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Am I the only one who doesn't care about DX11? Pinball is for playing pinball. I don't care how colorful the lighting effects are. Fix the buggy unplayable tables before you spend effort on making it shinier.

Have you learned how to catch before you shoot? In that bit of streaming in the other thread, it looks like you simply whacked anything that came near a flipper. The trick to Twilight Zone is always hold a flipper to catch the ball from the slot machine kickout so you can make a nice...

That Black Hole glitch is well known. And no you can't get much of a high score out of it unless you really want to wait forever. At 100 points per second, that's almost 3 hours per million points, or 600 hours (four weeks) to reach the top leaderboard scores near 200 million. The stuck ball...

This is a persistent myth. Farsight can do modifications just fine as long as Williams/Stern/Gottlieb agrees. Proof by example: removing songs from CFTBL, altering the Christopher Lloyd likeness for TAF, removing the Data East logo from POTO. Also inadvertent modifications in inaccurate rules...

I'm with Kolchak. Banzai Run's backbox is a neat gimmick but it really isn't very much fun to play. Just frustrating and confining, it's all stop and go to hit specific shots with no strategy or flow. I'd totally prefer Blackwater too. It was one of my first machines ever as a kid, at a...

Probably because that one educated dude spent multiple years of full time effort, while Farsight's team had to push out their table in a month or two among many other competing priorities.

You're thinking of goal detection, which TPA does do in many cases by analyzing the output to the DMD image. That's why so many tables fail to register certain wizard goals during multiballs, when there's other things going on on the display. But score rollover isn't done by image analysis...

High Speed has the same problem as all the early solid state tables in TPA: the flippers are too strong. High Speed is thrilling in real life since only a perfect shot should make it up the ramp to start that multiball and win that jackpot. You should get a lot of close calls where you know it...

Heck, put it this way. TPA is BETTER at licensing. TPA has done deals with Universal, Elvira, CBS (TZ), Paramount (STTNG), Columbia/Sony (T2), Paramount again (TAF), several individual actors across the tables, plus of course Williams, Stern, and Gottlieb themselves. Zen has done deals with...

There's a selection bias in the data points that we see. Multiple endpoints. We only see Zen's successes. We never see what they couldn't manage. Zen has the luxury of a wide open range of material. They can go with easy licensors and ignore the difficult ones. Farsight/TPA doesn't have...

Black Hole. The drop targets upstairs double or triple the bonus downstairs. That makes the points start flying by too... plus multiball zooms it up to a huge additional degree that Haunted House doesn't have. And Black Hole's flipper layout helpfully supports the player's efforts, rather...

This describes Big Shot perfectly as well. Pool is about precision shooting and naturally translates to pinball games that demand the same thing. When you miss in these games, you know it's your fault and you know you'll do better next time (no you won't, of course, but you know it anyway.)

I'm unsure on the numbers, but I think about 2.5B for the jackpot and 4-5 hours for the game. It's also possible that STTNG does take trillion rollovers in general but missed it in our cases, like CFTBL does. It's pretty much impossible to actually know.

I am quite sure my 950B game was more than that, could have been as much as 1950B. Yes, it's impossible to know how many times you're rolling it over since you don't even see the ten-billions digit, never mind hundred-billions. Maybe STTNG doesn't take trillion rollovers. But there is a...

I often turn off the table music entirely in favor of just the game sounds. I discovered quite a while ago I could play significantly better on Pro Pinball without music. I have a theory that music makes the player subconsciously try to time his shots to the beat, which of course would make...

Oh, and just for fun, your info here let me figure out exactly what went into my bonus on AFM in the other thread. It was the starting 5M, plus 250k * 462 Martians, plus 49570 * 8568 switch hits, all times 250x. I whipped out an Excel sheet that tried all possible numbers for the Martian count...

This changed at some point, it wasn't always this bad. Sometime around last November, I was playing Black Knight and it rarely had problems with ball locking, maybe about once per hour of playing. But yes I see all these same problems with the terrible ball lock too currently, on the PC version.

I remember it being not the ball physics, but the ROM emulation that ties TPA to 60 Hz. They've cited just getting the ROM to run at the proper speed in real time as a major challenge.

Getaway won't come in pack 33 or soon. We know they're doing TAF and so they wouldn't want to do another Williams from just about the same era so close. They'd want to spread out the highly popular gems. They'll mix it up before getting to another 90's Williams around pack 36 or so, which...

This. I think Haunted House is a great choice. I think it's got the biggest gap between great layout potential and weak rules shallowness in all of TPA and perhaps all of pinball. Modern mode-based principles could do loads of interesting stuff about navigating those labyrinthine playfields...