OP

Quoted from twenty84:

Baseballs and hockey pucks can go 100 MPH in professional games. That is 4.5 cm/ms. Swing with a 5 ms delay and you are off by more than 20 cm.

What are the numbers on a ball speed that tops out at 10-15 mph (in rare cases) and which probably averages less than 5? Probably less than 2mph in an inlane?

» YouTube video

Your experiment is cool, but as many have noted, it's questionable any human can truly perceive this difference. So I guess your findings imply that the flippers on the remakes must feel different/slower than on EVERY Bally/Williams game?

If I'm not mistaken, aren't we dealing with differences of 1/2 to about 3 mm here? In terms of where a shot might end up? The 1/2 mm being a cradles "control" shot, where accuracy is more expected? So a 1/2 mm difference in location on a controlled shot? Doesn't seem like much to me. Maybe the difference on those high speed Orbit shots would matter, if the difference is really 1/4 inch...but at 3mm, still less than 1/8 inch.

Quoted from CrazyLevi:

I think it's ridiculous to say that a variable delay of almost .5 ms can't effect players just because it's supposedly undetectable to the conscious mind.
Even if that were so It could still affect players. It would affect us subconsciously like so many other things do. We aren't really in control of our own minds.
People have been saying for a long time they notice a difference. The whole game is being run by some cheesy emulator instead of being done the correct way. If Stern pulled something like this can you imagine the shit they'd be catching?! It wouldn't be a 2 page thread I can tell you that.
And it's not just the flippers. It's everything - slings, pops, kickers, saucers, castles...literally everything the software controls is subject to the varying delays.
Your vulnerable mind is going to pick up on all that noise and get confused and unsettled. Just ask any brain doctor.

Sounds like quite a health hazard!

So does the science say that all the old Bally/Williams machines are perfectly immune to delays of any kind? The circuitry is so pure, so finely tuned, that no delay, let alone random delay is ever possible? I'm not an electrical or mechanical engineer, and certainly no physicist, so I don't know. But if THAT is true, than I'd agree with you about the subconscious mind knowing something might be up. But I question every machine will behave like the OPs AFM, with zero delay ever. My uneducated guess would say the opposite, that there's variance all over the place all the time with most machines.

Quoted from YeOldPinPlayer:

As many others have noted, it's irrelevant if you can perceive the difference. What is relevant is if the shot is thrown off by the reported delay. A variable delay will throw the shot off in a way that can't be compensated for.

I added a couple comments to my original posts via edit. My question would be, isn't the most likely potential location variance on a controlled shot less than 1mm? I'd be hard pressed to perceive this. Even if it was a variance of .25 mm to 1.25mm.

Quoted from jwilson:

The difference is that the original Fliptronics system is discrete electronics, with no software at all. The only lag is the speed of electrons in a cable.

Is this consistent with CGC's post about "up to 4 ms delays" with WPC95?

Quoted from CrazyLevi:

Yes, this is correct, but it's not about "fine tuning," these aren't Swiss watches. It's actually quite the opposite - it's a simple system without a lot of unnecessarily complicated nonsense involved in between to create a variable delay like the MMr and AFMr system. That's why a 1948 gottlieb will have no variable delay in it's flipper response and a 2017 AFMr does.
When you turn on a flashlight, it turns on instantly with zero variable delay once the switch makes contact. Re-design the system to include a bunch of software that's doing a bunch of other things at the same time and it would be a different story.

Is this consistent with CGC's and Keefer's posts? Sounds like WPC95 DOES have some random delay...perhaps as much as the remakes...which would just be a delicious finding, all things considered.

Quoted from Mvfvette1:

That's what it's starting to look like. Originals may have even an even wider amount of random delay than the remakes. Scores on the originals will now be decreasing because of this info. Professionals will no longer be hitting their shots with as much regularity on the originals. Also, the originals should no longer be used for tournament play.

Exactly.

This is absolutely one of the awesomest threads in Pinside history. You couldn't script this thread any better! Thank you Pinside.

Quoted from jar155:

People jumped on the delay explanation because nobody has had a reason to point to until now why the games have a different feel to them. A lot of people claim difficulty hitting center shots or chaining ramp shots where they've never struggled to do that before. Lots of high level players have said this from the beginning and have stayed consistent in those claims. Finding that there's no difference in flipper delay doesn't mean that the games play the same, it just means that flipper delay variance is not a factor.

Let's get Levi to break it down for us! After all, he suspects ALL the coils in the remakes may suffer from this "random variance" phenomenon.

Maybe they just play different because some are 22 years old and some are brand spanking new? Maybe it's the WIDER gap in "random variance" flipper response that the "top players" are perfectly acclimated to, and the truer response of the remakes throws them off?

Oh this is rich. What a great thread!

Quoted from FalconPunch:

Wasn't just Keith Elwin. Almost all top 50 ranked players feel like something is different.
And yes it a pity that some people think there are alterior motives. I don't care about resale value and elitism...
The conversation is open and I hope it continues. I hope someone can figure out what the difference is because it's still there on default machine settings.

It's because these are the most highly tuned (and attuned) players in the world, and they're going to notice the intrinsic differences between 22 year old games and brand new machines.

That and that every machine has its own nuances and therefore no two machines play exactly alike anyway.