You have the best way with words . I have to respectfully disagree though ... I don't think it'd take much to re-engineer the game. This is all opinion ...

As far as mechanical assemblies, the pop bumpers, ball trough, and flippers (with the exception of the way the whole flipper mounts to the playfield) are all based on existing designs. I think the slingshots could also use WPC-like assemblies w/o much modification. They used the old Data East style of pop bumpers (I actually like those).

Alien's big weakness is the IO cards. They're over-engineered CPU and solenoid driver wise (though much of the overcurrent detection circuits are disabled ... all of that stuff could be replaced with a fuse). I tend to think that the CPU they chose on the node boards was picked to handle driving the lamps (just a hunch ... that CPU is a lot of horsepower to simply read switch states, fire solenoids, and drive lamps). The game requires 4 of those ... that drives up the cost significantly.

The mini USB connector was a bad choice too ... that's a frequent failure point. The big-ass PCBs to mount lamps and switches isn't all that good too (some of the trace widths are supposedly very narrow ... that is not good in a pinball machine where there are lots of vibrations and you have a 6 mil trace connected to a via ... the trace can easily be broken at those kinds of connections). Plus throwing a USB hub into the mix isn't all that good for reliability (vibrations mean that you have a pretty good chance one of the ports could make intermittent contact).

However, I don't think it'd take much to engineer something reliable + you wouldn't need to touch the main computer that runs the whole show. When the Alien computer talks to the IO cards, it is talking to a USB chip that converts the USB packets into UART signals. The node CPU reads these like any other UART. It checks to see if the packet is destined for a particular node by checking some node address bits tied to GPIO on the CPU. You could, and I don't think this would take much, make a single board almost like a WPC driver board, to accept all of that information, translate it, and fire the proper solenoids, lamps, and switch reads without having to touch the game's main software ... this wouldn't be that difficult if you had access to the USB packet protocol Heighway used.

One final note, I wouldn't be surprised if Alien could run on any AMD A10 based computer ... they seemed to pick the motherboard they chose since it had 4 DVI ports. You *really* only need two display outputs (the in-playfield display is a mirror of the backbox display ... the other port would be for the airlock display). That opens the door to using a far less expensive CPU mobo.

I think it would all come down to sales projections overall ... the game is ripe for cost reduction and, ironically, the cost reductions would make the game as reliable as any modern Stern or WPC pin out there. There would be upfront engineering costs, but they wouldn't be all that bad. It all comes down to the number of people that would buy the game ... they'd still have to sell MM and AFM numbers to make it worth their while.

I wouldn't do that. They seemed to have used a (relatively) expensive microcontroller to detect the presence of a ball on the playfield. That's why the switch is $11. TI has an inductive switch sensor device that's very inexpensive in quantity and works great. Your cost for switches would drop significantly if they'd switch to the TI chip. Plus they'd be more reliable in the field.

So you're saying that Spooky has predicted that the world is going to go up in a ball of fire and piss soon ... and they wanted to jump into the rumor mill by releasing that pin! You heard it here first ... Spooky has predicted the end of the world by releasing TNA ... amazing. (this is how rumors get started ... ).

They must have some impressive financial backing ... that's a lot of salary, benefits, and other costs in that list . Cool!