I highly doubt they'd re-release licensed games. The licensing world is really different now and I doubt they could afford it.

No, but now you need to negotiate every part separately.

When WMS licensed, say, Demolition Man, they got *everything* - the name, movie footage, still images, actor's likeness, music. Now that's all separate licenses. Check out the ordeal Stern went through for PoTC.

Yes, but Star Trek is a current game at a $6500 price point, not a classic Stern at $2500-$3000.

Why pay a license fee at all when your most popular classic games don't have one?

They seem to have sold a ton of Whoa Nellys.

Vid is making a lot of sense. If they could produce The Pin for $2,500, they could produce Stargazer for the same money.

All the dev work is done, and all the parts to make it already exist, like the LED display replacements. But there'd need to be some dev time to use Spike. Although, they have the work done on Whoa Nelly that they could translate to this (ie. the tiny DMD could be mounted inside the coin door.)

I thought of that, but that would require using the Bally wiring and all the other boards. And LEDs would require more work.

Are all the Bally boards reproduced now? Including the power supply?

Don't think of it as an old Stern, think of it sitting in the gameroom store at the mall all shiny and new where a non-pinhead might see it and buy one classic-looking game for his man cave.

I would imagine it would be cheaper and easier to just get PinMAME running on Spike than to put all the repro Bally boards in there, or just recode the games from scratch natively. I mean, we're not talking about complex rulesets here.

One platform is easier to support, and easier to build.

PinMAME has already done all the hard work for them, I don't imagine it would take more than a couple of weeks to interface it to the SPIKE system. I mean, the P-ROC guys have it working pretty well for the much more complicated Sys11 and WPC MPUs.

I'm 100% positive there's a Linux port, and ARM isn't an issue - PinMAME runs on Raspberry Pi and that's an ARM chip, isn't it?

It's the internet and it's our hobby. It's fun to speculate.

No, you just use a driver to match up the PinMAME calls to drivers in the SPIKE system. This is how PinMAME on P-ROC works - you map WPC calls to lamps/coils and translate back in switch matrix events.

How do you think Pinbot 2.0 works when in 1.0 mode?

Retail price on those displays is $54. It might be about the same price as a DMD in the end?

Yeah, I'm just dreaming out loud here. At least it's a dream that could possibly come true.

Also, a modern cabinet but a classic playfield? That would be weird and turn off the primary market.

I think cabinets are made by an outside contractor anyway? So it's just part of the BOM calculation to do classic-style cabinets. I wouldn't expect them to be identical but at least they'd look right.

I could see the classic coin door being crazy expensive, that's a big slab of stainless.

The Whoa Nelly Stern is selling is basically a completely different game from what it started as.

It had a small LCD and 4 reels, but a classic Stern would have 5 LED displays... might actually cost more.

Like I previously said, the Bally LED 7-digit displays retail for $54 each, so wholesale would be less. Maybe $200 for all five displays?

The crazy custom cabinet.... you mean, like if Stern re-tooled the line to make the crazy custom cabinets classic Stern's (or Ballys) had? Same thing, different is custom.

I'm pretty sure someone else physically makes the cabinets. You can buy a WPC cabinet as a flatpack for $200, I imagine this would be about the same or cheaper.

Whatever work hours it took to make the developers Whoa Nellie work on Spike (or whatever's in it) will be the same work hours it takes Stern to make a classic Stern work on Spike.

Hmm, maybe. There'd definitely be some time to get it working.

Most of the BOM would be in hard parts like all the drop targets, which would need to either be adapted to current Stern parts (bleh) or get the old ones remade ($$$?).

Off-topic, I wonder why they went with what are essentially slot reels. I guess they might be off-the-shelf parts they could buy? Cheaper than real solenoid-driven reels?