Super bummed if T2 falls off your list. I think it would be the best candidate based on the criteria you listed.

While lots of people list TOTAN for a rule re-do, what most people really want is just some small tweaks to make it harder, although there could be opportunities to make the modes more diverse. Most of the complaints surround the fact that you can beat the game without actually beating any of the modes. You can earn jewels at the Bazaar and wish away mode completions. In reality, if people would turn up the difficulty settings a little, and decide that they will not select the Jewels, that fixes most things. Sure it would be nice if the game did those things for you, rather than purposely not selecting the best choices to artificially make the game harder, but the end experience wouldn't be much different.

Would love to see totan get tweaked! Especially with the tease years ago of a possible 2.0 version! Pm sent

I would love to see Totan get a few more things added. If it could be done with a simple ROM swap I'd be in for sure.

If you need a test machine I'd gladly let you use mine as a guinni pig.

Totan needs a 4 ball genie multiball. Finsl battle is 4 bsll. But standard play is just a 3 ball. It has the extra switch to know if a ball is locked and must kick out during multiplayer play.

A flying carpet video mode (steer the carpet)
Would be awesome but not needed.

More use of the pops.
And other ways to get Harem multiball.

Add a super duper jackpot, snake hit, ramp hit, genie hit.

Make a wish should be changed from complete mode to just select 2 random items.

All 3 wishes lit on the playfield should be collect a single jewl.

Ruby lit should be pick through to the item you want.
Not collect 2 jewels.

Final battle could still be the skeleton battle but when multiball unlimited starts it's not unlimited. It's timed. After 20 seconds no more balls return to shooter lane. you have to hit the genie a certain # of times and it increases each completion like the castles in MM. But at least 2 balls must be in play or you fail.
And on the final genie hit the magnet comes on and pulls the ball in the bottle.
Signifying you captured the evil genie.

But mainly Totan just needs the collect jewels rules changed so you are forced to complete modes. It makes the game more fun and challenging.

It's an awesome game suffering from mainly a single feature that makes it easy to complete.

That's my take on what it could use. I'm sure others have different ideas.

Definitely would be interested in a T2 rework of the rules. Great flow and plenty of shots that are not utilized to their fullest with the current code.

I've said it before, but this to me is the obvious choice. Great layout with typical awesome SR flow. TONS of them in existence. The game is all about the flow now, but could be so much more with even mid-90s level rules.

Been a while since the OP has gave us any progress updates. Hopefully he's too busy working on TOTAN!

Osric you have an STTNG which could definitely do with a little rebalancing away from the ridiculously lucrative video mode.

You also have a Junk Yard ... which is generally best run on prototype ROMs - but that excludes fixes of later code, and still needs some balancing or additions.

If you can test your stuff at home, it'll make it a hell of a lot easier. Especially for a first endeavour.

TOM needs a code update. There's a target that doesn't even do anything! The modes are boring and rules pretty simple. Beautiful game though, I still love mine.

Still no update for the op so I'm thinking this is a no go. Another disappointment starting a few years back with PPS and the 2.0 of TOTAN or CV and FH

I am on my third TOTAN. The first 2 I did not keep too long because of the ease of getting 2 jewels at a time from make a wish. I have had this one for about 8 months and I have not once chosen the jewels from make a wish---just hit the right flipper button and keep playing. I am now very happy with the game and do not plan to get rid of it. A small rule change on make a wish would be great-- like the person who mentioned it would take all 3 make a wishes to get a jewel.

NGG needs it, some of the code is simply broken. Adding an 18th hole wizard mode would be sweet

FH CFTBL

Maybe the issue is with integrating new rules with the original stuff; rules, sounds, animations. It seems like that may have been what killed the NGG project.

My vote would be Monster Bash.

Make qualifying MoR harder by adding more qualifications like X number of Combos, super Jackpot in Mosh pit mb, maybe a unique scoop mode that is available after all instruments are collected.

Add a mode or two that use the middle ramp.

Add a special multiball that starts when the Big Six Stack is achieved.

Rewrite the MoR wizard mode to be more strategic and modern rather than the same as Monster Bash.

my hope is if someone is to tackle re-addressing code, they fix the buggy, incomplete games like NGG & WOF for examples.

Man i cant agree more.
Fantastic machine, lots of flow, just need some small changes...

Iron Man would require new hardware for new code, as would all Sterns. Non-starter I'd imagine. Would have to be a full 2.0.

Lets do it...

New hardware??? Why?

Don't know why people start these kind of threads, get people's hopes up and then never follow through.

Getaway. Many ROM versions already exist, but each has a serious bug. It's a trade off which big you can handle.

Osrick you should seriously consider TOM for your project. Shoots better than totan IMO but needs rules to be fixed. Show it to your wife, see what she thinks! If you pick TOM let me know if your looking for ideas.

Gilligans island could do with a quick fix on the code.
Lover the 50 million shot. No more random multiball. That should be easy i hope?

Best canditates are those, which are closest to be "done".
Less work, faster releaes. happier people.

ACDC - Cannon mode inserts, Devil Horn inserts , a little bit tweaking some modes.
Adding a mode when lower and upper PF are used at the same time.
Done !

IJ (WMS) : there is a big bug in scoring .

Monopoly:
In multiplayer Game , it would be cool to lose points , if yozu step on a field that is owned by another player.
Maybe i missed it, but it would also be better, that rolling the dice and "locking in" are not as easy as now. you never miss a "street" , because you always move to an free place.

SOF, of course

All Stern games would require a full rewrite of everything, and new computer.

Unless someone leaks Stern's development tools / source code, no-one's going to be 'tweaking' their code.

Same deal with the other games too. PPS won't let someone just edit the code, so anything here would be re-written. That's what makes all these requests for games that only need small fixes so funny. Why would someone like this re-write all the code just to make a small fix? They only things that would be worth the effort are games that require large changes or near complete re-writes of the rules.

None of it matters since the OP seems to have gone dark.

I've never seen the thread before. Wth!? Shame on me.

@osric, @pinkopf: do you mind if I borrow your T2 rules ideas?

I'm not sure now many people know this outside of the p-roc community, but...

Besides being the developer for the Buffy pin and the lead developer for the SkeletonGame framework, I'm a college professor and I teach a unit on pinball programming in my computer architecture class. The machine we use is a proc'ed T2, and I've been doing this project for about four years now.

Originally the games were coded on pyprocgame, then I hacked in color support and they started doing color dot games. For the last two iterations they've been using SkeletonGame on top PyProcGameHD so the games have some nice graphics.

My students retheme the game (from software only) and I've seen everything from a generic Wild West theme, Zelda, Star Wars, Super Mario Bros (twice), How I Met Your Mother (!), and even an Overwatch game last semester. I really need to record and post some videos at some point.

The limiting factor tends to be the students' general lack of exposure to pinball. For most of them, the T2 in our common area winds up being the first pinball machine they really play repeatedly and start to learn the rules of, so their ideas for rules in pinball wind up being extremely limited.

A list of good mode ideas would go a long way to help the next class (this Fall) out. I have some ideas of my own, too, which I should probably find and share here.

I always threaten to really rewrite T2, since I've written so much code for it already and since Buffy is almost done, it's damn tempting.

People can and have changed WMS code, without using FREEWPC or a totally new system (like BoP 2.0). If it's non-commercial no-one is ever going to be successfully pursued by PPS or anyone else for it.

The problem with Stern titles is that people in the community CAN'T work on it, without a full rewrite.

But that's the point, he solicited ides in this thread to write new rules to a game and provide to others (presumably not for free).

Practical issues make T2 twice as hard. You're dealing with two different license holders.

So, on that note, my ideas for t2 share some similarities with the OPs. Here's an example:

----

T2 ideas:

The left database saucer as a "Command decision" shot like in STTNG. A player selects a mission mode and "travels through time" to start that mission. Some mini-modes can remain active for progress while mission modes are in play.

Idle mode/no mission mode active:
Future war: graphics and sounds show the battle in the future. Key shots award points, collect enough to power up the time travel saucer shot (think adding miles in Road Show). You need a certain amount of energy to enable certain mission modes. this lets the player not have to play the same sequence of missions over and over but also allows some missions to be harder to unlock

Why on earth would you assume that he was undertaking a commercial venture?

I suppose maybe he's gone silent because he always intended for this to be a personal project for himself. But given the effort that would go into this, if he had any plans on sharing this with other people, I never assumed he was doing it for free. And to be honest, I'm guessing PPS would get territorial with mere distribution regardless of money exchanging hands.

Pretty much the only people that have done that have been the original programmers. PPS can and has pursued people for releasing simple rom hacks. Rewriting from scratch via FreeWPC is more legal than hacking the rom, but you'll still get an angry letter if any of your dot animations look even vaguely similar

AFAIK only threats have 'worked'. Good luck to them trying to shut down a fair use hobby project with an author based outside the US.

Yeah but people are not going to want to put 1000s of hours into it when they know they're going to get threats

How about Demo Man?

...and dont give me "it's been redone already"...because that code is totally broken...how he sold it as bug free and got some others to say it was good was very dishonest imo....total waist of money...i got suckered...anyhow...

DM needs to use the left side a little more and is just itching for a good video mode. Add a combo champion in there and... voila.

OP isn't US based.

I'll bet they still try to shut him up though

Just get licensed by PPS....

I’m curious....all of the talk about rewriting code for T2..that it’s one dimensional. What would be the difference between T2 and Getaway? They both came out roughly the same time. Both are about the same depth of gameplay. There’s never talk about rewriting code for Getaway, but T2 is always the first mentioned when this topic comes up. What makes Getaway so much more “superior” in collectors’ eyes?

There's no need for a license for non-commercial hobby projects, which this is (I think?).

Re: STTNG the problem is that that the video mode guarantees relics every time once you've learned the order of the turns (which is the same every time). That's what then makes the wizard mode so lucrative.

Just making it 1 relic the first time, then other subsequent awards would totally change the balance of the game's scoring and probably make the game suddenly popular for competitive play.

It'd incentivise completion of other modes and make the game a lot more fun.

I'd say it'd be an ideal first project as you own the game, and it's a small amount of work for a big gain.

Pinsider soren made a new code for a lot of games including STTNG.
In this code version the video mode is scrapped.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/four-new-pinball-software-mods-dm-sttng-hs2-jy

TOM + new cabinet art + autoplunger + new code = Best pinball machine ever made.

I suspect that's basically the idea for the CGC remake.

I'm aware of it, but there's no need to scrap it. Just not to give relics after the first completion.

Guardians of the Galaxy could use a code update.

Funny timing for this thread to get necromanced.

My students came up some fun themes on the T2 last month (Portal, Star Wars, Starship troopers, and Harry Potter), and after the semester ended, I decided to post my own WIP port of a simplified T2 game to SkeletonGame. I figured it would be helpful to future classes and other would-be SkeletonGamers...

https://github.com/mjocean/T2Game

I would say TOM, TOTAN, CV, and MB, in no particular order.

I think those games have great layouts, artwork, and features and would be incredible with deeper code/more modern code.