos I want to see are the ones where people are unboxing them. Anything else is just hype anyways at this stage. I'm sure the packaging will look like cardboard boxes.

I'm delighted to hear that coloring of the DMD appears to be actually happening. Curious to see what kind of options they put in it, ColorDMD has stepped their game up lately. Hopefully the screen tearing goes away with that too. It's not a huge deal really, but it was pretty obvious at Expo to me at least.

I'm also curious to see what the translites look like when they're next to other games. I wasn't really that impressed with the ones I saw at Expo. Looked like inkjet prints, a little too washed out. I'm pretty picky about translites though!

I asked other people what they thought and they noticed too, so I don't think it was just me, but I don't know if those were final or not. I'm kind of guessing they were, my suspicion (with zero actual evidence) is that these are being printed more "on demand". The reason I think that is that PPS is offering those Getaway translites with the custom license plate. That would require easy one-off printing to make happen. (It's a really cool idea by the way)

The process my printer uses for my translites isn't ink based, it's photographic. So RGB instead of CMYK, since it's light based instead of dithered ink. One downside to the particular way we do them is they're a little on the dark side when they're not lit up. The tradeoff though is they really light up beautifully, no washing out at all. To me that's the most important trait.

Haha, this is true! We covered that story pretty extensively actually. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/08/monkeys-selfie-cannot-be-copyrighted-us-regulators-say/

This is what Rick wrote in response to me three days ago:

So, I have no idea why he's flipping out again, but his words were "post more and more content" so I dunno what you're sad about. Unless you just think he was lying?

I love this part that Rick wrote:

- one switch actually is wrong per print, and so a longer version of the actuator was made after confirming per original games (and consulting with Gomez, etc) - it works fine - mainly because the software (per Lyman) never figured it would be correct (lol)

It's funny how some people bitched about Stern building the games, and yet, here they are, able to go down the hall and ask the original programmer about how the software sees a particular switch. Love it.

Damn my libelous, slanderous quoting!

35 a week is awesome. Who the hell else can beat that??

From talking to people I suspect that the price would have be closer to $4k for titles like that to actually work.

If you haven't seen the digital Pinball Arcade version here's a quick comparison of the face change. Notice how the nose and features have been tweaked so it can't be said it's the actor anymore.

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