The translite is photoshopped into these pics:

http://www.planetarypinball.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/MM-PreProLeft.jpg
http://www.planetarypinball.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/MM-PreProFront.jpg

You can see the translite is finely detailed, while the dark areas of the cab have camera artifacting.

No drama; Stern does it all the time and I assume it's just because he doesn't have a final translite yet. Just a fyi that the pics set off the photoshop detector

Edit, rest of the update looks really nice. Should be worth the wait.

It's not about a paltry interest sum... it's about the people who sold a game to pay off MMR and now have an empty spot instead of something to play for the next 3-4 months... Or those who chose to buy MMR over something available right then, and still have the same empty slot in the lineup

Rick,

Mid October is right when Expo occurs. Do you think there will be MMR activity on the line during the Thurs 16th factory tour, or will it still be TWD?

Hopefully you ordered from a disty who will refund your money. Judging from all the spots recently offered up for sale, and the continuous advertising of "new" spots available from various distributors (pinball star most recent), I don't think you'll have any trouble finding a MMr down the road should you decide to cancel

Yep, the market is "flooded" already and not a single machine has rolled off the line. We went from a 3 hour feeding-frenzy sellout one year ago to folks selling preorders for a loss in 10 months. MM is now being priced on its gameplay (which is very very good) and not so much rarity anymore. Compared to WOZ, Metallica, IM, ACDC, SM, etc... is it a 7K game? 6K? Doubt it'll ever drop below what I paid for mine in 1999

Only problem with the review is that it's coming from a MMr reseller. I don't imagine he'd be so vocal if the game stunk Still, they've had plenty of time to work out issues.. I bet the protos will play well. Will know soon!

They sold 1000 games in 3 hours, and have since offered (at minimum) dozens of refunds, if not hundreds, and it seems every MMr disty has "a few slots available" now. Restored MMs that sold for 15K sell for 10 or less now. The game hasn't gotten any worse all the sudden, and (some) demand is obviously still there, but look at all that supply! That, sir, is a flooded market. But you like to argue with everyone... hell, everything you ever post is either an argument or snide remark, so what else is new?

Stern doesn't pre-announce their games a year in advance. Stern doesn't take preorders either, or at least the disties aren't supposed to. It's certainly possible to have an oversupplied market for Sterns... just look at the people trying to unload Avenger games.

I watched the MMr feeding frenzy a year ago. I *participated* in it. To go from that insta-sellout to people bailing and selling a spot for a $500 loss just a year later is a huge change of attitude towards this title. Cal it flooded, oversupply, or just people losing interest... either way, demand has fallen off.

It's a pinball machine; we're interested in it We were in on one originally but needed the money for IMVE, and it didn't look like the new one would be substantially better than the old (which we have already), so got a refund. I'm very interested to see what we bailed out on... the 44.1khz sound will be nice, but inability to customize insert lamps, plus no proper fliptronics board were minuses. Rest is a wash so far. Hope to see the new games sometime this year, very curious about the emulation and platform!

Williams MOVED fliptronics to the power driver board in 1995; they did not CHANGE it. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of games built and shipped with fliptronics from 1990-1995. Some of the best pins ever belogn in that era. Fliptronics is the best flipper system ever designed, period. Yes, the playfield hardware is the same, but the drive electronics are not. Not even close. Maybe they will be as good as fliptronics, maybe not. I'm not willing to take the chance. When the game was announced, it was to be a 1 replica. What it became is not that, hence we bailed. What is wrong with that?

Look at this below. Dedicated power supply. Triple-staged drive: predrive transistor, TWO tip-102s and one tip-36c *per flipper*. "Designed and engineered by the number one pinball people in the world!" But not on MMR.

fliptr02.jpg

Here's the same fliptronic circuitry on the WPC95 board found in Medieval Madness original. Same triple drive, same circuitry.. just the bridge in its power supply was replaced by a pair of diodes in the upper right with the rest of the power supply diodes (they dumped all bridges in favor of discrete diodes).

If fliptronics was so unnecessary, why did they *specifically* bring it forward, completely intact, when they cost-reduced the WPC boardset back in 1995?

wpc95pwr.png

The small board in the head was irrelevant.. as long as its emulation is spot-on, it's fine... all it does is produce signals. If the timing and frequency of the signals match what the original 6809+ASIC would generate, we're golden, and I'm confident they will get that part right. The actual drive electronics underneath the game were not shown in detail til much later, and that's where the important parts are.

Stuff like two coats of clear and the better sound reproduction (not stereo) were reasons we signed up in the first place. Neither of those affect the game, they just make it look and sound better, just like the gold trim we were originally promised (and later changed to mustard yellow). Flippers are *the* most important part of any pinball and I don't want a cheapened version. It might be just as good; we will see when they ship! Games at a show get beat and the power often sucks so I won't judge based on that and really won't know til one is in a home or business to try.

You don't get it. The games are sold (the ones that are still sold, that is). Money and space has been allocated for them and the effect on the market has already occurred. With shipping supposedly imminent, whether or not games are actually delivered is somewhat irrelevant.

Of course it's opinion. Anything that can't be measured or quantified as fact is instead opinion. I can understand the love for modern stern flips, they are pretty snappy and provide decent control, but the power fade from cold to hot is too great (fans help), and overall I just prefer the feel of WMS.

In the future, if I toss out a claim that cannot be proven/disproven as fact, please append "IMHO" to the beginning... most people get it, but I guess I need to spell it out for you.

We were hoping to sell the original and keep the new one Too many question marks to stay on preorder, so will just wait and see. At this point I'm actually more interested in CC with a CCC package, so interested to see how the MMrs perform.

Higher-fidelity sound is always good, but it'd be nice if they used some good coaxial speakers in the head. The ones they are using appear to be (and sound like) basic single cone full-range generic speakers. PP and FF will likely have upgrades soon. I don't think MMR uses different-sized speakers like the original did.

Two games is a prototype/sample run, not production. Note the rest of the line is TWD.

Stern can't put them into production til they get UL approved, and I'm sure Rick will announce as soon as that happens. Meanwhile, TWDLE.

...waiting with baited breath for The Pin LE

Seriously, I thought that was a disaster, with the non-servicable playfields and lots of games returned. Was it successful enough to repeat, or is its inclusion a joke?

They sold out within hours at expo2013, but in the year since, many people have gotten refunds. I don't think all 1000 LEs are currently sold, but sales may pick back up once games start hitting the street.

Many of those had no doubts about PPS, they just decided to buy something else in the meantime. The pinball world didn't stand still waiting for MMRs to be produced.

Apples/oranges. Rick removed a feature that should have been included, but did not drop price. JJP added a feature for an extra cost, but the original game/features/price did not change. Plus you're making an assumption What if the better decals cost more than 400 and the removal of originals from BOM is already incorporated into the difference? This is unlikely (I think the decal upgrade is a big profit point), but possible. Rick's mech removal is much easier to calculate.

Is apples and oranges. You're only being "charged twice" by JJP if you elect for the upgrade, and that (again) assumes the price differences are there. Jack's comments are not BOM figures. Rick *removed a feature* from the game, after the fact, period. Not the same thing.

After the announcement. Coin mechs are an expected part of a new game and their omission wasn't revealed until months after the game was announced. Coin mechs omitted. Better decal option added. Omitted. Added. Different.

This is a stupid argument and I'm done. Agree to disagree.

A "couple weeks" from this weekend is Dec 8th. Let's assume they have all the parts at Stern ready to go by then, and the line starts up. A few days later you have games rolling off the end. But, then they need to be boxed and sent to Chicago Gaming for inspection, and then re-boxed and shipped to distributers, and then finally shipped to end users. Hopefully the disties can drop-ship right from CGC to eliminate this step. Each step adds time, and that's where you bump into the holidays.

It's conceivable that a few squeeze out before 2015, but only if they bust their asses hard and don't run into ANY additional issues. Remember, if one part of the thousands needed for the game isn't right or doesn't show up in quantity on time, the line gets held up.

I think seven hits... one to extinguish each of the blue lamps, and a final one for the BFTK insert.

Do you honestly think Rick is extending anyone a vote in this matter?

I wonder if Rick himself gets a vote, or if CGC simplay told him "first come the golds, then the blacks..." The guy running the floor is not going to want anything complicating assembly... would prefer to make a batch of one color, slap S/N and game numbers on them as appropriate and ship 'em.

The idea that someone would spend an extra $300 for a low number is just nutty IMHO... but whatever floats yer boat

A personalized plate is quite a bit more visible than a pinball game number. They're also more meaningful than, say, the number 8 or 6 or 3 or whatever on a pinball machine.

Cargument fail

Yep.. it's now crate, throw on a label, match label to address on spreadsheet, ship. Can I be the guy getting paid $100/game to match labels to addresses?

Skit-B said it best.. "Making pinball machines is hard!!" Remember, this is CGC's first game since Vacation America. Give 'em some time to get back in the swing of things.

If the existing computer cannot currently refresh the DMD frames without tearing, will it have enough horsepower to handle the additional processing required to colorize on the fly?

Have they sold enough MMR games to justify the time/expense needed to colorize the frames?

Does colordmd own a copyright on their frames, thus requiring PPS to choose different color palettes (or to license the current images from colordmd)?

So many questions, so..... much time Any answers out there?

You can't do it that way, because the game is running emulated code. The hypervisor can only look at the data in the virtual display ram and colorize from there - you can't add color to the original ROM code. They cannot screen-capture every possible frame that would ever be displayed and try to map to redrawn color frames, because far too much of the display is dynamic and cannot simply be mapped.

EDIT - replied to rare before seeing the ensuing discussion. I don't want to say it's impossible, but it's definitely more complicated than many people think. I remember even the colorDMD guys saying MM was harder than the games they did prior due to a new almost sprite-based system for some animations. There are dynamic frames generated where the colorize routine may have to determine whether a particular pixel is part of the score or part of the background or part of an animated object moving on the screen. Now run that routine for every one of 128x32 pixels, then 15 times a second, and pile that on top of the hypervisor functionality...

The game runs on the beagleboard. That board already has to emulate the original CPU and translate the input/output to the new hardware system. The existing frames are tearing, which could be an indication the CPU is occasionally lagging when emulating the existing display. Asking it to perform the colorization process as well ... will it be able to? Remember, colorDMD has its own biult-in processor handling everything, separately of the MM CPU.

If CPU horsepower was an issue, they could add a board between the display panel and the beagleboard that basically acts as a colordmd, minus the display. Heck, colordmd themselves may be able to do it if CGC cannot. It may be harder to decode pixel data from the LCD output from the beagleboard, however.

You might want to give the colorDMD a shot in your real MM... it is pretty impressive.

I don;t know whether it was the fact the speakers on the game I played were wired backwards (out of phase) or the fact they were using extremely cheap speakers, but I was quite underwhelmed by the audio quality of the test games. Sure, if you listened closely you could hear the highs that didn't exist in the DCS audio, but the overall sound seemed pretty muddy. Thinking people are going to have to upgrade the speakers to fully realize the better audio in MMR.

Interesting that CGC isn't listed on the flyer, anywhere. Is this the first time a pinball flyer has completely omitted the game's manufacturer?

Can you two take it offline? Get a hotel room or something?

For AFMr, PPS could charge 10K if they:

- Tracked down Brian Eddy and hired him to design an updated game/ruleset using the existing AFM playfield (AFM 2.0)

- Hire a programmer (would be nice to pry Lyman away from Stern briefly) to implement the new rules on a more powerful PC controller.

- Include the original AFM via emulation, just like MMr. Bonus if it was also accessible from the new game, like playing MM from within DOTT

So we know Stern games are often shipped with dings and scrapes... what are the chances that a thousand (or however many they sold) MMRs can get packed in a box, loaded in a truck, driven across town, unloaded, unpacked, setup, opened and inspected, broken down, packed back into the box, loaded, then shipped to end user or distributor... without getting more dinged and scraped games?

Has anyone with a Vacation America (or other CGC product) ever tested their service dept? Are there testimonials out there? What about arcade legends cab owners? There's some Amazon reviews, including one review from 2008 that says CG ignored their emails/phonecalls about a broken AL, and that's about it.

Specifically, there is a bit of RAM called the framebuffer. It basically contains/represents what is currently on the screen. The game software can write to this RAM.

The DMD hardware that turns the dots on and off will look at this RAM at specified intervals, say 15 times a second. It'll paint the display (refresh the dots) with whatever is in the framebuffer at that moment. If the game software is slow at updating the framebuffer, one of these snapshots may catch it in the middle of an update. This means the top of the DMD shows the current frame while the bottom shows the previous.

If the hardware is fast enough, you can write your software to always be ahead of the framebuffer reads, which eliminates the tearing effects. Or, you can at least try to time it to skip the reads.. this takes even more time and would lead to jerkier updates if the hardware is too slow. All original WPC programs/hardware were designed to work with the DMD in sync, and basically never 'tore'.

Neither does a routed beat to hell original

Do you really think someone at CGC (or China) wrote that emulator from scratch? I almost guarantee you there's some mame/pinmame origins in there, just like all the other emulators..

Nice one there Mr Bally...

JAN 19th, not Feb. At least til Jan 19, then all bets are off LOL

Likely that the art has already been printed. Rerunning it would cost $$$.

Would you prefer that, or would you prefer answering the question 100 times over as each buyer calls you individually?

Seriously, one-on-one communication via telephone is about the least efficient method to deliver information to your customers. It's nice and personal, but horribly inefficient. If there's anything this project needs now, it's efficiency. I guess if you snailmailed updates it could conceivably be worse... but seriously: one official status report sometime before 10am EST would have cut short a lot of the guessing and posts, and saved YOU time having to deal with it as well.

TRAINWRECK 1

5,000,000

Rick doesn't need to change his behavior, he just needs to get the game out the door. Which I'm sure he's working very hard at doing, so people like you stop b*tching about it.

I'm officially nominating you and whysnow as the biggest pinside windbags. All this talk talk talk and nothing to back it up

I called him out because of post count... talk talk talk talk... i'll sell if not in 2014.. oh wait maybe not, more talk talk talk

Who is more obsessive: JFH with MMR, or you with the thumbsdown campaigns?

Are you actually keeping score? How many times have I 'thumbs downed' you in the last week?

I can definitely tell you the only posts (of anyone) that I ever click that thing for are posts I truly disagree with, and even then I don't use it very often. I can't remember if I've ever clicked any of yours, but considering your pettiness, I probably have. I definitely click the green one a lot more than the red one for most people

Congrats on hitting the beginning of the end... I hope the recipients enjoy their new games! Looking forward to unboxing pix and hope to be able to try one out in the wild soon.

I've had them both for 15 years. Definitely different enough. AFM is a fair bit faster and more intense game; MM is a little deeper.

Screw the price, here's the REAL AFMr question...

Will PPS produce proper JIGGLY martians for AFMr (and for us to buy for regular AFMs), or will the remakes be stuck with the crappy RFM stiff, non-jiggly martians??

Buy a used Stern pro with complete code for less. Like, 2K for a WPT

A few shows and one barcade is hardly proper field testing.

Stick one out at Modern for a couple months and we'll see how it does. These games will need to survive 50K or more plays to be profitable on location.

Touché

Agree. I had all three, and sold the MB. AFM and MM just have better playability, despite the similarities. MB is fun but ALL your points come in the wizard modes, and the game gets kinda boring after a while.

Way, way off base. So where did the other 2000 go?

Has anyone heard of, or known of anyone hearing of the parting out of a MM? Or the dumpstering of one for simply being worn out?

I can't imagine there being LESS than 3500 MMs currently. It was one of the first games to get lots of parts reprod, and with the consistent demand since 1998, only someone ignorant to its value would have parted/trashed one without trying to sell it as-is first. And every beater I ever saw did sell, often quickly.

None of that makes sense. Overseas... who cares? Pinball is an international market.. any games competing with MM will sell to the same markets, so it doesn't matter where the games are.

Fires, tornados, floods.. have killed what, two known examples? (PAPA)

Do you have ANY real evidence to support that ridiculous claim of ops destroying MMs? That kind of stuff happened in the 60s, not the 00s. I mean, one dude in central IL (sounds pretty rural to me) does not mean all ops were that blind to market conditions.

I think the fact that 670 of 4400 happen to be listed here demonstrates even more the fact almost all 4400 still exist. This is a niche website and only a fraction of MM owners will post their games. My personal MM is not listed here and I know of a few others in town not represented as well.