Quoted from idealjoker:I am aware of Oliver Kaegi's MB upgrade for Alien Poker, which requires serious hardware modification. (For me, having multiball with the Alien Poker rules does not make much sense, so I am not planning on upgrading mine.)
The only way Alien Poker multiball would "work" would be if the drop bank was only utilized the way it is now in single ball only. Multiball makes zero sense to have a drop bank whose goal is to hit a single drop down in order when you've got 3 balls flying around.
I love Oliver for his trailblazing in this area for sure, but most of the multiball 'modes' and goals just don't make sense to me.
You can have plenty of romspace if you rejumper your MPU for hyperball style with 3x2532's. I don't doubt that there might be some crunch opportunities in there but the code is pretty efficient now, unless you're going to try and do it all in the gamerom and not touch the OS roms.
Flash, Nitro Groundshaker, World Defender, Trail Drive (em). I might be mistaken on Trail Drive, but there was definitely at least one EM Clay did it to. All require adding or moving hardware (switches).
Going from 2 ball to 3 ball multiball isn't that much of a stretch for sure, some single ball games MIGHT lend themselves to multiball, but a lot of them don't without tossing out tons of old rules. I hadn't realized JL was only 2 ball MB I thought it had an option for 3 like Pharoah does. Unless Pharoah also doesn't and I'm misrembering.
I know I considered using the outhole on firepower to make it 4 ball multiball in just the way you're intending JL to work but never got around to trying it out. It would have been the same as 3 ball multiball but with 4x playfield scoring, when you launched the ball and hit the first target after locking the 3 it would release them. That's the way the other ones work at VFW BTW, ball is held in the game's saucer, then the second ball is served, and then MB starts on first switch hit after that. Those are "gottlieb system 80 style", where no ball will remain in the lock in between balls.
Quoted from PinballBJB:There’s no poll option to applaud and encourage your creativity and industriousness while at the same time expressing the opinion that most of those games probably are best left to be played as designed, even if that means they’re less full-featured than later games.
One could say that about any mod put onto a game. Thankfully just a rom chip swap away using/not using a software mod, or if space allows, making it optional. You might want to poke into the (several, at this point in time) various DickHamill threads where he's got an arduino replacing the games' processor and roms with entirely new rulesets. Most of these tend to be of the mission style type like later games have and I'm with you on that not being in the original spirit - I'm guilty of the 'mission' style type myself on Trident way back in 2011 or so, it actually ruined the gameplay so much for me that I sold the game.
There's no way to know you've "gone too far" until you've actually done it. Chalk it up to the learning curve.
See the bally/williams soren thread as well for changes that are evolutionary and make sense. I think what IdealJoker is proposing here isn't radical at all, 2 ball to 3 ball MB (which I thought the game had anyway.... it's literally been at least 25 years since I've played a JL). The changes he made to pinbot were more radical vs. this.