Normal
Remember that most of the tables in TPA are emulated from original ROMs. That means that for things like goals and scores, TPA has to somehow "scrape" that information from certain visual and audio cues - they can't embed their own hooks into those ROMs. Unlike a built-from-the-ground-up fantasy pinball app where presumably the developer has all of the code at their disposal.This reason alone explains why there are problems triggering certain goals - depending on what the table visuals or audio is, the cue might not be picked up by whatever is listening.The same goes for scores. TPA scrapes the final score of a game the same way.How do they do that? There's going to be some kind of polling thread that runs every CPU cycle (60hz, in TPA's case) that watches for events that it needs to react to. The more you put into that thread for a table to look for, the worse your performance gets. Maybe not so much on a PC or console but on tablets and 'phones the cost might be too great.So can they get more advanced stats together? Yes. But at a cost. And they won't be accurate, because of the inherent limitations baked into how they get that information.This is not "shame on Farsight", it's a case of knowing or being able to extrapolate how the application is programmed and seeing that what you want done isn't necessarily as easy or feasible as you might think.
Remember that most of the tables in TPA are emulated from original ROMs. That means that for things like goals and scores, TPA has to somehow "scrape" that information from certain visual and audio cues - they can't embed their own hooks into those ROMs. Unlike a built-from-the-ground-up fantasy pinball app where presumably the developer has all of the code at their disposal.
This reason alone explains why there are problems triggering certain goals - depending on what the table visuals or audio is, the cue might not be picked up by whatever is listening.
The same goes for scores. TPA scrapes the final score of a game the same way.
How do they do that? There's going to be some kind of polling thread that runs every CPU cycle (60hz, in TPA's case) that watches for events that it needs to react to. The more you put into that thread for a table to look for, the worse your performance gets. Maybe not so much on a PC or console but on tablets and 'phones the cost might be too great.
So can they get more advanced stats together? Yes. But at a cost. And they won't be accurate, because of the inherent limitations baked into how they get that information.
This is not "shame on Farsight", it's a case of knowing or being able to extrapolate how the application is programmed and seeing that what you want done isn't necessarily as easy or feasible as you might think.
