Quoted from DanMarino:I was trying to award a replay credit at a low score since the MPU doesn't have a free play setting.
Both Alltek and Weebly boards have free play roms installed for Bally games.
The original boards you can get freeplay capable roms burned (you do have to find them or the patch for them, some are at:
http://www.pinball4you.ch/okaegi/pro_soft.html).
The styles of freeplay I have seen are:
always max credits
display shows at least 01 credit all the time
credits can show 00 but the apron lamp lights indicating credits/credits can show 00 and just starts a game without the apron light
credits at 00 will electronically 'flick' the coin door switch so you can hear the sound byte for adding a credit
There are likely others I'm forgetting about. I know the classic stern games when I added them I was playing with different types of freeplay - I find that most people at shows that are sort of 'in the know' about credit displays would look at the credit window and see zero and not even try to start a game, so when I took games to the local show I would set the credit display to not show, or put a note near the credits display "game is freeplay just press start".
I think the another reason as BigAl56 says re: management is that they didn't want to have operators calling up and saying "the game is in freeplay somehow, I'm losing money!"
The freeplay market was so tiny back then I'm kind of surprised that Williams included it in their games. There is a specific test in the OS rom code for "max credits=00" enabling the freeplay (it wasn't a side effect of that setting, for instance).