The lightning flipper story with games like BSD and Fish Tales seems to be generally known. If I'm not mistaken, there was a large German distributor that asked Williams to make the games tougher... shorter ball times... and those flippers were a solution.

I've always thought that was interesting... but didn't realize that at least one (maybe more?) German and European (excluding France) received games had factory settings that were decidedly more difficult than games shipped to US, Canadian and French distributors. At least that's what I stumbled across in BSD's manual... you can see in the attachments, the Factory settings for German delivered BSD are the same as Hard settings for US/Canada games.... and the German Extra Hard settings are certainly harder than top-tier US Extra Hard settings.

In this case did the German/European games ship with an entirely different ROM? Or can you switch to German settings in a domestic ROM?

Would be interested to hear what some old timers/ pinball historians have to say about this...

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Did you guys realize that the difficulty settings were that different... or different at all?

My BSD has the L-1 rom. There's an option for European scoring but the difficulty settings only offers ex easy through ex hard. There's no option for a US or European version of difficulty settings.

So.... those European games must have shipped with unique European ROMs?

No one knows if there are European specific ROMs?

Does anyone here have a BSD re-import? I'd be curious if you went into settings and found the German/Euro difficulty settings...