Out of curiosity, any link on videos where he stated this ?

Unfortunately, since they still have customers willing to buy no matter what, they have no reason to change their attitude

The only other thing that could get them moving is legal action. I'm actually surprised that no one started one already, especially in the US (it would be more difficult in Europe, given the variety of legal rules).

Would welcome a picture. Not that I question your statement, just that I'm going to receive a Stranger Things, so might as well look into it

On a sidenote, I have a Star Trek Premium from Stern, no PP, and it's perfect. I might be missing minor defects, but to me anyway it looks perfect. Hence why I would be interested to know whether the dimples you see are something I would miss.

Am I reading the comment right? That's second degree humour, right ?

Because otherwise, I have quite a few German friends who would not take kindly to this kind of comment.

I'm relieved. And no, unlikely this show is known anywhere else but the US, so I suspect any German reading this thread would not have caught the humor, just like myself

Regards

As much as I would like to claim that "yeah, that was intended as a pun", honesty compels me to state "Oh damn, you know, I actually absolutely did not make the connection when writing my response".

That's what you get when writing in foreign languages I guess (you should try French )

Cheers

Well seen that way, that definitely does change the perspective, and I can understand your point of view, so yeah, go ahead and enjoy the pin.

Cheers

I kind of disagree.

While JJP indeed has a massive responsibility in the management of the issue, Mirco is the manufacturer of the playfield. As such, they are responsible for the quality of it. JJP, just like any integrator, buys a product with given specifications. In any industry, if the supplier fails to deliver (ie Mirco), the customer (ie JJP) is entitled for a corrective action plan and potentially compensation. The fact they are not pursuing that route is, frankly, baffling.

Pushing the blame on JJP on the basis of 'art under the post', 'thick clearcoat' is not relevant. If a supplier feels that the specifications given by the customer impact quality, they have to deny these requests. Again, that happens in every industry (and for that matter, I'm precisely dealing right now on a problem of that nature in my field, ie electronics).

Also, Mirco has a track record. There are multiple testimonies over multiple issues over multiple playfield reproductions, and for those JJP was completely out of the loop.

So in my opinion they are not responsible of the playfield quality itself

However they should have acknowledged the issue, implemented a corrective action plan, and adressed customer concerns, which they didn't. For that they are responsible.

And for that reason alone, no JJP for me in the foreseeable future.

As noted, I agree that JJP is responsible to the end customer. I was simply responding to the poster on the actual root cause of the issue. To me, it's not JJP, it's Mirco.

But that does not change the end result:
- JJP should have addressed the issue with Mirco, they haven't
- JJP should have addressed customer concerns, they haven't

And for these reasons, yes JJP is fully liable as a company.

And I absolutely don't get it why they have not taken it up to Mirco. As a manufacturer, I would go ballistic if one of my suppliers was messing my product quality.

Only rationale explanation is, as implied by others, that there's some sort of contract, but we can only speculate

So no JJP for me regardless of the theme (although if they release a James Bond theme or Blade Runner, that will be super hard to resist)

Some design choices in the control electronic of my DialedIn LE really baffles me. Compared to Stern or even Pinball Brothers (I just looked at the design of the Alien remake), I would on contrary argue that it's not designed for longevity, at least this portion.

If it were, they would not have used a consumer type PC motherboard with a consumer type PC graphics board, plugged in a vertical position. It will fail eventually. And no you just can't change the motherboard and the graphics board, the embedded Linux distribution is tied to the HW, so unless JJP provides SW maintenance to allow for support of newer motherboard and graphics board, or somebody hack their distribution, you will be toast if the motherboard dies (not to mention they likely have a custom sbios)

Well Pinball Brothers also put a PC, but at least it's an industrial grade box. Their design architecture is probably more expensive than Stern, but they could not afford very likely a custom design like Stern did (who is using NXP if I recall), so a PC was their best bet. Although god knows I think a PC is not suitable for this type of application, at least they did their homework in terms of reliability. For their first (well one would argue their second) it's not a bad accomplishment.

Really wonder, does JJP still use consumer grade motherboard for GnR?

I don't intend to start a debate on whether a PC is suitable for a pinball machine. I understand the pros and cons of each architecture (disclaimer: my work is specifically on embedded ARM device, so I'm quite knowledgeable).

But I can build a three display output (and more) ARM based system with equivalent graphics capabilities for the purpose of a pinball machine in a 30W enveloppe with an operating lifetime under full load of 5 years, 24/7. And I can add some additionnal capabilities on top of it, image processing being one of them, but not only. That's kind of the whole reason why Apple is using ARM extensively, including in their Macbook line and ditched x86.

x86 brings is essentially ease of development and reduced engineering cost (especially custom motherboard requirement as is the case for Spike 2). As of today, from the pure capability standpoint in a pinball machine, there is little rationale to put a PC, but from the cost of development there definitely is (that, plus the fact that when DialedIn was released, indeed embedded device capabilities were far lower than where they are today).

ARM platform bring better integration, lower power consumption, longer operating lifetime. And for that matter, Stern Spike 2 architecture allows them to have as many display as they want conceptually, so DialedIn 3 screens setup is not something they would not be able to replicate easily should they want to. But engineering cost is way higher. It's a 50k dollars figure at a minimum to build a fully integrated ARM based custom system. Stern Spike 2 development likely costed way more than that, since they built a whole architecture around it (node, communication bus, etc).

when Pinball Brothers selected a PC for their Alien remake, the whole reasoning was likely engineering cost (at the expense of BOM cost though, from what I could see on their system architecture it's not exactly cheap)

So bottom line using a PC is perfectly legitimate, even if not optimal (my DialedIn is NOISY compared to Spike 2 next to it) in my opinion, but can be justified by lower engineering cost.

What I do challenge however is the use of a "consumer" type motherboard and graphics board.

Consumer products are designed with ONE directive: cost. They need to achieve the minimum warranty required legally at the lowest cost, and that's absolutely it (except for gaming motherboard). Which means it's super unlikely it will last for 20y, at least not all of them.

Using a graphics board with a regular PCI-express slot in a mechanically constrained environment, especially with regards to shock and vibration, is really really not a good idea (as we have seen with users reporting that the card had unplugged itself from it's slot). There are industry grade standards to adress precisely this type of concern (MXM being one of them, but not only).

And lastly: supply of these consumer parts do not last forever, whereas in embedded (even in PC space) it is traditionnal to supply components for 5 years at least, 10 years more often than not.

When these parts are not available anymore, should the motherboard or graphics board fail, you're toasted. And speaking of which, I could actually not find replacement boards on JJP website itself. You can't find them on Marco either (at least I couldn't).

One will argue that you could find some on ebay since it's a consumer product, true enough, but for how long ? Especially the graphics board, which is not exactly a standard model (it's a low profile board). WPC machines have been around for more than 20y, and you can still find boards for them. People have been designing replacement CPU board that work out of the box.

It's a different story with a tightly coupled SW/HW as is the case here

I appreciate the fact that JJP is bringing new capabilities to their released machine (Scorbit being one of them), as do many other JJP owners (I have a DialedIn by the way), but so far I have not seen a company commitment to upgrade the BSP (stands for "Board Support Package", ie the combination of BIOS, kernel and filesystem that make the whole thing work) to support different type of HW (especially graphics). And no it's very very unlikely it will work out of the box (try using JJP image on a brand new motherboard with a brand new AMD graphics board see if it works). I tried in a VM, could boot to the main bootloader, but no further.

Maybe some will step in and hack the BSP to make it work on alternate HW, but at the cost of these machines, shouldn't this be the supplier responsibility ?

If JJP state that they can (and will) add support for new motherboard/graphics board, then they will be one step closer to true customer care: allowing the customer to replace parts at a later time with different type of HW. It's a HW maintenance dream. But it has an engineering cost to JJP, with little to no return (except customer satisfaction).

True enough, part availability from Stern is also a concern (and cost !), but at least we have a solution for the foreseeable future. I can buy a Spike 2 board on Marco or Stern 2 easily. I do agree the same question will be raised in 10y.

Anyway, that was a rather long post to state my point of view

Constructive comments welcome, please let's avoid a flame war.

Regards

Technically, this is indeed good news. And well, your marketing department sucks because it's advertised absolutely nowhere that you can use GnR motherboard/graphics as a replacement to DialedIn, Woz, etc...

However I would point out that you can't buy a GnR motherboard/graphics board on JJP website (or any other JJP pin for that matter), Marco, or any other site that I could find. Marco does not even have a section on JJP CPU boards.

So for this promise of long term support to become true, then there's one last hurdle since the technical aspect is solved: document the required parts, ensure their availabilities on JJP website and other part distributors.

Or, make it work with any motherboard/GPU combination, regardless of processor model (AMD/Intel) and graphics board (AMD/NVIDIA) (within reason of course, we all know how complex this can become).

On a sidenote, I find it absolutely brilliant that JJP keeps releasing new code with new capabilities for older machine, where ROI is pretty much zero. Kudos for that.

Regards

OK good to know, and kudos for that

But just so I understand : what happens if a customer has a faulty motherboard/graphics board ? Do you have hidden inventory and should the customer contact JJP they will get the option to buy it ? If so does this apply internationally ? Or does JJP states "buy any Intel motherboard and it should work" ?

Just curious, and I'm not trying to stir the pot here, just looking at the big picture support wise.

Sidenote: this whole "OS vs HW qualification/test" issue is not unique to JJP, I've had this issue raised on multiple occasions (Yocto vs Ubuntu vs RedHat vs whateverdistributionthecustomerwantstouse vs whatweprovide), so I'm not going to throw a stone here.

Well I've had three motherboards die on me on the last five years. Granted they are kind of taxed in operation so I'm probably not representative of day to day usage, but still.

Server motherboard are another class altogether. They are not built around cost, they are built for robustness and 24/7 operation, and yes I also have server motherboards which are still alive and kicking after several years (although my SMC blade server has always been prone to memory failure for some reason).

But in the field, I've had multiple customers having physical failures of motherboard because of shock and vibrations when using standard PCIe graphics card. That's the part which is a concern to me honestly.

Your point on emulation is valid, and absolutely fair to state that x86 brings flexibility. But... so does ARM (see PinMame running on RPI... or any other emulator - Retropie, Recalbox, etc).

Cheers

Well for that matter maybe remove the speaker, the grill, and mount a wooden fixture in front with the speaker oriented toward the player ?

Ah did not know that. Will have to check on DialedIn

This thread seem to come back alive

Joke aside, you won't get any confirmation from JJP, since admitting to a manufacturing process change would mean admitting there was an issue in the first place, meaning... well... liability for all original buyers.

Whatever they did, if they did anything, has been done quietly, and the only way to know for sure is to wait a few more months from owner of the last builds to report back.

Incidentally, it would be really good to have some sense of the build date these changes started to have an effect, that way second hand buyer can check it