PPS has said that they do have access to the original source code. How much that includes documentation and/or tools has not been mentioned.

Exactly what fix are you looking for here? If they really gave you 15X jackpots in that case, the scoring would be completely unbalanced. 5X jackpots are pretty generous as it is.

I don't think that will really work since TAF has no auto-launch mechanism. "Saved" balls would back up into the shooter lane.

But that has an auto-launcher, correct?

You missed the whole point of the discussion. It wasn't that you can't have ball saves without an auto-plunger. It's that you can't have MULTI-BALL autosave without an auto-plunger.

At worst, the saved balls will back up into the shooter lane. At best, a player could exploit that by intentionally allowing the balls to drain and then plunge single balls - playing multi ball modes with essentially one ball in play at a time.

Maybe you could come up with some weird rule that if there is a "saved" ball in the shooter lane then no other switches will score points or something (and try to explain that to a newbie player somehow), but there are probably ways to exploit that in some way too.

Obviously, in single ball play, there can be ball saves without an auto-plunger. Almost every SS machine made would essentially "ball save" if you scored zero points on a ball. Multi-ball is a different situation.

And if you notice, with your example of Whitewater, the ball save from the home ROM does not work in multi-ball. As soren said, the standard was to do a multi-ball "restart" mode - which is what Whitewater does.

I haven't played TOTAN in a long time. How does it handle ball saves in multi-ball?

Does STTNG still have problems when reaching Final Frontier the second time in a game?

I know that for a long time, the second Final Frontier would cause the game to mis-count how many balls are on the playfield and it would get massively confused. You could then end up playing multi-ball with only one ball in play and/or playing single ball with multiple balls in play.

I looked at the ROM release history, and haven't seen anything about it being fixed. But I've run into the issue on multiple STTNG machines, and know for a fact that it at least USED to be a problem.

That isn't true. There used to be a problem after the second Final Frontier (on all STTNGs), and the first one would work fine.

Now, maybe they fixed that problem at some point, and created a new problem with LX7, but there definitely were issues with the second Final Frontier back when you could find STTNG machines out on location.

This reminds me of a pet peeve of mine. I completely understand the reason for disabling extra balls for tournaments, but why do they (especially on B/W games) make the point "novelty" award for so low a value? It messes up the goal/reward structure.

If a shot/combination/sequence was worthy of an extra ball normally, then in a tournament it should be worth a significant number of points - at least something worth shooting for - not some barely noticeable amount.

Not to diminish the effort that is/was put into these games (having worked in the video game industry for 20 years, I understand all about workload and time pressure), setting the extra ball point value to something more reasonable does not seem like much additional work. Seems like it would be far less work than is done for other tournament mode issues (such as removing "random" awards and such).

I realize this is not a huge deal, just something that has always bothered me. I'm not trying to impugn anyone's work ethic or anything, just trying to make a suggestion for future improvement.

It depends upon what you mean by "ball save". Do you mean "plunged the ball and it drained in the first few seconds, so give it back" or do you mean "just started multi-ball and some of the balls drained right away, so keep giving me more"?

If you mean the first one, then yes, you can have ball save without an autoplunger. If you mean the second one, then no, you need an autoplunger.

Well, assuming you don't mean the multi-ball save - then putting the ball into the shooter lane to be re-plunged manually is fine.

And virtually EVERY WMS game from the '90s (and at least '80s Bally) has this, including TAF - most people just don't realize it. If you score ZERO points on a ball, the ball is typically "saved" and returned to the plunger.

This is primarily done to avoid loosing a ball when the ball feeder mechanism has mis-fired. It's essentially impossible to do on a properly functioning TAF, but on some machines (especially SS machines) it is possible to keep re-plunging balls, scoring zero points each time.

In this case the "ball save" is based on "lack-of-points" rather than based on "lack-of-play-time", but the concept is the same.

Of course, but that's not the point. The point is that a ball save is still functional/viable even without an auto-launcher. And actually exists on most games already in this form.

The fact that it is used infrequently does not change the fact that it works.

And if a "no points scored" ball save can work, so can a "short time played" ball save.