For the millionth time I would like to know if anyone has ever paid MSRP for a Stern machine? Street price is nowhere near that.

Actually he has been here a year, but yeah ever thread he has posted in has been something negative about JJP.

Maybe more by weight, but nowhere near as much fun. WOZ gets the least love of any game in my house.

Haha, just because they have a color display does not make them ahead technologically. The JJP system may be powerful but putting a huge, bloated PC in a metal box in the bottom of a pinball machine is a square peg in a round hole. SPIKE is far more elegant, easier to manufacture, easier to assemble, easier to maintain, easier to make profit with and so on. It can also do stereo sound and multiple color displays.

They have used high tech automotive communication to eliminate nearly all of the switch and lamp wiring for simple RJ45 cables and at the same time moved the coil drivers right onto the bottom of the playfield to eliminate another mile of unneeded wiring. All of this increasing reliability and ease of troubleshooting. Not to mention the cost of the materials and the elimination of the need to fabricate nearly as much wiring by hand. Also, the base of the cabinet is basically empty. This makes it a lot easier to work on compared to that metal box in the bottom of the cabinet.

See above.

See above. Not sure how saving all of that material, manufacturing labor and simplifying the system wont save money?

No to both. Never said it did. I was making the point that Stern is not behind in technology. In fact they are ahead, even if JJP system is more "powerful" from the standpoint of graphics.

Oh well, it is only pinball. STLE sits right next to WOZ in my gameroom.

Maybe it is time to get over the spite and lift the hood on a new Stern and enlighten yourself. I am certainly not smart enough to do so and I know no one from Stern will be defending themselves here any time soon.

Just to bring this back to topic. I am looking forward to playing Hobbit. I love drop targets and the idea of 15 individually controllable drops is intriguing to me.

Sorry, but those transistors are not surface mount. Easily serviced in the field or replaced with cheap spare board and service the broken one at the shop. Much easier than hanging over the machine to get into that terribly placed metal box... my operator friends love SPIKE already and are not so nice when they discuss system JJP.

Not worth debating any more if you did not even know this.

I think you may be wrong there at least on WWE. KISS would make sense to be in stereo so hopefully they got that in place.

Once again, not sure why this is being repeated? The drivers are not surface mount. Just like the SAM boards. Everyone said they were surface mount when they came out on WPT, because a lot of the parts like the CPUs and memory were. Ended up that Stern had smartly put through hole parts in the locations that might have to be field replaced. I have replaced a few of them and have been thankful for this.

The transistors are pretty plain to see in the picture below. How cool is it have the drive transistors for the flippers and the ball trough and shooter lane so close to the actual coils and save all that wire and harnessing and labor? Makes troubleshooting all that much easier not having to follow wires into the backbox and put the playfield up and down to hook up a meter (or drop screws down into a metal box in the bottom of the cabinet). Nearly everything is on the back of the playfield and yet it does not look crowded. The SPIKE system is definitely an evolution if not a revolution in pinball systems. Round peg in a round hole.

Spikedrivers.jpg

I have STLE and WOZ LE next to each other and the most obvious difference is the lack of GI lighting and flashers in WOZ and the different displays. Aside from that they both look like money. Lets not even compare the game play LOL.

I'll start by saying JJP tech support is top notch. Lloyd and Alex have really done a great job and are seemingly available 24x7x365 over the Internet to help with problems.

The problem with your statement is that we are all "customers" here on Pinside whether we have bought a JJP machine or not. We are the customer base, plain and simple. The snarky comments made frequently here, at shows and on RGP by JJP, Alex and/or Keith are the source of the hard feelings including the "customer is always wrong". You reap what you sew. JJP has plenty of people and the mods here to defend them. They don't need to get involved and throw barbs here. If they had kept it positive, these feelings would not be so predominate.

Funny thing is when I go to shows and gatherings where people talk privately one-on-one or in groups, the negative feelings toward JJP are much stronger and more common than here on Pinside. I sometimes have to find myself defending JJP even though I am no fan of the pompous way they do business.

And most of them preventable if they had thought to do what was done in every other modern pinball machine: put mylar in the pop bumper area. Duh?

Forgot the "IMO" on that statement. Star Trek and Metallica were both released since ACDC and both are great games (IMO). Both are also rated higher than WOZ, not that it matters.

Two of the best pins of all time had terrible designs that caused the playfield around the VUK to be eaten alive starting on the first game played until there was a huge hole there and missing artwork. I'm talking of course about AFM and MB. Imagine if Stern or JJP put out something that got eaten up like that and not just on a handful of games? Every MB and AFM had that problem.

I thought this was fixed by an EMI seal and some filter magnets? The problem is with static electricity in the low humidity months. Get with Alex if no one else can help you.

The digital manual on the machine is useless, especially if the machine is BROKEN. The coffee table book is an awesome option for people who don't actually work on their machines themselves, but the game should come with a black and white printed version.

They don't have to print even half of those pages. A lot of them are fluff that is not needed for field work. Just the basic schematics and wiring diagrams and diagnostics, etc. Probably 50-75 pages would do. It is nice to have them inside the machine when you need it.

No need to tell me about killing trees or digital material. When you work in aerospace, you assume anything printed more than 8 hours ago in outdated and throw it away or verify it against the latest files in the configuration controlled document area online. Printed manuals at you desk gathering dust are a no no when the ISO9000 auditors come a knocking. I've been working in my present engineering job for over 6 years and have zero manuals or printed material at my desk at any given moment. Everything is on my laptop or sharedrive and everything is up to date. That type of control is needed at the factory where the pinball machine is built but not at the end user.

That is a broad brush painting a lot of people as losers! Surely in a few cases it is true, but your broad brush hit and insulted a lot of people who don't deserve it. I work hard and don't read or post to pinside from work. And I certainly am worth every penny I am paid.

While you like to project a holier than thou image of walking on water, you have made blunders and been called out on them. To think you haven't brought a lot of it on yourself is foolish. There is a big difference between talking about delays and saying JJP is going out of business. I doubt there are more than a handful of people on Pinside who think JJP will go out of business before every single Hobbit is produced. Yet you lump anyone who criticizes JJP into that small group and even worse you have created a straw man where people actually wish JJP to go out of business. Paranoid much?

I think it is self explanatory. He was done and harassing PMs brought him back to send a message.

Quite common for them actually.

I agree with most of what you say and live my life that way regarding goofy mistakes and pity for pity sake, but I think you missed the point being made here in this thread. Maybe you are not well versed in the history because this has been going on for years. Rather than thumbs downing your post, I will ask that you re-read posts 613, 609 and 621 above.

They didn't bring it on themselves by getting down and slinging dirt in the forum. They simply mind to their own businesses and give us updates.

I doubt that severely. They will be making them for as long as they are selling just like WOZ.

That may be the "direct cause" in a very few cases, but the "root cause" in all cases was neglecting to put in $0.75 worth of mylar in the pop bumper area like every other game came from the factory since the beginning of time.

I'd like a smaller LCD in the speaker panel and not "in" the backglass. The same size display as in a 14 inch laptop would be perfect and insure mass production pricing. This will leave room for a full size backglass/translite, which I don't want to give up. Personally I think the JJP machines look goofy with that big display. It is simply too big.

Why is that? The LCD will most likely be cheaper than the pricey LED displays they have been using. As long as they keep the development costs down for the on-screen content, the price should not go up nearly that much if at all.

That would be even more expensive from a development standpoint having to develop two systems, not to mention the LED displays are really expensive compared to LCDs.

It all depends on how the use the display. Sure if they try to do a lot of fancy stuff it will take more time to develop. On the other hand they may just start out with colorized dots like ColorDMD. Either way, I look forward to getting rid of those crappy LED DMDs. Not only are the LED displays themselves more expensive ($300) than the old plasma ones or an LCD, the 8x8 grid pattern looks terrible. Not to mention reliability - I have had an LED go out on one. Good riddance.

Since when?

Maybe its a good thing it bombed at Expo? It mid-June 2015 and its sounds like they are still working hard on basic features of the software for another few months. If it had shipped in 2014 as planned, it might have had Alpha software. Now at least it should ship with fairly complete software.

I need to work on my scathing tone a little. Seriously though I like the Hobbit theme and love drop targets, so would be disappointed if this is not a really fun game. My feelings towards JJP are another matter and don't block my desire to play a game with 15 individually controlled drop targets.