Virtually guaranteed some sale conditions were included…

I would like to see more standardization personally. We don't need a bunch of different boards out there doing the same thing.

Predator was built on FAST and everyone seems happier with how things play now, but also I feel much better about someone taking a chance on buying a smaller run game from a smaller company knowing it's backed by standard hardware that's likely to be around even if the company stops making games. (Not hinting that Pinball Bros is done, best of my knowledge they're working on multiple game ideas.)

If you bought a Haggis game and it breaks you can get parts from FAST even though they're toast.

It's clear American almost went completely under. If they hadn't been bailed out by a new investor the support for their games wasn't likely to last much longer. If they were using FAST you'd be able to still buy boards.

Could FAST go under? Sure. Anything can stop. But every time a company like Barrels of Fun standardizes on it there's more stability in the market for all of us.

I would consider American announcing they were switching to FAST a positive step just for those reasons.

You might want to look again - that screenshot is from the planned Merlin's arcade pin, the actual Merlin's Arcade which has not been released that long is the Legendary Edition (12 pinsiders with 16 wishlisted)

Ninja has 45 pinside owners, with 51 pinsiders having it on their wishlist, and as you noted, it sold all 100 copies. Which is 100 more than before he made the cabinet change.

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I agree with this but using the Aimtron board might be a part of the sale condition, it would make sense for them to try and recoup development costs for these as I am guessing they did not make a profit with the sale of the company to Bryan.

If the new owner agreed to that then he's a pretty poor negotiator.

I don't know where this "you must use our knock-off p-roc boards if you want to buy the company from us" came from, but that would indeed be a pretty stupid sale condition.

I don't know anything about the Aimtron board system but Bryan did say the plan is to continue to utilize it. I've said this many times but the fact Houdini ran P3 boards made me feel a lot more comfortable buying that game from a startup company.

I feel like I'm being goaded, lol. It's always the same few people too. 3 different threads with the same people sharing their "expert" opinions about Multimorphic products. Welcome to pinside, Bryan, and good luck!

... and just to dispel the same rumors that were shared in slanderous ways when BoF was researching boards, the P3-ROC boards have been in production and available for well over a decade now, including through COVID. We've updated firmware and added features along the way, including hardware EOS support, and continue supplying boards to multiple manufacturers. We also use them ourselves in the P3, which is always pushing the boundaries with new features, which means we're motivated to keep adding necessary features and staying up with new technologies.

An interesting tidbit on pricing: We had aimtron quote pricing on some of our boards early on when they [naturally] wanted to build them themselves to bypass the middleman. The price they wanted to charge us to have them make the boards was higher than what we quoted them! They saved [a lot of] money by buying the boards from us instead of making them themselves, lol. Then operational management changed...

Are the Aimtron boards just P3 boards? Or knockoffs? They're clearly not exactly the same, and yet very similar.

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I just assumed knockoffs. If they're actually P3 compatible and can simply be replaced with P3 boards if something goes wrong that would be helpful information.

If they're not ... then I don't care if they move to P3 or FAST, just something that feels like a known quantity would be preferred for future support. Aimtron is not a pinball company and there's no reason to think they will care about any of us in the future. We've all seen what happens to the value of games that cannot be repaired, they tank. Nobody wants that.

I personally prefer FAST because I know them and have worked with them on things like Predator, so I'm gonna advocate for the one I'm familiar with. Any argument for P3 is equally valid.

I'm told they're software compatible and mechanically compatible, but that they aren't electrically compatible, which is why machines need to fully run one set or the other and why a few AP customer who received the AP boards accidentally by AP sales folks had no success with them. That said, if they're electrically compatible, then we get into interesting territory.

So they are knock off boards, that much seems to be clear. After that not so much. Seems nobody outside of American actually knows!

Anyways, all I'm saying is if you want your products to be more appealing to the general market not rolling your own boards is actually smart.

It's a waste of resources and support, but importantly to outsiders it's a weakness to the longevity of your games, which is part of what determines their value.

And aftermarket value matters. For some reason I keep seeing people say companies don't care about aftermarket value, which is absurd. If your games don't hold value then they have less value NIB, and that's a direct problem with your sales.

Confidence in the future of a game matters, and so does confidence in being able to sell it for a reasonable price (not taking a bath, doesn't have to mean profit) later.

Kind of cool I think

I think it's super cool! You need the space for it, and people to play with, not for everyone. I have nowhere to put such a beast personally.

Doesn't fit into a regular pin spot, you need space around it.

I just saw a Merlin on location at AYCE Gogi. But it was turned off/broken.

It was doing a great job at holding bags though.

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I was going to say the exact same thing. Cuphead has enough intrinsic appeal that you wouldn't need to be a fan of Cuphead to be interested in getting the game. It lies somewhere between a totally original theme and a super popular IP. Make it a fun game and people will buy it for that simple reason.

Amen! You are spot on and fans are not a solution. Flippers are a critical piece of technology and game play. Having the best and most the consistent flipper response is something I addressed with engineering day two in Chicago and future games will benefit from our new design.

AP has ZERO restrictions on what we buy. All I want is the most reliable board set and product for our machines. That holds for all components and materials. However, please remember that one user 1 data point with a product does not have any statistical meaning. I have heard the same good and bad about a range of boards. What I will be doing is meaningful testing with a large enough sample set. We will be putting a range of products through complete thermo-cycle and shock testing. This is something I know a lot about. I a recovering Ph.D. Analytical chemist . Cost comes only after reliability!

I stand corrected. I guess Aimtron couldn’t get this albatross from around its neck fast enough.

I like what we are hearing from you and there seems to be well thought out direction going on. Looking forward to seeing what you do.

For the record ever since I played Hot Wheels and heard such great things about robust American builds my first NIB was going to be GTF but we all know how that tale ended… Beautiful game though.

Best of luck New American Pinball!

I had to tell that bag lady to move her bag a few times off of games I wanted to play. What a weirdo.

For flipper feel ("snappiness") you can use bigger coils and/or bigger capacitors to drive them.

But if you want to be serious about flipper fade, you need to concentrate on bushings with tighter tolerances (so less energy is wasted per flip) and a board that can drive sub 1ms duty cycles. Only Stern has that at the moment (they can do microsecond duty cycles, which is why you can hold a spike system flipper up for an hour and the temp won't appreciably change - try THAT with a Bally/Williams or any PROC3/FAST machine, they can't hold temp in that test).

But even microsecond duty cycles only helps with flippers in hold, not flips. They still have issues with fade in long sessions. The problem is accumulated heat and electrical resistance working in a kind of feedback loop that happens when there's not enough time between flips. That reality is why you see some games that don't have much of a fade issue at all - the ball isn't back at the flippers quickly, or there are timed pauses in scoops or vuks or hold posts, etc., while other games have severe fade after only 40 minutes or so due to the ball coming back to the flippers quickly and/or lots of multiballs. You can overcome that for a while with bigger coils or bigger capacitors that still push power in when electrical resistance is great, but ultimately heat IS the real enemy, and they will fade.