You can't really take credit for this. As the colordmd tools have matured, it's easier for them to expand the team so that there are more people working on projects at once -- and they can be completed quicker, again because the tools are improving all the time.

With or without SmartDMD/Pin2dmd that would have still happened.

Can already do this with SmartDMD with whatever capabilities it has -- as long as there's free room in the rom for the color data. Often there's not a lot of free space, so you hit a wall. Unless SmartDMD has some sort of external storage for the color data now that I've missed.

New SMVE runs on SAM, not Spike, but you're right about the ROM not being available direct from Stern -- at least not so far.

Some of the animations would be ok in place of the video clips, but others wouldn't make sense. For the main villains they would generally be interchangeable. Especially Venom and Goblin - since their modes are pretty generic. The last doc oc on the vault edition is a scene with a bomb on a bridge that doesn't match up - but that doesn't really matter. Where you'd get into real problems is the modes. VE has "Electro" instead of "Bonesaw", "Tell MJ" instead of "Rescue MJ" and "Jack O'Lantern" instead of ... I'm not sure which one that replaces.

I also don't know if the animations are the same number of frames as the clips they replaced -- I'm guessing they're not always, if at all.

Edit: Another caveat: I haven't looked at the SMVE rom directly to check this, but most of the animations in the VE are sliding flat graphics. They *MIGHT* be procedurally generated - meaning that each of the sliding plates is in the rom - but not the generated animation of them moving. So you'd have to extract those assets, then make animations in something like flash to get the frames you need, and then convert the output of that into images you can load into pinball browser -- probably. Would have to check the rom in pinballbrowser to verify that.

You're mis-stating this badly.

There's not likely to be "another product" that could do the same for "a fraction of the price" unless that fraction is 9/10ths. Look at where the price point for MikeD's SmartDMD pre-built setup landed. It was almost as much as ColorDMD. Once you add in time for assembly and a buffer to cover support/replacement (unless you're stupid and leave that part out) -- you end up in the same ballpark on price. ColorDMD is a damn good deal at $400 for what you get, and the service and support that comes with it.

And they wouldn't get wrapped up in legal challenges -- *IF* they come up with their own method for doing the colorization of the display.

Lastly, it's pretty hilarious that you think ColorDMD is sitting on some mountain of cash from this venture that they'll use to wield attorneys at people.

Don't forget that the board they drive the thing with is their own design/build - lord knows how much went into that for engineering/testing/software/etc.

I'm sure every game they can do, will eventually get done. No reason for them not to. Some are obviously lower priority, but they'll get around to all of them eventually.