Really is looking great!!

Same here! I know I'm going to be down the production line a little but once it arrives, we'll have a Hobbit Party down here on the Gulf Coast, have some folks out and stream the play on Twitch.

Seeing the games on their FB profile in final testing is exciting, to me anyway - progress. With all these day-one orders, I wonder how day-one orders actually get divided out amongst direct sales vs distributor day-one orders, etc. Is it a round-robin scenario where 15 games come off the line and 5 go to distributor a), 5 to distributor b),5 to direct sales, etc? Anyone have any insight there?

At any rate I'm looking forward to my Hobbit, whenever it arrives I know it will be great.

Out of the box, we left the glass off my 75th for the first dozen or so games to tweak a few things. Simple stuff, like adjustments of the magnetic gate, a few plastics that needed to be shifted and stuff like wire-ties under the playfield being close to coil movement (gravity, from being stored upright). I didn't have to call JJP for any of that. That said, I've called and emailed for other stuff not related to my pin directly and I've found them to be very responsive. It says a lot that you can email and get the owner of a company back in the same day.

I was impressed enough, in fact, that i got on the list for a Hobbit LE within a couple days of WOZ 75th showing up and recently moved that order to a Smaug slot. I haven't asked for estimates on my game delivery, when it gets here, it gets here. I'll bet it shows up before my birthday in April but if it doesn't, I'm not sweating it - I know plenty of folks on here were in before me. (Though I did buy from a distributor's day-one order batch.)

A friend bought an early ECLE (very early). He had some light board failures, which were common and some clear coat stuff (clear coat hairline crack around a saucer, he said). JJP replaced the light boards quickly (1 week or less, he said) and they sent the guy a new playfield with no hassle whatsoever. It is worth noting, I guess the original playfield clear coat issue wasn't THAT big of a deal because years later he's still playing on the original

Much of the pin hardware is Williams stuff, so parts will be available for that. My understanding is these light boards are pretty proprietary as is the power distribution system. There are currently 698 pinsiders with Woz listed in their collections, 128 with The Hobbit listed. In the off-chance something happened to JJP one day, I'm quite sure someone would step in and fill the need for any parts. The games have a mostly fanatical following and the community it just wired in such a way that plenty of small shops fill in those cracks.

That said, I don't think JJP is going anywhere but up. I think they are clearing their throat and about to sing.

But, I'm a unapologetic fan.

Is your Hobbit's VGA port free, like it is on WOZ or do they have that tied up for the storybook screen / thing? If it is free, you can go into a VGA->DVI converter and into a game capture card, using the capture card as a source in XSplit (or whatever you are using) to get pure game audio and video. If it isn't free, you can still do something similar with a pair of splitters. (Split the DVI, then go into a DVI to HDMI converter, then split the vga, vga->hdmi converter.)

The elgato capture card works pretty well, though I don't know if most notebooks would be happy powering two at once

Thanks! That changes things a bit for someone wanting to try to do an apron LCD mod like has been done alot on WoZ. Good info!