tldr: Using this thread to document my efforts to retheme a Stern Iron Maiden Pro.

I bought Iron Maiden (Pro) purely for the gameplay and rule set. It's a fantastic game (with fantastic PF art too!), but the theme doesn't interest me one bit. Iron Maiden is not my favorite band and Metal isn't exactly my favorite genre. I quickly converted all of the music over to metal covers of classic video game music to at least keep the tone of the machine intact and kept it that way for a while, waiting for Pinball Browser to add video replacement functionality.

There were a few parameters to picking a theme:
It had to have a strong enough soundtrack to support 12 songs.
It had to have enough video content available to pull from for the LCD display without having to do much heavy lifting since I'm new to video editing.
It needed to be complex enough to map concepts to the deep Iron Maiden rule set.
I intentionally avoided themes popular enough that they could possibly be made into a commercial machine.

Persona 5 is a JRPG video game that came out in 2017 and is one of my favorites of all time. The soundtrack is one of its strongest features and the game contains over 100 hours of HD content (plus an animated series spinoff) to pull assets from.

Recently Pinball Browser added a video replacement feature. For now, I'm going to be focused on mapping Persona 5 concepts to the Iron Maiden rule set and using Pinball Browser to convert audio and video assets to the new theme. I plan on also rethemeing the translite, playfield, plastics, and cabinet eventually but I'm starting with the cheap and time consuming aspects instead of the expensive and time consuming items.

I've got a rough draft of how I'd like to map P5 concepts to the Maiden ruleset that I will share soon. I don't imagine there are many Persona 5 fans on this board, but I'd love to get feedback from fans of the game as well!

I've mostly focused on replacing Attract Mode video to get my feet wet since I don't have to worry about syncing up audio, but went ahead an ordered a custom translite from https://arcademarquee.com/. Print quality looks great and it shipped very quickly. It looks a little blown out once backlit but this art wasn't designed for pinball so it could just be an issue with the composition. The price was right so I might end up printing a few to compare in the actual machine.

I've got rough versions of the Match Sequence and Mystery Award completed as well. I definitely know what I'd like to change about both of them but haven't had the time to learn how to make those changes effectively.

IMG_0558 (resized).JPG

Appreciate the info! Definitely feeling a lot of restriction being locked to the Iron Maiden rule set and video/sound triggers and durations so a new framework is very appealing. For now I'm going to stick with only a retheme, but will be looking to do a machine from scratch for my next project and Mission Pinball is definitely on my radar for that.

jabdoa I've been reading further about the distinction between the MPF and MPF-MC. Is it possible to run the factory rules directly on the Stern board while leveraging MPF-MC to control the sound and display? I imagine MPF is required for MPF-MC to run on top of. Can MPF be set up as a pass-through with the Stern boards handling the rules and MPF-MC reacting to the game state to trigger video and audio? I really like the flexibility of the MPF-MC, but am not at a point where I can invest the time to port the Iron Maiden rules to a new framework.

J85M Since I'm implementing the retheme via Pinball Browser all I can change are audio and video files. The player will be selecting something at ball launch and the only effect of that selection is the music that plays outside of modes and multiballs. I suppose it could be converted so that the selection maps to a different concept like episodes, scenes, characters, etc but ultimately the only functional difference in gameplay is that music.