I'm a simple man and for me it all boils down to this. I want Jpop to bust a F'ing move.

Right now Aaron has a personal relationship with Jpop that he has cultivated. Jpop told me during our conversation last week of how he personally likes Aaron and what he brings to the table. Aaron has invested a lot of his personal time in laying the ground work and has already formulated a plan. Aaron made me a believer per our conversation about all of this last Friday.

So my analyses for the straightest line, at this time in history is this: Jpop + Aaron = Results.

Edit: Aurich is way quicker on the keyboard than I am. I may have to un-friend him.

The future is entirely speculation. The past is as close as we can get to something that's "factual" in any given moment.

In truth any of us discussing either the past or the future is probably not terribly productive. That said, I'm pretty sure that's not what the internet is all about

...or giving the ball to the best running back in the league on the 1 yard line to win the Superbowl.

I don't think anyone actually cares what the hardware system is, they want to see a flipping game.

It's fantastic that some owners are now taking a more active role. Hopefully that results in some true progress, rather than just reveals of what's already done. It certain seems more hopeful.

So, that's the ultimate question - what's the date for seeing a working game with a ball that hits targets and scores points?

Said the man from Seattle. Bold comment my friend.

personally, i thought it was a great call...

I met the guys from fast and had a great conversation, keep in mind I was learning about their technology as business is my strong point, not boards and programming. Having said this I do know one thing....these guys are huge enthusiast and if their boards do and perform as they say they do, and they are prepared to work with John and get a flipping game by the PNW meeting, then the rest of the business issues ie cost/future cost etc can be worked out in advance to avoid and "bad" business practices down the road...its just business. Lets get er on and get these things flipping I, after talking with these guys have some confidence they can do what they say and in a timely fashion.

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John's had a functional (unfinished) MG game for well over a year. The software wasn't completely done, but there were some modes, and multiball, and a full service mode. As referenced by whomever that was that visited the shop and said "I played Magic Girl". He stopped paying the programmer that was working on MG at the time, so he (the programmer) didn't renew the contract they had an continue working on it.

I was incorrect in this statement. The EM conversion at Expo was running on a p-roc and drivers boards from pinballcontrollers.com (aka multimorphic, aka p-roc), but I believe it was using MPF, Brian can pipe in here and clarify if I am wrong on this.

I'm not sure who the entire team is at FAST and mission pinball, but I'm curious if anyone on the team has written code for a fully functional DMD style game, whether on FAST/MPF or on another platform.

MPF doesn't have display support yet, I don't think. Lamps and score reels, yes!

They may have come out with another version since I last checked.

MPF has full DMD and display support since the end of last year. I was at a talk in January where Brian broke it down.

In what way? More pre-orders? Free labor or intellectual property donation? Or just more feel good posts to lessen the pain of those who have thousands of dollars committed to this project for years, with still no clear end in sight? Is this the light at the end of the tunnel, or a train coming your way?

I would be demanding my money back at this point, sternly written letters are getting these guys nowhere.

I don't think they are writing any letters, they are trying to come together as a group and get the project completed. Is it what they had in mind on the onset? Nope, but it sure is better than hiring lawyers to solve their problems (and get no game and maybe no money).

Also, now many will really ha e the chance to participate in the process of making these games.

For sure. The passion and heart of the owners is what lit a fire under us to want to be a part of the solution. Not everyone is portrayed best in an online forum, but all of the owners I have spoke to are really great people. Gives the effort a whole new meaning.

Aaron
FAST Pinball

The MPF LCD support is pretty damn cool too. Priorities have been steered a bit by opportunity.

Aaron
FAST Pinball

I definitely hope to play ons some day!-

Pin blades AKA more artwork
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Tomorrow is JPOP's Birthday. Wish him a Happy Birthday.....at least.

Those blades look pretty good.

Hi Everyone,

I'm Brian Madden, one of the guys (along with Gabe Knuth) who's writing the Mission Pinball Framework (MPF). Sorry I'm a bit late to this thread. I haven't been following it recently as I figured it was just more of the same. (I hung in there for the first few thousand posts.

Anyway, to answer some questions people specifically asked us (in random order):

Rosh is correct, the Big Shot EM conversion we brought to Expo last year used a P-ROC with P-ROC driver boards.

MPF is open source (via the MIT license), meaning anyone can do whatever they want with it. So just because a project is using MPF doesn't mean that Gabe or I are involved. (Well, I guess we would be by association since we're writing MPF, and certainly we've prioritized certain MPF features over others based on requests from users, but there are lots of people building projects with MPF now.)

So the question about whether anyone involved in MPF has ever written a complete, fully-featured DMD-based pinball machine sort of depends on what you mean by "involved." I can answer that neither Gabe nor I have. But again, there are lots of people downloading and starting to build games with MPF, so I don't know what the experience level is with everyone.

MPF is hardware agnostic with a pluggable platform interface which can be used to connect to different types of controller hardware. Gabe and I have written platform interfaces for the Multimorphic P-ROC and P3-ROC, and the FAST WPC and Core controllers.

If a new hardware platform just materialized in front of us and someone said, "I want MPF to work on this," then we (or they?) wouldn't have to redo everything from scratch, rather, we'd just have to write the platform interface for MPF for that hardware. Gabe and I have focused our efforts on what's most useful for the community which is why we've only written platform interfaces for publicly-available hardware, but I know of at least one other open source hardware project where they are working on a platform interface for MPF, and we've received emails from a few other people asking about MPF on their hardware. Again, since it's open source software, so we don't know exactly what everyone is doing.

We release new versions of MPF every 3-4 weeks. The current version is 0.14 (the 14th release), though 0.15 is done and available in GitHub and we're just working on updating the documentation for it which will be done in a few days. (We're crazy about documentation. Currently we have over 600 pages of explanations, tutorials, how-tos, references, etc. The main documentation lives at https://missionpinball.com/docs, and the API reference is at http://mpf.readthedocs.org/ .)

We started MPF in June 2014, so we're 9 months in. The feature list of what we have done is here: https://missionpinball.com/docs/introduction/current-features/. Since we iterate rapidly, any statements about what MPF is missing are only valid for a month.

Rosh is correct that we're aiming for a "1.0" release this summer. That was an arbitrary date. To be honest, the whole version numbering is pretty arbitrary. I mean really how do you say something is "1.0," especially when you have enough ideas for 5 solid years of programming and you release a new version every few weeks? (Our multi-year idea list is here: https://missionpinball.com/blog/2014/10/the-mission-pinball-framework-roadmap-vision-for-the-future-of-pinball/ ) And of course just because we call it "1.0" doesn't mean it won't have bugs, and it doesn't mean that "1.0" is any more permanent than 0.18 or whatever was right before it, since I'm sure we'll have 1.1 a month later. But we appreciate that 1.0 is a big mental step for people, so that's why we decided to make it a goal.

Speaking of goals, we have two main goals for MPF: (1) To create a complete framework that allows for the rapid creation of games, and (2) to allow non-programmers to create their own games (whether they're updated software for existing machines or full custom machines).

The "non-programmer" thing is pretty huge for us. We believe that 95+% of a game's code can be handled with MPF's text-based config files, including scoring, modes, objectives, game logic, light shows, sounds, display, animations, effects, multiball, etc. Seriously, a lot of stuff in pinball machines-- even JPOP’s and new LCD ones--are about 99% identical. (Like the difference in DNA between a human and a chimp.) Our claim that you can do 95% of a machine with text-based config files is something that a lot of people don't believe. Our response? We're fine with it. We just try to keep our mouths shut and our heads down. Frankly we don't need to worry about this because we're not selling anything. MPF is open source, so if people don't like it, ok then. They don't have to use it. (Plus my favorite pinball machine is Road Show, so I'm already comfortable with people not agreeing with me.

As a side note, the "LCD versus DMD" complexity is an issue for the artists and animators and affects the computer power you'd need in the machine. It doesn't make a lick of difference for the programmer. From the programming standpoint it's just elements on a display, and the way you handle layering, movement, transitions, decorations, fonts, etc. is identical for both types of displays. Same for RGB LEDs versus single color lights. RGBs are more work for whomever's designing the light shows and lighting effects, but it doesn't make a difference to the programmer or MPF.

Anyway, I agree with Ben about a full pinball OS (or whatever you want to call it) taking 17-18 months. The good news with MPF is that everything we've done in MPF already counts towards that. So if someone started completely from scratch today and chose to use MPF, they could have their game completely done in a few months. (And again, if people don't believe that statement, that's fine, I won't argue.)

Speaking of time, I've been working on MPF full time since last June. My professional background is in IT, though I love pinball programming. That said, I understand the realities of the pinball industry and don't relish the thought of trying to make my money from pinball and hopping from project to project, wondering if I'll get paid or where the next meal will come from. So instead, I've simplified my IT life so that I now do contract IT work two days a week, leaving three days to work on MPF. (I call it "full time" because I spend 40 hours a week on it. Typically 12 hours on my three non-IT work days, and usually another 12 hours on the weekend.) I do not view this as temporary. Between Gabe and I, we spend 50-60 hours per week, every week, working on MPF. We love it so much that we don't want it to end which is why we're excited that we have 5 years of ideas.

It's true that we haven't written a complete game in it, but that's more because we're spending our time actually writing MPF itself. I think at this point MPF has been run on at least ten different machines. The hard part of pinball software is not the actual programming, rather, it's doing the complete game and rules design, and it's putting together all the assets. (Designing the actual light and flasher shows, building the animations, recording and editing the sounds.) But once that's done, the programming is just linking it all together. And once you make one mode, you can make 20.

Whenever I say this, people (who tend to be non-programmers) always protest, "What about this weirdo device or that crazy mode?" But so far I haven't seen anything that can't be figured out pretty quickly. MPF is very pluggable, so when we come across something that's weird, we write a few lines of Python code to handle it. That's the "other 5%" of the 95% of stuff that can be done in text-baed config files. Example: The crane unloader for the Deadworld in JD. There's no "standard" MPF device for that, but we have motor and magnet support, so it was just about 20 lines of Python code to override the Deadworld ball device's eject() method with one that uses the crane, and boom, done. Took an hour.

If a brand new machine that I had never seen before showed up at my door (assuming the hardware was hooked up), it would literally only take a few hours to have a game running on it. I don't mean just having flippers flipping and knocking a ball around--I'm talking an actual playable game. Players, shots, scoring, DMD and/or LCD with lots of real info, etc. Give another few hours and we can make some light shows, and another few hours and we can make some modes.

In fact, I will put my money where my mouth is there. I just picked up a Demolition Man this weekend. It's stock, and I haven't written line one of config for it for MPF. Once we finish up the documentation for 0.15, I'll spend one full day with it to see how far I can get and I'll blog about it and post videos and stuff. (So let's say next week for that.)

Anyway, to tie this back to JPOP, I guess my point is that if he does decide to go with MPF, someone (whether it's us or someone else) can have his machine legitimately running very quickly. (And if he chooses a hardware platform that's already written and tested for MPF, then it's even faster still.) Of course whether JPOP uses MPF and what hardware he chooses is up to him and his team. Frankly I don't care either way, I just really really really want to see those games get built since they look sick.

Sorry for the crazy long email. Back to 0.15 documentation for me!

Note to Jpop customers not in the Facebook group.

I'm urging everyone to meet at Chicago Expo this year for an expedition to Zidware. Things have taken a positive turn but I don't like leaving things to chance and reinforcement is never a bad idea.

I'm gonna put on a pair of mustache glasses and hide in the middle of the group for that!

For those intending to show up in disguise.

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I pray that by expo visiting the shop is not the only way anyone will see these games. If it is, we're right where we started.

Yeah, Expo is OCTOBER. That's a long time from now.

I hoping to get to Expo again this year, but I'd sure like to have some direction on what's happening before then. I'm hoping for the best still, but it's been a bumpy ride.

That's correct. Now everybody has plenty of notice to make arrangements. I'm not sure what your issue is.

I totally agree. If given recent events, we don't have any positive reveals in the next 7 months before Expo, I don't think we ever will. It would be embarrassing for JPoP to even show his face at Expo, particularly if MMR, TH, and TBL are shipping by then. Talk about finishing in last place, but hey the art looks great!

In any case I'll be at Expo to see what we can do.

I appreciate the heads up as I have a very full travel and "business" schedule. I want to get to Chicago this year and this is just one more reason to go!

I haven't decided if I'm going to Expo this year, but last year was a great show.

I would bloody well hope that MMR, TH, and TBL are shipping by then!

IMHO the owners should just rally behind Aaron and Brian, and tell John to just go ahead and give FAST a shot for Magic Girl. We're talking a handful of games here, why the hell not just go for it? You've got two guys in this very thread chomping at the bit to help get this game built. If they deliver even half as fast as they say they can it will still be twice as fast as anything else that's going on right now.

I meant in terms of seeing a working game, not visiting the shop.

It's kind of sad that its come to that, really. John started with PROC. Had a full time programmer that was making great progress. Should have been able to put the pedal down and get things done with a fully fleshed out framework and an eager contributor.

But John had to be John. He wanted a new version of the PROC, without paying any development or testing costs tailored to his specific needs. He didn't get that so he decided to make his own, and throw a whole wrench into the works costing time, effort and money. Then, for whatever reason, he stopped paying the guy who was doing the code. That guy stuck it out for a while, then he gave up, as it was his full time job and he has a family to feed.

I've heard from a bunch of people that tried to work with and/or help John on these projects and not one of them relates good stories or news. John may be a great designer. Very creative and all that. But he really needs someone in charge. Someone to say no. Someone to set budgets and timelines. Without that, I fear any new effort in any direction will just be as wasted as all the previous years.

We'd all love to see John's games finished, I'm sure. But just having one gung-ho guy with a brand new untested boardset and an unfinished software framework that lives on the other side of the country is no magic bullet as long as things continue on the path they've been on.

Assuming this is accurate (I have no reason to believe that it's not) why would FAST be so eager and willing to jump on board? I appreciate that Aaron is a big pinhead and wants to help the community and this project in particular, but if he does get involved and has the same type of experience referenced above, it's not going to work for long. I'd hope and assume that Aaron would have some significant (face to face) discussions with JPop before taking the plunge.

Still disappointing to think that the hardware hasn't even been decided on after all this time.

Aaron knows I say this with love, but he was willing to work on Experts of Disaster. At least with Magic Girl there'd be one hell of a beautiful game to show off after the work!

I think it's helpful to look at this as a business decision. Aaron isn't a charity. Obviously he'd sell his hardware to John, though at the # of games we're talking about that in and of itself isn't a huge deal.

But he needs something powered by FAST to show off. Saving Magic Girl would be super smart. That's a high profile, legit thing. So putting up with the Jpop stuff might be worth it, so long as he can get John to just let him work. That's the big if though.

I personally am wary of people just doing "favors" that are that big. That's when people walk away, or get unmotivated, or whatever. I actually trust someone who has a vested self interest to stick it through a lot more. So that's how I'd think of Aaron, someone with enthusiasm, that's driven by a desire to see his own product succeed, and would harness that energy to make Magic Girl succeed.

If you haven't already, join us here: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/lets-figure-out-the-bare-minimum-costparts-to-build-a-whitewood

You have a great thing going in MPF. Has an enormous appeal to non-code people like me.

Because there is the potential for 116 sets of hardware sales. That's my best guess. Assuming $399 is the base package needed to build a machine, that is a lot of potential. I know he said there is a discount for that QTY, but it's more than $0. Maybe he should just get the money put in escrow so it's there when boards are delivered.

This is a story I've heard at least ten times now, and my experience was the same.

Hook up with John, enthusiastically offer free/cheap help because it's fun to be on a pinball project with a guy considered a top designer.

Encounter countless frustrations from vague specifications to being asked to quickly do a load of work on something to be told that he wasn't going to use it because he was just curious to know how it might work out, to being told to go ahead and order supplies and he'll reimburse later and getting paid back is like pulling teeth, to getting deeply involved, asking hard questions and eventually not getting phone calls returned.

Basically being asked to bend over backwards for him, you know, for the love of pinball.

Sometimes being given work already done by others, asked to copy what they did because he no longer has access to the original work done for him anymore. LOTS of promises that aren't followed through on and also being confidently assured that he has something covered only to find out later that it's not covered at all.

I know many people who won't do work with him anymore, and I swear to god, every guy I know who is involved in pinball in the Northern Illinois / Wisconsin area that designs, makes, or sells things has a John story or twelve to share and the punchline is always "Never working with him again, those machines are beautiful but they're never going to be made."

Or the pinball machine he promised to buy at last MGC from people who carted it down from Minnesota - so excited that a pinball legend was talking to them and was going to buy their EM. He pulled the for sale sign off of it on Saturday and kept telling them that he just had to get to an ATM to get the cash. Only to stiff them by blowing out of there on Sunday without buying the machine, leaving them with an unsold machine on Sunday afternoon when most people were gone. True, it has nothing to do with Zidware but it's indicitive of his style. Using his pinball fame and leaving others holding the bag.

We call it getting JPOP'ed.

He's a VERY nice guy. He's very fun to talk to. He has a good eye and the design looks great. But following through, staying organized and on task, and overselling his capabilities are big problems. My first indication of problems was being at dinner one night and him asking the waiter if he was a programmer -- it seemed off the wall and zaney at the time, knowing what I know now, I'm not sure he was kidding.

Good luck with this but if the guys at FAST get involved, I imagine they'll be sharing the same story in private that I've heard from so many others.

I've wanted to share this for so long but it just felt like sour grapes and I didn't want to crap all over everyones hopes and plans here. But watching all of this continue on and on and on and on and on over and over and over and over... I just can't hold my tounge anymore.

Seriously guys. Go to his shop and ask hard questions. Don't just oogle the neat mechanism he has, ask who is going to mass produce it. Don't settle for, "I've got a guy." Get the name of the guy and call him - ask about the production schedule, see how enthusiastically the guy responds.

Queue thread in a year where Aaron is on list of people who tried to work with him.

Seriously though, proc vs fast aside, the group of Facebook people need to get real serious with Jpop about his kind of behavior / mindset. I don't know how you legally make jpop pick a path and stick with it, and pay people, etc. This isn't going to work if he just blows off the project manager cause jpops still the boss, etc.. Are you guys cooking up any strategies where he can actually be over ruled on something? Like an executive board or shares or something.

That was pretty much my point!

I wished to hell you had shared this story back when I was being asked if I wanted out because so many people wanted in. That's back when I first started to see his bullshit lies.

Ouch.

I want to thank those people that have spoken up in this thread and filled in some of the blanks. I think things have gone on as long as they have cause its just been seen as some troublemakers on pinside or something, or at least easily dismissed as such.

Well, not to get into Aaron's business too much, but it's already public that John announced that FAST and Mission were involved, when they really weren't. They've already done this dance with John.

IMHO the only way it will work is if you owners put pressure on John to just cede over things to them to actually work. It's simply impossible for one person to control everything, let alone work on 3 games at the same time. He has to understand at a certain point you pass control over the next expert, and let them do their job. Jpop doesn't need to worry about the switch matrix or whatever, he's got other shit to do.

If that's not in place then Aaron and Brian should walk. Nothing but headaches down that road. And they can't make that happen without the owner pressure. That's why I'm suggesting that you just rally around people who are willing to walk into the lion's den, and say "this is how things can get done, you owe us that, make it happen".

No pin ever done at Williams was by one person. None. Not even games like The Shadow, where Brian Eddy worked on the playfield design and programming. John can't pretend he can do everything.

I sincerely hope Antonio (you know the guy from Quetzal Pinball or, more accurately, the guy who IS Quetzal pinball) was not JPop'ed because he does not deserve that.

Sorry. There was also an NDA in effect. He was pretty emphatic about my not sharing that I was doing work with him. "I prefer to let the work speak for itself". If he didn't want me talking about good stuff, I wasn't about to start spouting off about bad stuff. All I needed was for his project to go south and for him to start looking for a scape goat to hang a lawsuit on.

Enlightening.
By the way, would you mind if I repost this post on our French forum ?
It seems we have a new local wave of JPop worshipers that may benefit from hearing some dissent voice.

I guess I got lucky. Talked with him a year or so ago about doing some programming for him. After we talked I did my due diligence and talked with other pinball guys in the Chicago area who had done work for him, and the message was pretty clear ...

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