Isn't the pretty much the setup every Golden Tee/Incredible Technologies game has had for the past 10 years?

I wouldn't worry so much about that, especially with the SDD. Will be just as reliable as any other pinball circuit board. My concern would be the fans, and dust from the playfield clogging up ventilation, etc.

It's a SSD not a standard HD and there are no moving parts on that mobo either so mean time between failure is significantly lower. SSD's are rated in write cycles. Since the writing will be minimal you can expect long use time out of them. Significantly longer than any spinning HDD.

There are many SSD's with failures. Hopefully they are using Intel consumer based or enterprise based drives. Specially when they use raid 0 with 2 memory units and one failes...drive is gonnnneeeee. They also have so many read/writes etc, they should be reliable but there will be issues.

Those are not SSD drives though. Platter based disk is pretty reliable and old tech. SSD is still semi new for consumer base/grade. If you do some research you'll see there are some companies with high failure rates etc. And with one of the coder's on this forum saying he is locking the system down, how well can we image the drive etc? Will it be key locked to the motherboard, like xbox? For security I don't suspect it will be an open drive. They will lock this down somehow so people cannot just plug the hdd in and mess with the code. Thus making a copy may be difficult. Once out of warranty, will the owner be forced to buy a new drive from JJP that is over priced etc? What is that cost?

Where is their memory for X stored and written to Y? Just questions I'm throwing out. There will be SSD failues. As reliable as things are, they will have failures. I'm curious to see how we can fix these and what it will cost down the road.

Is that a shaker motor in the front left corner of the cabinet? Making a physical image of a disk is trivial, it can be done no matter what type of security or encryption mechanisms are used. The kicker here is is they are most likely using an obscure file system, and within that file system various methods of 128-bit and 256-bit encryption (I was told this). Even if you could decrypt every file on the disk you would all have to reverse engineer the binary executables and decode/decompress the asset files if you want to extract something or make any mods. The only way to break in to a system like this is to find some weakness to exploit that will allow you to decrypt the system's kernel loader/hypervisor, which will in turn allow you to decrypt other files since the kernel must decrypt any modules it wants to use. The key is to hijack this decryption algorithm at run time and make dumps of various decrypted modules for further examination and exploitation. From there the whole system can be opened up like a zipper.

I wonder how you would update these games when a new version of the gamecode is released? It doesn't look easy to insert an USB stick since all of the electronics are in the box. Maybe they will have a website and you update it wirelessly?

Great article, but I kinda just want to play it now.

Enterprise class not consumer drives

Most have locked down disks yes. And I think there is some block level copy you can do? But you see disk for that for sale. They lock their drives down. This is new and I assume JJP will lock the drive down, so we shall see what can be done.

Ah thankfully Yeah they should be pretty damn good then. But still my question remains for out of warranty, 10 years from now. How do we replace them or reimage one? Pay for it from JJP or do it at home?

Full disk encryption isn't beneficial in this case. The code base will be locked down but not via fde.

For people that don't know wtf you're talking about, is this good?

Once out of warranty, will the owner be forced to buy a new drive from JJP that is over priced etc? What is that cost?
Where is their memory for X stored and written to Y? Just questions I'm throwing out. There will be SSD failues. As reliable as things are, they will have failures. I'm curious to see how we can fix these and what it will cost down the road.

These are good questions. I know the SSD failure rate is still very low, but maybe I'll present these questions to JJP to see what they say.

Well do we even know what they are doing for file system type etc? I mean xbox had it locked down until they cracked it so copies could be made etc. Unless you or someone working on it knows, otherwise I guess we wait and see, but I'm just curious.

holy crap you're in Duluth

Why would you need to copy it? You'd need the boardset to run it and the gamecode will probably be on the JJP update site anyway.

Backup. For when/if the drive fails. I have no intent of using it for malicious reasons. I know hdd's fail...its inevitable. I'd want a backup to put in when it did, so I wouldn't have downtime. The game code will not be on the site, updates maybe. But the HDD will house the OS and code...not something they will let the user touch.

I would imagine JJP could overnight a drive to you in case of failure. They will need to have some sort of plan in effect after basic troubleshooting has confirmed the failure.

board? the SSD HDD. And how could it run without the drive having the OS booted up?

Sure, but under warranty maybe. What about years from now. Will you have to find old stock? or pay out the wazoo?

Years from now the drive won't be available, it will be discontinued, as all computer parts. A new drive would be loaded with the code since the drive is standard. Did you ever have a hard drive fail on a laptop and Dell send you one? Same thing. You'll get what's current, not an old drive.

Wow the detail is amazing.

I wish Stern would put in the upgraded speakers etc..,

I want to work there SO bad! Place looks awesome, might as well do something you enjoy right?

Rewind to 1975, and my my first visit to Chicago. Main purpose was to see the Bally, Williams, Chicago Coin and Gottlieb factories (Rock-Ola and Seeburg would be on my next trip there). Exit the Kennedy Expressway and stop at IHOP. Then proceed to Williams. Actually drove past it as it looked nothing like the massive building with a logo as shown on the part catalog covers. Then went to Bally which was way larger and had many additional buildings on Rockwell & Fletcher streets not to mention the glass silkscreening operation on Oakley almost a mile away. Then to the dump called Chicago Dynamic Industries. Very friendy people working there and let me right on the plant floor and up to the parts department filling up a box with schematics, part catalogs and copies of every flyer they had.

When we headed west to Northlake, my dad said you watch, Gottlieb will make Bally & Williams look like pikers. Boy was he right (as parents usually are) That almost brand new Gottlieb facility was huge and modern.

The point is that all four of these companies, whether in a large, modern plant, diminutive old building or something in between, all turned out beautiful, fun coin operated pinball machines.

There aren't very many of us are there?

The factory pics look nice.

....years from now the drive won't be standard. It is old tech. We won't be using SATA3, it will be something new. I know what you are saying, but it doesn't make sense. This isn't Dell. Dell doesn't lock their HDD down. I don't think you fully understand my question....

JJP is going to use an enterprise SSD as said by someone above me. Great that is a longer lasting, more reliable hdd. It will still fail at some point though. JJP will also lock their hdd down so Bob can't just plug the hdd into a dell desktop and pull the data off. The drive will have to have a special block copy or a hack to get around some odd file system that will block a user from accessing it, or any plain OS. So just putting any hdd in will not work. Also when the HDD fails, how do you get the code/OS back onto it? What if JJP fails or does not stock HDD's? How will the HOU user replace the hdd and have the code/os back on it, in the future (years from now), without paying insane amounts of money for a oem original? Also since it is an enterprise level SSD hdd....it will NOT be the price of what you guys see off newegg or best buy, they will cost a lot more.

1. I can see being able to make a backup to a spare hdd for a user.
2. JJP selling them forever?
3. a hack comes out to get around any security and allows backup or new hdd.

I just said the drive won't be locked down and will be clonable. It's also running a standard distribution of Linux. It will be fine for 15 years or better. Folks like me can get the codebase to run on more modern linux kernels ( > 3.x.x.x ) if need be. Do not worry.

After reading that entire article, I have to say I'm impressed as hell.

I am not POSITIVE about this but I think northvibe IS "folks like you." He was an impressive young man when I met him! Odd sense of humor but that just made him more likable!

I plan on making a backup of the drive using a Forensic Dossier

Very cool, thanks for posting!

Ah I couldn't remember if you were the one that was working on that, so if you actually knew or were guessing.

Perfect then. Clone, keep image on SAN and never worry I had no fear of the OS etc, just being able to get the machine backup and running from a home users perspective.

hahah TG!!! Hey you know how to fix big laser printer/scanners

I knew it was going to be PC boards in there. Everytime I asked Jack about the boards he'd dodge the question. As long as they keep making that style of powersupply and jacks, it's ok. Hopefully we won't have a situation like p2k, where the CPU /motherboard becomes obsolete 15 years from now, and you can't keep the damn things going anymore. Because they are unfixable. I don't mind computer CPU's, i'm just thinking long term.

Man, that is some top quality hardware. Very, very impressive.

This is great thanks for the info!

Like I said, you can make a physical one-to-one copy of any drive, regardless of what's on it. It could be all zeros, it could be your sister's PC hard drive, or it could be a drive that's part of a 24-disk RAID used in an FBI data server. As long as you can make a raw copy of the data you should be good. Just use software to write that image bit-for-bit to the new drive, if for some reason you can't get a free replacement from JJP.

ow their power driver board plugs straight into the USB port. The speakers look impressive too. I'm a little bit worried about all those fans because in my experience fans, with age, always lead to noise

Yes, standard bushing fans (which typically cost less than a dollar). with all the money jack is spending, I bet he's using nice bearing fans. As others have said, these are dirt cheap and easy to replace. I can already see the first mod now, LED fans

led_fan.jpg

Sounds like the PC (motherboard) plugs in via usb, so if tiny pic's could run the game, you could just run it from a usb stick sized pc in the future (if that could store/hold it). It runs linux, so there are endless possibilities for compute power. Future proof we are!

Sure, but there are certain circumstances a normal user or copy method will not work. And that is when the drive is locked, for instance. Xbox 1 hdd.

partclone, clonezilla, altiris, etc.. All will work no problem.

Clonezilla being my favorite.

Correct,

You can do a block level copy of ANY data including the Xbox 1 HDD but the issue becomes that the data isn't usable. In a lot of ways the FDE used unlocks based on the UUID of the machine itself when its first cloned.

Block level duplication cares not what the data actually is. Its just 1's and 0's as far as its concerned.

Yeah, I mean't it wouldn't be plug n play after copy was done. At any rate, thank you for letting us know I think that is a great way for the data to be saved in-case of some tragic hdd loss and use for years to come.

Can I have my VNX fast cache run the disk, then fiber channel it to the pin? hahhah.

The short answer is that unless specific efforts are made to lock the image to a specific disk, cloning a drive is trivial. This is independent of making sure the code can't be changed. A lot of what Northvibe and Alexlevy are talking about makes guesses about JJP's intentions.