(Topic ID: 136653)
Linked Games
Medieval Madness
Williams, 1997-
Medieval Madness (Remake - LE)
Chicago Gaming Co., 2015
-
Medieval Madness (Remake - Standard)
Chicago Gaming Co., 2015
Topic Gallery
You're currently viewing posts by Pinsider Crash.
Click here to go back to viewing the entire thread.
Quoted from vid1900:We had the MMr and MM in the shop at the same time for 4 days while we put Mylar down in the normal wear spots, and moved the slingshot brackets back on the MMr.
The MMr plays a little bit faster.
The shaker on the MMr adds greatly to the game experience.
The sound was clearer on the MMr too.
We played a ton of games on both tables, trying to find differences.
Nothing looks or feels cheap on the MMr, believe me.
Absolutely. I am blown away by the build quality of MMR. I guess it's hard to see the appeal when you own an original.
Quoted from metallik:Yes, and I don't see why any of this would be used on a double-wound coil. Why would you PWM a primary winding when there is a secondary winding already present? PWM drives coils hotter - notice how Stern switched back to dual-would with Spike.
Does MMR use PWM on its flippers? If so, what was the reasoning? Do they use it on both windings? Does the hypervisor ignore the EOS switch readings from the emulated game completely?
I don't see how this is relevant other than to establish a reason to bicker (more) in this thread. I don't care how the electronics handle duty cycle, voltages, etc. All that matters is how it plays. Give it a try, it would certainly help you to get out once in a while.
Quoted from metallik:This is on top of the inability to use a standard DMD, DMD replacement, or color DMD.
People keep making this claim. Has it actually been tested? I mean, there's an unused 14-pin header on the CPU board labeled "DMD." I tried to give it a whirl but the cables wouldn't reach long enough for me to tie in a neighboring game's DMD. Still fascinated by this and surprised no one has actually tried it (if it's been done then pardon my ignorance, just never seen it discussed).
9 months later
Quoted from rubberducks:The longer they wait, the more disinclined people are going to be to pay ... and it WILL get cracked. If it's not easy or feasible to do a firmware based hack, then a cheap hardware based one would almost certainly do the job.
If all this time has been spent on security measures, resulting in the delay, they're absolutely stupid.
Interesting discussion. The last time someone ranted and raved about security on the JJP platform it turned out to be all smoke and mirrors. There is absolutely no security or encryption on JJP or CGC's platforms.
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/mmr-under-the-microscope#post-2954053
Quoted from metallik:JJP software will not run without a hardware USB dongle, and I believe Keith encrypted the assets about a year ago. MMR, who knows. Maybe they're protecting and encrypting their data as well. Guess the cost of encryption will be baked into the upgrade price.
Yes it won't run without the dongle, but you can boot and install the game in a virtual machine. There was a change several months ago that included "asset protection" but I didn't find anything different.
2 weeks later
Quoted from aeneas:I wonder if there are legal issues causing the delay ?
Ie Colordmd owns some patents on colorisation and CGC probably does something similar ?
(and no I don't have any info or want to start a rumor, just wondering what can cause the delay)
Not the case. This platform uses full frame replacements, not on-the-fly colorization of existing monochrome frames. Two different technologies.
2 weeks later
Quoted from snakesnsparklers:$10 for any hardware required to bypass the security
$Free to install cracked software to allow colorized screen
Hey, the color data is unencrypted as of the latest update.
Quoted from Wolfmarsh:Even if it is a commercial USB security dongle, there are known defeats for pretty much every one of those.
Pretty much. Won't be surprised if we see a torrent in a couple of months. People have already been distributing SD card images for backup purposes.
Quoted from metallik:If they're working right from the controller RAM (how does PinMAME do it? because they almost certainly copied that ) then they're already familiar with the memory map and would still just send the output to the new high-res program.
Emumm uses PinMAME source code. So yes that's a safe assumption.
I was assuming the free market established a price ceiling of $8500? Lol, is Stern seriously charging TEN GRAND for their games now? And are people actually BUYING?!
Quoted from DeeGor:If they're using pinmame, then they should release their source.
Correct. Actually by making emumm a closed source commercial program they appear to be violating PinMAME's GNU GPL license! Has anyone showed them these terms and asked for the source code? Should it become available it will clear up the mystery as to how they are performing frame detection and injection.
To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you
these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have
certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if
you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others.For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether
gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same
freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive
or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they
know their rights.
Quoted from dluth:They have said PPS will probably have them next Thursday - so set your expectations to October 1st to avoid disappointment.
October 1st is Saturday. 
Quoted from kidchrisso:I would try the penny trick first...search inside forum....there is a thread on how to do them.
Quoted from boustrophedonic:I mean, USPS is open on Saturday, right?
PPS clearly isn't.
That PIC chip is programmable. What's to prevent someone from buying an equivalent part, reading/reverse engineering it, and cloning it with a programmer? Seems really simple to circumvent.
Quoted from labnip:Do you own an MMR or MMRLE ?
Have you preordered the latest Colorization DMD with security chip ?
Frustrated with missing color frames ?
Well, folks we have the newest PPS/CGC mod ready and available for your purchase.
This amazing new mod has been in the works for 6 months by a team of professional and expensive gaming artists.
Introducing, the Color Transition Sticks !
Yes, that's right folks. These Color Transition Sticks mod are cutting edge artwork that you or your friends can hold up over your DMD during those pesty non-colorized transition scenes. Each Color Transition Stick is clearly labeled on the back to let you know when to put each Color Transition Stick in front of your newly purchased MMR/LE & Colorization kit so you can enjoy those remaining few scenes in the amazing new colorized art they were always meant to be experienced as.
We, well actually not us, are manufacturing batches of these beautiful Color Transition Sticks right now & we are now able to accept your pre-payments. We're told by the 3rd party manufacturing provider that they will have these ready in just a few weeks, so hurry and pay now so you can get ahold of your personalized collection of Color Transition Sticks.
PRICING:
For MMRLE "original" owners, you pay $300 for the mod.
For MMRLE "non-original" owners (we don't care for you), you pay $600 for the mod.
For MMR (non LE) "original" owners, you pay $500 for the mod.
For MMR (non LE) "non-original" owners, (we really don't care for you the most), you pay $800 for the mod.
For any MMR/LE owners who have ever said anything negative or questioned anything about PPS or CGC, you pay $2500.
For any MMR/LE owners who any fan-boy pinsider perceived you saying anything negative or questioned anything about PPS or CGC, you pay $3000.
For any MMR/LE owners who have been kicked out of the PPS Forum, you pay $4000 extra.
For any MMR/LE owners who've said they would have paid any price for the prior MMR/LE Colorization mod, you pay $10,000 (we love you long time).
But wait, that's not all, if you pre-order now, we promise not to make your kit with used ice-cream sticks, which we've received some Quality Control team feedback that they are stickier than expected.
Pre-order with confidence.
I read this whole post out loud in the typical enthusiastic overbearing American TV ad narrator style. Don't worry, I'm the only one here right now.
Quoted from wiggy07:Made a video showing the installation and game play of the MMR color upgrade. Animations look good.
Blog Post :
https://pinballsupernova.wordpress.com/2016/08/10/mod-installs-mmr-color-display-upgrade-install/
Video:
» YouTube video
Great video! Really gives a deep detailed look at what we have. Not edited, not choreographed. That said, I love the colors and the redrawn artwork. I do have some questions about the art direction in a few scenes, but for the most part it's a decent improvement. Unfortunately the pros stop there, as it's painfully unfinished. Now I don't particularly like photobombing threads, especially since it takes up so much time. However, I feel it neccessary to point out a whole different rabbit hole of glitches, palette errors, and missing colors in this $400 premium priced mod. And for those who think I nitpicked the video frame by frame for a solid hour, I discovered all of these while watching. I noticed the quirks. I had to go back and rewind for every single one of them. Is it an issue.
First, "the screen" everyone has been talking about with the soldier at the gate. Notice the text vs. the score? Why is the text upscaled in hi-res and the score still 128x32 style? Also, why is the score outlined in a black box? Transparency wasn't corrected to reflect the rest of the game text.
A glitch that leaves a corrupted shadow behind where the score should be:
Another example of mixed fonts:
A couple of more errors in the lock is lit and joust transition animations:
254_(resized).jpg255_(resized).jpg
Look at the castle in the revolting peasants scene. Looks fantastic. However, let's compare the before and after toast. What's wrong here, why is the castle low-res with darker and flatter colors after the toast? It looks awful!
262_(resized).jpg230_(resized).jpg
Looks like the text has an inverted alpha mask with missing castle colors too:
A few examples where color is completely missing:
260_(resized).jpg246_(resized).jpg229_(resized).jpg
Glitchy transitions where the image turns low-res and a completely different color (a palette error):
232_(resized).jpg233_(resized).jpg241_(resized).jpg243_(resized).jpg231_(resized).jpg
There's an especially buggy transition during attract mode where there seems to be a smeared red trail behind white text. What?
Touching again on the mixed content issue. Several other scenes have parts that are mixed 256x64 (hi-res) and 128x32 (low-res) images. Completely ignoring the fact that text/numerics aren't upscaled, here's a problem with the joust scene with the lance sparks being off color and low-res below the 75:
In the trolls total scene the tops of the ears are incomplete and there are a few old dots below the 150 that have been cut off:
In Merlin's magic, the background of the scroll is low-res while the rest is hi-res.
Speaking of Merlin's magic, a few frames before we see some compression/digital corruption:
More examples of corruption and glitchy artifacting. In the joust victory scene the knight on the horse isn't fully cleared during the screen blank:
The black text outline is out of place:
256_(resized).jpg
253_(resized).jpg
Gate bashing scene with broken outlines and missing pixels in the numbers:
A similar issue with screen blanking again:
In the ugly riot scene the first half of the text has a black box around it while the rest is fine. Also, There is a random block of pixels that turns black beneath the U:
237_(resized).jpg238_(resized).jpg
Now on to a different issue regarding quality. A handful of these images have been upscaled to hi-res, but their source materials have simply been scaled up rather than redrawn, often quite poorly using a nearest neighbor scaling algorithm that leaves the image looking rough and mismatched for the frame's resolution. When this happens, hi-res pixels are still present but they are collected in groups of 4 (due to the low-res upscaled images used as a source). Here's an example with the catapult in catapult slam. Notice the blocky edges in the barrel vs. the surrounding scenery:
Here is another example with the trolls scene after defeating one. The troll and boulder look very strange. The boulder has some hi-res pixels in the center, but the edges are clearly upscaled giving it a rough and uneven look. If the upscaling was not done within a multiple of 2 for the hi-res frames, you get uneven and jagged low-res pixel artifacting (seen as hi-res pixels in groups of 4, sometimes groups of 2).
Castle explosion scene after defeating one of the kings. Instead of redrawing every frame they simply upscaled the explosion sprite with no smoothing (nearest neighbor scaling as I mentioned before).
Another case of this with the catapult launch animation. Look at the broadside wall in the background and the door:
And the worst corner cutting by far, check out the scene for locking balls for castle multiball. This looks absolutely hideous!
And finally a few more miscellaneous observations. The royal madness mode has some nice animated gradients, but to me it looks like they just gave this part a blanket treatment and didn't bother to actually colorize anything:
The lightning effects in the multiball start scene are cool, but no changes to the castle? It really looks like they just did a hue shift on the trees, grass, and door (which is fine, it does the job). I know this one is a long shot, but the castle looks a bit out of place because it doesn't change.
And lastly, purely art style wise, shouldn't the faces of the knights be centered and not off to the side?
I love this upgrade and think it adds value to the game. But it has a significant number of issues which don't justify the asking price. Given the extremely long wait periods for preorderers and lack of communication, we should expect something of much higher quality. These flaws give the impression that the project was rushed and leaves it looking incomplete. I do realize that not everyone notices these issues, but by providing a product of this nature that draws so much more attention to the display, PPS and CGC opened the door to analysis and criticism when normally problems like this are not a big deal. Pinball is pinball, but they decided to step up the DMD, which is purely a secondary feature of yesterday's aging technology and bring it into the modern era. Unfortunately, they failed.
Quoted from DeeGor:I got word back from PPS yesterday that CGC's sound engineer is working on it, and will go beyond simply raising the levels of the callouts. So that's promising. How long that will take is anyone's guess.
Quoted from TaylorVA:
Will you make this available if they don't?
If they sit on their hands and do nothing, I'll likely throw it out there.
Quoted from Rat:I politely asked Rick if there would be an update to the colour to fix the issues that had been reported and also asked if the update to the call-outs was happening.
In his answer he did not address either of my questions but instead told me he did not understand what my problem was and asked if I wanted to cancel my order, so I can only assume neither of these will be addressed.
Quoted from vicjw66:And here I thought it was because you didn't want your statements to be recorded publicly and easily searchable at a later date, which would hold you accountable for them. Statements made in one on one phone conversations are hard to document and can easily be denied. How silly of me. You just prefer that personal hands on approach that makes for superior customer service. PPS is of course known for their superior customer service.
Exactly what I was thinking! Rick doesn't want the heat of criticism or being held accountable for his statements, which is why I suggest offering to record the conversation and post it here (with his permission).
Promoted items from Pinside Marketplace and Pinside Shops!
Northfield, MN
Saint John, NB
You're currently viewing posts by Pinsider Crash.
Click here to go back to viewing the entire thread.
Reply
Wanna join the discussion? Please sign in to reply to this topic.
Hey there! Welcome to Pinside!
Donate to PinsideGreat to see you're enjoying Pinside! Did you know Pinside is able to run without any 3rd-party banners or ads, thanks to the support from our visitors? Please consider a donation to Pinside and get anext to your username to show for it! Or better yet, subscribe to Pinside+!
