It was API's original involvement with pinside that convinced me to buy Houdini and Oktoberfest. They really seemed to be working with the pinball community and had a genuine interest in supporting the games and the people that bought them. It has been sad and disappointing to see the decline over the past few years and I wish you all the best in tuning this ship back on the right course.

But those property taxes in TX - oof!

And the power grid is more reliable in IL.

Sorry, where can MDHR’s side be read/ heard? Outta the loop and was really hoping for this game to come out.

Does the OLD AP own them $$$ for not makeing the game?

Congrats on the purchase. Early Houdini owner here and still own it.

So with you being in Tx and AP being in Chicago, how will you manage it long distance?

And exactly how did you go about mentioning buying a pinball company to the wife?

Yeah, I completely acknowledge that from a support standpoint, it's a risky move; I've been there before, someone reports a bug to support, and after troubleshooting for days the user casually drops "I made some changes to the software, do you think that might have caused it?". That can be somewhat mitigated with image hashes in logs provided to support to know if it's a custom or official version.

But on the flip side, having the community be able to help with code commits may help a ton; I'm a big believer that "more eyes on code results in better code", faster and more reliable bugfixes, which would allow the hired software engineers to focus more of their time on new products. Also adds a longevity to the game in a worst case scenario where support does get dropped; I know my local spot has a custom rom for our Theater of Magic for better competitive play.

I'd totally understand if AP didn't want to go that direction, but as a big open source advocate, how often do I get a chance to talk to the owner of a company and pitch the idea?

Came here to ask…
Please save Cuphead.
That is all.

Yeah, I certainly am sensitive to property taxes (as someone who was born and raised in the upper Midwest). I can’t speak to Illinois’ power grid superiority, but the property tax in both IL and TX are among the highest in the country. At the very least, TX offsets some of that by having no state income tax.

And now, back to our regular scheduled programming!

If you're into open source pinball my suggestion would be to find a way to contribute to https://missionpinball.org/

There are so many reasons a commercial company would not want to open source their code, a lot of them really good ones, but first and foremost it's probably a non-starter for most license discussions.

Mission Pinball though is totally open source, and is an awesome way to be involved in coding games.

So White Water 2 is essentially White Water 1, just you are shooting to the right in the upper playfield, rather than to the left like it was in the original...

GENIUS!