Uh yeah! That's sounds awesome.

I have thought for a long time ... if someone could do new licenced software for the WPC titles, they'd be on to a winner.

Think about it, if you could do the upgrade programming as per above, burn it onto a chip and market it for say $299, who wouldn't want to buy it? You'd have basically a new game for $299. You'd sell a bunch of them.

rd

Sounds great. New code would be amazing for it.

New code = Good!!!
$299 = definitely no good...

$299 is fine because you can't copy protect an eprom.

You want someone to do it for free?

rd

So who is gonna step up and do this?!

Not I, said the fox!

I wouldn't know a 0 from a 1 with coding.

But if I did, it'd be a winner for sure and I'd be into it.

rd

Though swinks had a very nice idea, I find extremely annoying people defining price tags on smthg that they have absolutely no clue on the effort of making such things happen....

I also have no idea, but I won't guess the value of it. Could it be more? Less? Honestly don't know, but I definitely wouldn't pay $299, and I'm sure many people wouldN'T cough up $250-$300 for it...

I would be all over a rules expansion for Creature..... Or MB..... Or NGG...... Or a host of others. If it were at all practical we would have dozens of 2.0 upgrades by now. Maybe someone who knows something could chime in and raise my hopes, but I won't be holding my breath.

Unless you have access to the original development environment I don't see how this could be possible. People are able to make changes to code (WPC competition roms for example) by viewing what is changing in realtime on an emulator, and modifying it. I make it sound easy but that's very time consuming and not an easy task, and it's usually limited to scoring changes and balances. Adding entirely new modes would be extremely difficult and I am not aware of it being done on DMD games.

I just pulled a figure out of thin air.

It'll take 100s of hours to do a project like this. Programming, play testing, reprogramming ...

People are paying $400 USD for a chip to make their MM displays colour. They are paying $2000 USD for a 2.0 kit for Bride of Pinbot (albeit that includes some hardware as well)

So $299 for a whole new game rom to completely change your existing 90s pinball machine would be a pretty good deal I would think.

The problem would be, no doubt someone would rip the Roms and burn copies. I have no idea how to stop that happening.

rd

It's impossible to prevent that with a simple rom swap. Now someone could get creative and create a daughterboard that installs in the CPU socket that adds some decryption circuitry to decrypt the modified rom but then that means designing and selling additional hardware to make it work. Doubt that anybody would do that.

Double feature with a 2nd movie from the same era would be cool. If it's a lights out mode then how about "The Invisible Man". It works similar to looking for the creature but based on the various targets and switches instead of the 3 holes. Lights off until something is hit so you track down where the invisible man is hiding. Put a timer on finding him or he moves to another location/leaves/end mode too!

Add a ball through the snack bar is cool though I'd stick with just 3rd ball since that's what the machine and trough are set for.

A video mode like the arcade game Jungle Hunt - using flippers to swim away from the Creature.
A video mode like the arcade game Tapper - using flippers to serve customers are the snack bar.

It's probably the intelligent option from a business point of view. It wouldn't cost that much more for a small board, yet you would protect the work you'd put into it.

rd.

What about licensing issues?

"hypothetically"

Any code well done would be great for any title. You could always change it back to original.

Hyperthet´ic`al
a. 1. Exaggerated; excessive; hyperbolical.
Hyperthetical or superlative . . . expression.

----------------------------------------------------

hy·po·thet·i·cal (hī′pə-thĕt′ĭ-kəl)
adj. also hy·po·thet·ic (-thĕt′ĭk)
1. Of, relating to, or based on a hypothesis: a hypothetical situation.
2. Conditional; contingent: the hypothetical meaning of a clause beginning with if.

How did Dutch, 2.0 BOP?

NGG if nothing else to fix the bugs and add some cool things for completing 18 holes. I owned a CFBTL and really miss it. Would love to see a software update.

Its doable. WPC is easier than say Alvin G, Capcom, or DE as at least there is quite a bit of information on how the basic code works. The problem is someone has to reverse engineer the entire rom. This is not 100's of hours of work. It is 1k's. If it is a pet project for someone like ChadH has been doing with DE games sure. Someone saying wouldn't be great *if* and doing the fun part, IE new rules, but none of the actual work.

No one will pay for the work. The people throwing out the ideas have no concept of the effort involved and they are too cheap to fund it. This is why PPS never got anywhere with code updates. Simply no way to realistically fund it.

Easy to get around. Don't distribute the updated roms. Distribute a patcher. No code infringed on.

Exactly. It would have to be a labour of love, that's for sure.

Would it be better to start from scratch rather than re-engineering the Williams stuff?

rd

They wrote all the rules from scratch to run on a small embedded PC that drives the machine via a P-ROC board. The original bop rules can be run on the machine using pinmame, but not extended in that way.

Some here are talking about new roms, which could be coded from scratch using FreeWPC. The number of people who have completed FreeWPC titles are relatively few...

error. Disregard

Not so much that it'd be better, that you'd have to unless you're licensing with PPS.

My only real complaints with Creature are the repetitive, easy, and fairly high value left ramp combo, and the random distribution of modes. In casual play the latter doesn't matter as much and wouldn't be a necessary change, however in tournament mode that should absolutely be removed. One player getting a pretzel and the other getting Unlimited Millions is just flat out unfair.

As far as the left ramp combo issue, the left ramp should really be given a use in main gameplay rather than just being looped over and over. Hell I'd rather it just do nothing instead of what it does now.

Anyways, other than that I think Creature from the Black Lagoon is one of the strongest Williams games. There's great value in the simplicity, challenge, and replayability. The multiball being only two ball with no add-a-ball is a fantastic challenge that really makes you play in a much more safe, controlled, and protected manner, where losing one ball means losing out on the massive prizes that lie ahead. Most modern multiballs with tiny jackpots, very long ball savers, and add-a-balls that provide even more long ball saver fail to recreate the intensity and excitement that Creature from the Black Lagoon presents. Even the glitch with the multiball playfield multipliers makes for an incredible asset in your game strategy, it's spectacular and wasn't even intentional!

Also as far as theming, atmosphere, sound, lighting, and animation, I find it to be one of the best games ever made. Very, very little I'd want to change with this game.

absolutely right, I'm bummed when I don't get the pretzel!

I think the game is pretty perfect as it is.

So what hardware, software, programming language skills would you need to pull this of? Hyperthetical speaking...

Pinsider Aeneas was working on new Wh2o code.
New modes and everything.
He would be the man to ask .

That's me

Well there are a few ways to do it.
1/ learn assembler and get intimite knowledge of the wpc platform and you can hack the existing eprom (but it's more tweaking of rules then, making total new rules is very difficult then) - but you get to keep the existing rules. Very difficult to do..

2/ go p-roc. Disadvantage is that it costs more (new hardware to buy for everyone who wants to install the new rules). It gives you (total) freedom, you can create everything from scratch and add new things (new sounds, animations, color screen, ..). This is the most popular way at the moment (see CCC, Bop2, ..). It's an active project so a lot of help is available.

3/ Use FreeWPC. What I am doing. James Cardona's Demolition man new rules are probably the most known rom made with freewpc, there are also new rules for Corvette and TZ.
Disadvantage is that the project isn't popular / active anymore (so not many people to ask for help, there's a lot of info but you need to find it yourself). But there's a stable, working version that you can use.
Advantage is that the rules get burnt to a chip that everyone can install in their existing game. So it's cheaper for people to put it in their machine.
You can only use the existing sounds, which is a disadvantage if you want to create total new modes and don't have good sounds effects to go with them.

You program it in C. While that is not the easiest language, I didn't find it that complicated to make new rules.. there are a lot of examples with the freewpc code of other game rules so you can always check how someone else did something. And there are usually multiple ways of doing something so while some code may not be optimal, if it runs it's ok
The freewpc environment isn't the easiest to learn but I documented a lot of what I encountered and others had also documented how to set up everything on your pc.

Programming skills are only one part needed. You need someone also with graphical skills (this is what I miss and where I'm stuck now). Just having some nice looking artwork makes a huge difference.. and you also need testers, people who want to look for bugs and help fine tune the rom (ie help with when lights/flashers or short sound effects are activated, ..).

As far as licensing, normally you can't re-use anything. My rom is called bigfoot (and not whitewater2) and I don't re-use any graphics. Then you're legally ok.

Edit: link to my documentation :
http://www.flippers.be/freewpc.html

So using FreeWPC would be the way to go, but I think the idea is just to add some additional things to the code and not to re-write all of it. Is there a way to get the original code into FreeWPC so that you would only add lines here and there?

No that's not possible. With both freewpc and p-roc you have to rewrite everything and can't reuse any existing code.

who wrote the rules for this ear of games?
maybe they are still working?

It would be cool to incorporate pinball Mike d's mod as well. Still the best creature upgrade as of now , in my opinion.

20161019_114908 (resized).jpg

So are we gonna get a new code?

The way I look at it is I love the code as is, needs to add to the strategy not subtract. Very minor changes. All I'd like to see is

After 5 left ramp shops the ramp lowers for 30 seconds, each shot to left ramp resets timer.
Next would be 10, 15 etc. Each left raml shot will tier 1 million, 2 etc.

Multiball stays the same except stategedy stays the same except if you find the creature and save the girl it starts a 4 ball wizard mode.All multipliers are set offor the previous 2 ball multiball mode. That way it's risk reward. Stack your multiplier before starting 4 ball or just start to ball. This gives a highly rewarding but risky depth to the game.4 ball will have 5 second ball saver and cannot be reset. 2 ball reset to snack bar as normal.

I feel these changes would open the rewarding part of the playfield alot of people have a hard time to get to while this adding a deeper level to multiball and the flow.

What you guys think

That would be awesome

It'd be a very minor addition. Sadly I don't got the skills. Maybe I could learn but no experience really

Creature only has a 3 ball trough and it has no autolauncher.

You can do it also with a 3 ball MB and no auto luncher... But a few tweaks on the code would be fine...

But if you have to buy Hardware Like a p-roc board vor stuff it might be better to upgrade the code more, in case of the Hardware pricing

What you described is not really "very minor". It's because you don't have the skills that you think so. Nice ideas though

I find it really ridiculous that people would balk at $300 for a new set of rules for a game. The rules make all the difference in pinball - they are literally half of what makes a game fun to play. And if you consider what these games cost, let alone what parts/mods prices are, $300 would be an absolute bargain basement price.

Having 2 different sets of rules is almost like having 2 different games, if the differences are significant.

Compare this hypothetical upgrade to any of these...
- Invisiglass $300
- Topper $200
- Mike D Hologram LCD - $450
- LED OCD + LEDs - $300
- Toy car with LED headlights $50

All of the above added to a single game would NOT enhance the game play as much as a well done new ruleset. It wouldn't even be close. I think Creatures rules are great as-is, but an alternative version with Wizard modes would be absolutely awesome if done right. You would definitely want the ability to easily choose original vs new ruleset though.