Quoted from vid1900:At least this will prevent Neil Nicastro from closing down the pinball division on a whim
Too soon! 
(Topic ID: 327919)
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2 months later
Quoted from DanQverymuch:Yes, their gambling game division was blowing away the pinball division profit-wise, making the bean counters think that pinball was a waste of time and effort.
A fine example of how the love of money is the root of all evil. Pinball was sacrificed to make more stupid, evil slot machines.
I respect this line of thinking and see where you're coming from. The part that many people forget was that WMS was a publicly traded company. Neil had an obligation to the board and the shareholders to make decisions in the best interests of the company. Unfortunately that meant lopping off the pinball division. Now, the lack of execution on the sale of the IP to some other functioning entity is beyond me. frobozz I believe said it best that perhaps you don't want to sell it to someone (like Stern) that makes a killing off of it, making you look like an idiot to your shareholders.
Quoted from Joe_Blasi:but would of Pinball 2000 lasted as is? With the video screen?
Where they planing to dump the rom + sound pci card and just use some kind of SSD and pc sound hardware?
Full flash on all cards? Having the base software on masked roms tied to that chipset would of made installing updates to work on newer pc hardware an issue down the road. Even with the flash over lay they may of needed to maybe have to remove the disable update setting.
How much rom space + flash update space would of been taken up by having drives for more chipsets out at the time?
I can see the need for compressed sound with the sound board doing the decompressing to fit into an smaller rom space. But if had an big disk for files then an basic pc sound chip can fit the need.
At the time Pinball 2000 was being designed, they had to get the entire system out the door in 18 months. You had design guys like Andy Eloff who were used to designing systems with ROM chips. This was at a time when spinning rust was expensive, and forget about Flash. They could only afford that for the developer prism cards. If they were worried about failure in the field (since most of the embedded space was still on ROM chips at the time) and Tom Uban could get XINA into a few megs of space, ROMs were most definitely the lowest cost option in terms of BOM, design time and field support.
Had they been given more time, things like Compact Flash would've been used. Motherboards with integrated sound would've been used compared to the Cyrix based ones that were used in set top boxes, so you could ditch the DCS hardware, which eliminates the entire PRISM card. Nowadays there are enough embedded reference designs to be able to spin up a system on basic commodity hardware and have it be relatively fault tolerant.
They just weren't given enough time, but having looked through that system in depth the past 10 years, they really did a fantastic job with the time and talent they had.
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