Without schematics made public?

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/stern-spike-schematics-coming-this-month/page/4#post-4870757

The drive transistors on the node boards are not surface mount and can easily be replaced. Some of the earlier boards had design/manufacturing problems on the surface mount equipment which made them fail way too frequently. The idea is that the operators and home users will still be able to replace the common components that fail in the field because of shorting or whatever. The only difference is the board is smaller and mounted under the playfield instead of the backbox to save miles of wiring. Go back and look at SAM. Plenty of surface mount there too, but I changed my share of failed transistors with no problems on SAM games.

Problem can easily be solved by Stern just lowering the price as they must have a huge mark up. But that's there decision i guess. They are the only ones who manufacture those boards so technically can charge what ever they want (and they do lol) I guess only downside to this for them is ppl may avoid buying there machines.

I wasnt aware of that, great news.

Sorry, to clarify I meant at Stern's actual cost to provision the boards, not that they would be completely free. Just no markup / not a profit center for them.

I don't think it's practical to expect many people to become knowledgeable with debugging and repairing these surface mount boards. I'm not saying it can't be done but it introduces a lot of new barriers vs the traditional through-hole technology. Better if the boards can inexpensively be swapped out and then sent to Stern or another 3rd party for repair, with the refurbished boards re-entering the market as possible future replacements.

Research and Development is not cheap and is factored into the prices. You can’t just sell the boards for the amount it costs to fabricate. There’s a lot more to the equation.

Completely agree but the prices these things go for they are way marked up.

Stern probably does not want people to buy their boards and build their own machines from them...so if you make the sum of the whole system prohibitively expensive, you will exclude people from doing that.

I seriously doubt that plays into it. There's like one or two crazy people that are capable of doing this sort of thing, and it's for the challenge...not the cost savings.

Hell, I would argue Stern should sell Spike stuff to homebrew hobbyist like Multimorphic and Fast boards. Not make it a core part of the business or anything, but send an email to sales and talk to a human to buy some stuff to play with. Seems like a way to start cultivating more design talent to replace the designers aging out of the industry.

I think their boards are simply expensive because of low volume and R&D. Who knows how much money they spent to develop the Spike and Spike 2 hardware, associated software, and developer tools.

Lol. This would never happen. It’s almost impossible to get any game specific parts for Stern games.

So? they are a business.

The griping about prices never ends yet somehow games keep selling out.

I was thinking a homebrewer that goes into selling actual production games, like Spooky.

Why would Stern be against that? I'm sure they'd license Spike for the right price. Then they get a taste on all the games being sold that they don't make.

Multimorphic powers Spooky and American Pinball afterall. (Of course if I was one of them, I probably wouldn't want to become overly reliant on Stern)

Oh yes this is why they don’t care and keep prices high as people just keep coming back and asking for more why we have 1k toppers

Has anyone looked into replacing the dual core processor on the carrier board with a quad core like George mentioned Stern would be doing soon? I’d like to use a quad core on my Aerosmith for smoother playback of live videos I used to replaced the animated backgrounds with.

I imagine it wouldn't help if the game code isn't programmed to take advantage of the extra horsepower. A computer doesn't automatically know how to split the work load from a dual to a quad core. (Assuming the CPU is the bottleneck)

Good point. Those CPUs are cheap enough where I’d give it a try if it was socketed though.

Those boards likely have an integrated GPU with hardware for decoding the videos. CPU shouldn't play into it too much - it would take away precious cycles the machine needs in order to react quickly

maybe they do now a lot of the service menus and errors are in the old dmd format Now spike 2+ may not have an dmd out.
Now will spike 2.5? or 3 with quad core run older spike 2 games?

the linux kernel should split the cores on it's own.

I think that pinball 2K has better video with more ram / pinbox system with more cpu power.

Speaking with George Gomez about the upcoming series.
I wanted to put out a "how to build a pinball machine" video, but how much better would it be to have GEORGE tell you what's up?!
Exactly.
Stay tuned, we got a lot of rad stuff to come!

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It'd be great if George Gomez would let you film the full process over the span of a year. It'd be a fun documentary to drop as part of the new game reveal.

I'm definitely curious how he decides on the direction a layout will go once he has his lower area set up, etc... Does he start with a large feature, or start with things like shots and then figure out which becomes a major feature, etc..??