Totally agree with this. Get out while the gettin is good. Once the game is dead its nearly worthless, hard to sell, can't be fixed (depends), and in your way.

Sorry but to me this translates to "Nucore is no longer" just like pinchroma said. This is a thread where a guy needs to fix his game and is asking for a nucore. Can he buy one now? No. Is there an eta when he can? No. Nucore is gone. When/if you change that then this will change. No disrespect intended here. Your product was quite awesome and frankly the only way I'd own and run a pin2k. The video enhancement was worth it alone. But a guy that just brought home a dead pin2k doesn't want to wait an undisclosed amount if time to see "if" he can fix his game.

I have gone through 8 pinball 2000's and of those 3 had dead PC boards. They die often.

Pros can fix it? Most pros are backed up 3 months. Plus its not always the caps. This is a full PC multilayer mother board. Way more complex than anything in pinballs. It's nothing like repairing a pinball board. You don't even get schematics. Find PC repair shops. How many if them will repair boards? None. They all just sell you a new one.

I'm going to disagree here. If my machine dies, I am *entitled* to fix it and definitely will do so using whatever means necessary. Pinbox is "out there" and will be forever. If Nucore wants my sale then they'll need to be selling their product rather than sitting on it during litigation with third parties. If they aren't, as an end user I'll be using whatever else I can. If pinbox is available and also nucore is available, I will go the nucore route. However I refuse to sit idle waiting on lawsuits that hurt the general public with broken machines.

I'm not here trying to offer Pinbox support either. But it works just like nucore and does not *cause* switch matrix problems. It's most likely that your switch matrix issues were real and inside the wiring.

It could be left up to the user to package the software I think without issue.

i dunno. There are other issues with the license. As an end user, I didn't have to agree to a license when buying my machine. So I am not bound by one. I can see a guy selling something being bound by copyright laws but he also doesn't get tied to a license a company writes unless he agrees to it. Licenses writtenby companies aren't laws unless both parties enter the agreement. So its not the williams license that matters but the law. And fair use is part of the law. Unfortunately, people tend to buckle down because they don't want the headache to fight a battle that they should win against a company that has money to fight it.

This is way different. Breaking into your shop and stealing your parts actually costs you money because those parts are then lost. You are then out those parts. However, I would have no problems duplicating your parts on my own dime. That would cost you nothing - except potentially a lost sale. But let's say you were t selling the product anyway. Then you don't even lose a sale. In this case, with nucore not for sale, no one is harmed by using pinbox. People aren't going to wait years with dead machines. So pinbox users when nucore is unavailable aren't customers anyway.

Sorry but this is ridiculous. Suing the end users that just want their machines running isn't the way to do business. Anyone can sue anyone. It sucks that bigger companies use lawsuits to bully people around. I could sue you for damages due to stress you add by threatening lawsuits all the time and squashing innovation by hobbiest with these threats. And if I had a lot of money to put into that, it would be a real threat. Of course I'm not serious but you should get the point. It's ridiculous.

Companies need to start focusing on innovation and offering products to make money. Not trying to take legal action out on individuals trying to fix broken plastics, add a couple rules into a game they own, or fix a broken computer where parts aren't available.

then perhaps you should focus on all the great stuff you make and lay off the legal threats all the time. Then you'd be seen as the hero rather than the jerk . In all reality you do add a lot of benefit to the community and your stores are fantastic. I buy from them all the time. It's such a shame that has to be all undone by the constant and ridiculous policing of everything. Who cares if someone makes a new ramp that is not otherwise available or a trunk that won't break? You have 10,000 other products to sell. Rather than spending so much effort shutting down those other people, of which a lot of would win their lawsuits if you didn't bully them into submission, Why not focusing on providing better products and winning that way? Clearly you have the upper hand in that area.

Making a replacement motherboard is a monumental task for the size of market we are talking about here. On top of that, you would still need the via bridge chip on it which isn't available anymore. I think this is technically way more difficult than writing a non nucore based emilator from scratch.

I don't know anything about Gottlieb. No one seems interested in making stuff for their games. As far as Stern is concerned, they seem to allow anyone to do anything they want in the area of mods. Also, they embraced the last community code changes not by threatening law suits, but instead by posting the updated code on their website for everyone to download. So it seems like it's *way* different.

the most ridiculous one is stopping production of a ramp. A ramp! It didn't use any ip or graphics. It's just a ramp. It's a shame the people making some of these things are too passive to just say screw off and keep going about their business.

There is no license. I dont agree to licenses when buying a pinball machine. Therefore I'm not bound by one.

Why should I spend my time doing all that when I can just google pinbox, download it, and install it? Geez.

The thing is, in this case, pinbox does not equate to nucore lost sales. People with broken machines are not willing to wait an undetermined time to fix it. That means they're not nucore customers. In fact, if I can't fix my machine within a couple weeks, I figure something else out. No one is going to store a broken machine for years. That's just ridiculous.

The whole argument that a pirated work equates to a lost sale is stupid. In my past I have downloaded several things that I would never have purchased otherwise.

I would absolutely never wait on nucore in the current state with a brick taking up space in my house or shop. I would either have gotten the original board fixed, found someone to sell a used nucore, bought one of these overpriced working computers, or have gutted the machine and made a video pin out of it and a pinball 2000 "kit" for an owner of the other machine. In any case, something would have been done and quickly. Nucore wouldn't see a dime in a year or whenever they get their act together. The only way it's going to cost them money is if their product is currently for sale. Anyone using pinbox today isn't costing nucore anything as none of those people are going to store bricked machines in hopes that nucore becomes available.

Right. So let's take the logic further. We both agree that if our machines break today, nucore isn't getting a dime - be it now or later - to fix that machine as we are not waiting and need to fix it now. In that case, I would argue that using pinbox is *not* theft. Theft requires the owner of an item to have a loss - the stolen item. In case of ip theft, the case can be made that the loss is a sale. In this case where we agree that there is no sale and never will be, you may as well use pinbox as it harms no one. The people at nucore are unimpacted either way whether you fix the board, buy a new board, or use pinbox in this case.

This post is quite inaccurate. First the release of pinbox didn't "ruin it for everyone". For we can now use pinbox while you grind your wheels on court. Nothing ruined. Second, this lawsuit should have nothing to do with whether or not the product is being sold. If williams or whomever was preventing sale due to the pinbox lawsuit, you could still sell your product without ROMs and let the users figure that out. By the way, several of us would be happy to use pinbox and pay you for the nucore. I mean there are so many options. But I'm afraid you guys are responsible for your situation.

Oh and I see Rick *is* involved. So much for him say he isn't.

And back to this point here is an active thread. I don't see stern in there crying lawsuits or trying to shut them down. Do you?
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/jurassic-park-improved-t-rex-work-in-progress

Since they already took money and released the product, if they are infected by the GPL version, I don't think reworking the code is even an option. They would still have to release what they have at this point as open source. Then they could refactor their code but the problem is their curren code is now also GPL and refactoring without the library still causes their code to be poisoned. I think they're screwed if they used the GPL version.

They can still sell their product. They would just also have to provide the source code. Most people would still buy it. But I think their lawsuit would be squashed with this.

It's impossible to "secure the problem". You can't go get the cracked copies off the internet and put them away. Those will be out there forever. Suing the guy doesn't solve anything in this regard.

This sounds like an outdated excuse. It's perfectly fine to not support windows for whatever reason like its costs or you just don't want to run on windows. But the task scheduler isn't the reason. Games like pinball fx2 run perfectly. This is just as time sensitive as real pinbsll software. Also ccc runs great on a cheap dual core windows pc.

I didnt say that they should support windows. I said that the reason for not supporting it shouldnt be the task scheduler. And I was quite clear on why.

Fair enough. But I would blame this more on the emulation software available on Windows then (ms virtual pc and vmware player).

I don't see this working well at all. For one thing, the Pi processor is arm big endian and the x86 pc needed for the pin2k is little endian. While this can be translated via software emulation, I think it adds another layer of complexity.

From why I can see, no websites were hacked or source codes stolen. Everything that was done could be done by simply downloading the public nucore software. Companies don't keep their source code in the websites anyway. So what would be the point of hacking the website in this case

Legal or not, most people don't care. Pinbox is "out there" and once out, the cat can never be put back in the bag. The way to shut it down is for Nucore to get their product back on the market. Most people will use Pinbox since even right now there are no other options. Every day that nucore sits off the shelf because of a lawsuit or whatever is another day someone installs Pinbox to fix his machine. While people may talk big, when it comes to it, they'll do what they have to do to get their machines running now rather than having an expensive paper weight sitting around hoping a legal option comes.

Software is cracked all the time (usually within hours of release for most major titles) and it's done without source code. I can't imagine keeping my source code on a web server. If someone wanted to crack some software I doubt they'd think getting into the company's web server as the first step.

Sorry but it's not all entiry repairable. Not every mother board is fixed by replacing caps. This is not a 100% option. Pinbox is. This doesn't help with broken / missing prism card, busted out crt etc. Most people aren't going to jump through hurdles in order to get their machines running.

It's a shame nucore has taken the long lawsuit road instead of getting the product onto the shelves.