Marriage between Farsight and Heighway? Not very likely

[Heretic]

176? can ypu break that down by company? surely it cant be that many tables unless your including some others producers?

 

[wolfson]

no worries Heretic,my pleasure. TPA 75, ZEN,65,ZACCARIA 38 and PRO PINBALL 1,SEE I FAILED AT SCHOOL HAHA ! 179 not 176.

 

[wolfson]

sorry, ZEN - 1 . I`m a boofhead,so that makes it 178 tables.

 

[Heretic]

sorry, ZEN - 1 . I`m a boofhead,so that makes it 178 tables.

damn didnt realise some(most) of us had so many offical tables heh, bigger than most arcades in history yet people still get pissed. plenty to go around!

 

[rehtroboi40]

"Plays like a dead frog with a car battery up its arse."

How much actual thought went into that line?

IMO, he crossed the line when he said that about EBD-perhaps the most well-done simulation yet for TPA. Guess he never played the original computerized version from 1993. (Amtex pinball games were still important early-steps in simulation of real pinball machines on computers and game systems.) Some would say that about Pin*Bot and High Speed on the NES as well.

You could even go as far back as Atari's Video Pinball, and how closely the arcade game tried to duplicate the feel of real pinball.

 

[Heretic]

gotta love the classic videos games! davids midnight magic really did magic in terms of code for the 2600 im still fond of it.

didnt the venerable little wing produce the 93 ebd?

 

[superballs]

gotta love the classic videos games! davids midnight magic really did magic in terms of code for the 2600 im still fond of it.

didnt the venerable little wing produce the 93 ebd?

I only got to play this one tine as a youngster and I was hooked. I didn't even care that much for pinball at the time. I'd have loved some more tine with that game.

Sent from my SM-N910W8 using Tapatalk

 

[Fungi]

I only got to play this one tine as a youngster and I was hooked. I didn't even care that much for pinball at the time. I'd have loved some more tine with that game.

Sent from my SM-N910W8 using Tapatalk

Emulation baby. Emulation.

 

[superballs]

Yeah, might be the only way

 

[rehtroboi40]

gotta love the classic videos games! davids midnight magic really did magic in terms of code for the 2600 im still fond of it.

didnt the venerable little wing produce the 93 ebd?

Actually, I think they did the programming work, with Amtex as the publisher. They had also planned Fun House and Royal Flush, but both were cancelled.

Later Microsoft did MS Pinball Arcade. Two tables-CBW and Haunted House eventually made it to TPA. Followed by Williams Pinball Classics with ToTAN, CFTBL, BR, and LW.

It would be very nice to eventually see all of those table simulations which haven't made it to TPA yet be able to do so. Especially since MS Pinball had some good choices for EMs to include in their collection, especially Slick Chick. Granted the one table that appeared in a previous collection (PHoF) that I still want more than anything else is Sorcerer.

 

[Baron Rubik]

Emulation baby. Emulation.

2600.emu by Robert Broglia.

 

[AnvilCloud]

I am happy with TPA,ZEN,PRO PINBALL and ZACCARIA,actually I`m over the moon with my 176 tables.what a foul mouth,maybe this dipstick can put his head were the sun don`t shine !!!!

So does having a "foul mouth" reduce the credibility of his statements? Some people really need to get a thicker skin and understand context over presentation

 

[Heretic]

a well placed **** makes the world go round ...in this politically correct era it might just be shocking to see.

 

[Zaphod77]

Making digital pinball, especially with already existing tables, is NOT nearly as easy as he seems to think.

Let's see him do better. furthermore let him do their own table.

I understand the whole VP thing. The following things are quite common.

1) shots are much more difficult then they should be, due to temporal resolution issues. By careful tweaking of the flipper settings and the layout, this is usually fixable, but tends to lead to
2) shots that are too easy.
3) bad flow. this most often comes when the table isn't mdeled accurately enough. diagram and pictures vary widely in uality.
4) wrong rules, for non emulated table.
5) wrong layout!

Many times a pinball game was made either with substandard assets, by someone who hadn't played it, or both.


Whenever I made a table, i always tried to fix problem number 1. I also always made emulated ones, and ALWAYS got the layout accurate. I used accurate manual diagrams (and as someone who played the table, i could tell if it was right), and then tweaked from there as best as I could. i ALWAYS made tables that I knew pretty well, and it showed.

Farsight tends to do pretty well, but mistakes do slip through that anyone who's played more than one of said table in real life would catch, like the super jackpot timing being wrong in t2. As anyone who's played it seriously in multiple locations knows, it hits on the second light from the bottom, fired during the upswing of the cannon.

 

[WhiteChocolate]

HEEEIIIGGHHWAY TAH HELLL!

(sorry, but ya know -someone- just -hadta- do it!)

 

[The loafer]

Interesting comments coming from Eala (Dave Saunders). I'm not a particular fan of that type of language on social media but many out there are so... So with understanding that this isn't directing at your guys but his target audience, who gives a crap how he said it?

I wouldn't put the tags "legend" and "pioneer", in relevance to our virtual pinball hobby, on just anyone but Dave Saunders is certainly a member of that club. The guy knows how to create a table and most importantly why a table is designed in such and such a manner. Because of this, his words carry a lot of weight and although I wouldn't flat out say he's 100% right, Farsight would do well to at least review the technical aspect of his comments as it sould surely lead to a better EBD.

I find the EBD PC version plays very well though I stopped analyzing every little possible pro and cons of a virtual pinball table years ago; I just want to have fun now

Visual pinball: I'm not so much into it, mostly because of time, but the tables done now especially on VP10 are 10x better than they were back in the old days. In fact, it's extremely hard to go back and play those tables now. Yes, playing vp on. PC is not for the casual gamers. You think that's bad? You should try keeping a pincab up to date !

 

[soundwave106]

Interesting comments coming from Eala (Dave Saunders). I'm not a particular fan of that type of language on social media but many out there are so... So with understanding that this isn't directing at your guys but his target audience, who gives a crap how he said it?

Generally, the kind of comments he made are, um, not terribly helpful.

It certainly would take more than "five seconds" to tweak a physics engine, anyone who's written more than a "hello world" in a programming language would know that. There is weight and gravity in any physics engine, not "none". I do agree that Pinball Arcade feels a little too "floaty" (it's a common criticism) but I'm not sure what a "dead frog with a car battery up its a***" means physics wise.

One clue: I think the PC plays an awful lot better than the Android in my experience. Some of the "bad physics" I imagine might sometimes boil down to how many frames TPA can draw in a second. It is my understanding (at least per this tweak guide) that TPA's physics engine is optimized at 60 frames per second. It's decently easy to get the PC there. The question is whether you can even get there with iPad. Maybe. You have less control over tweaking the internals of an iPad, so I'm not so sure...

I would think in general that the more frames per second, the more accurate the physics (unless you interpolate, but that might cause too much CPU usage). High FPSs probably limit your platforms. Virtual Pinball for instance can generate *much* higher frames per second, which I imagine helps its physics models. But as a PC only platform, something like 240fps+ is not out of the question. I can't picture 240fps on an iPad at the moment...

In general, when I encounter foul-mouthed absolutism, I typically think people are either spouting personal opinions that they are trying to "strong-arm" with foul language, or are Dunning-Kruger effect type folks who only have a mild understanding of the problem. For instance, if someone says, "that [expletive] music sucks!!!", more often than not, it's probably not that the piece of music is technically at fault, it's that they do not like the style.

In this case I think it is more "engineer personality". Some people in this category can also be a bit foul-mouthed and absolutist even though they really know better.

 

[DanBradford]

Back on the original title question, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be able to see Heighway games digitised in the future. Farsight is a business which intends to both make money and spread the word about pinball. Andy Heighway is a businessman who wants to make money and expand his recognition. Neither side would care about a few comments on social media by an individual speaking for himself and not as company mouthpiece.

I for one would happily buy any and every real-life table in digital format for the price of a beer and a packet of crisps, be it Seawitch, Flash Gordon, TSPP, Freddy Nightmare on Elm St, WOZ, Full Throttle or Alien(s). Let's hope the licensing guys of all these companies can work something out to everyone's advantage.

In fact I think I'll send Andy a text later to ask him to put it on his to-consider list.

 

[Naildriver74]

More is better