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Stern, Spike and the furture of Pinball


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I truly think Stern will get a handle on this system and sort it out so there are only a few common boards and then all will be good.

 

Let's hope they manage that sooner rather than later and they don't leave too many "orphans" behind.

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I took the advice of a well known pin tech and friend a while ago,and that advice was to steer clear of anything stern with the spike system in it.i am cashed up and looking to buy my first nib and i would not even consider a any stern with spike.my money will be going on a tag if i am happy with the final machine,and i like what i see so far.
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If your spending in excess of $10K on a Stern Pinball, a Node board is less than 3% of the purchase price. Not a big deal for an overpriced PCB if the need ever arises in your ownership of the machine. Think of the enjoyment playing the pin, when the fun goes then time to move it on. Doubt the informative tutorial as much as I enjoyed it will be end of SPIKE.
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i think the problems with the node boards are a hit and miss

i've got a kiss pro with thousands of games on it without a problem and yet GoT with 100 games and a node board goes

when you spend 10k for a game 200 for a node board isn't much and pretty easy to change - a tech will charge 200+ to change a mosfet over on a SAM system

same shit , the rest of the cost cutting is another story

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If your spending in excess of $10K on a Stern Pinball, a Node board is less than 3% of the purchase price. Not a big deal for an overpriced PCB if the need ever arises in your ownership of the machine. Think of the enjoyment playing the pin, when the fun goes then time to move it on. Doubt the informative tutorial as much as I enjoyed it will be end of SPIKE.

 

The problem isn't necessarily the price of the board (although still expensive) the problem is will these node boards for specific pins still be available?, as, if not, the pins is potentially unrepairable... they've got you by the balls

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Well all this talk of nodes hasn't diminished my love for GoTLE. I'm happy with the game and hope it continues to operate flawlessly as it has to date.

It's an interesting thread and I've learnt a lot but it is only pinball after all. Think I will go play some. :D

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i think the problems with the node boards are a hit and miss

i've got a kiss pro with thousands of games on it without a problem and yet GoT with 100 games and a node board goes

when you spend 10k for a game 200 for a node board isn't much and pretty easy to change - a tech will charge 200+ to change a mosfet over on a SAM system

same shit , the rest of the cost cutting is another story

 

Mine charged me $50 :D

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i think the problems with the node boards are a hit and miss

i've got a kiss pro with thousands of games on it without a problem and yet GoT with 100 games and a node board goes

when you spend 10k for a game 200 for a node board isn't much and pretty easy to change - a tech will charge 200+ to change a mosfet over on a SAM system

same shit , the rest of the cost cutting is another story

 

Who's doing your work? lol 200 bucks to change a fet jeez?

 

Marco had them for $300 usd that is a lot for what it is. Those lamp boards would also be peanuts to mass produce.

My question still stands, wheres your 10k's worth? so far we're down to a near empty pine box the play field with a system designed for a toy pinball a cheap off the shelf LCD and some decals and in all cases released with unfinished code. I know the home market seems to just dismiss these things but I wouldn't want to be an operator, you must be paying for the license surly?

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I enjoyed watching that video and watched a few of their others. I hope he continues making them because they are very informative and well made.

 

I agree with the 'idea' around the new system being problematic, but as a person working in tech all my life, I just think it's inevitable and part of technology moving forward that you can't avoid. Sure the initial change might piss a few people off, but ultimately Stern would be doing this to lessen their costs, increase their profits, and reinvest that money back into the business to (hopefully) pay their people better and innovate and improve their designs.

 

Are they innovating at the moment? Well, they do still make the best pinball machines around in my opinion, even if I have personal issues with some of them (never been a fan of Steve Ritchie regardless the era). And they have moved on to LCD and all of the animations and things that go into that - which would be incredibly expensive to produce (at least initially until it becomes business as usual).

 

All of the boards might be proprietary for now, but I don't think anyone needs to be concerned that you are suddenly locked in to buying Stern for the rest of your life. Look at older pinball machines with new boards and reverse engineered chips. As well as arcade machines that have encryption that takes decades to break, but once it is broken the thing is emulated or can be reproduced. The tech heads will find a way and, with something so incredibly popular with very (very) passionate fans in pinball, you can bet without any shadow of a doubt that someone will get replacement boards produced if Stern falls off the wagon and is suddenly not around anymore.

 

Tech always moves forward (pinball very slowly compared to everything else) and it pisses people off for sure. I remember back when I used to repair PCs and got annoyed that suddenly everything was swappable boards instead of components you could repair - but now you don't even have to think about how to fix a PC you just swap something out and off you go. Maybe pinball will be like that too soon.

 

Anyway, as an operator it's probably a lot more of an issue, but I'm just a home user and tech enthusiast who has long since given up shaking my fist at innovation. I sure can't fix my mechanical watch myself if it suddenly dies - but that old grandfather clock maybe!

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Who's doing your work? lol 200 bucks to change a fet jeez?

 

Marco had them for $300 usd that is a lot for what it is. Those lamp boards would also be peanuts to mass produce.

My question still stands, wheres your 10k's worth? so far we're down to a near empty pine box the play field with a system designed for a toy pinball a cheap off the shelf LCD and some decals and in all cases released with unfinished code. I know the home market seems to just dismiss these things but I wouldn't want to be an operator, you must be paying for the license surly?

 

i do all my work myself but i do know techs that charge a call out fee plus the repair - they don’t work for free !

 

 

i agree with you totally, i stopped buying new machines long ago GBLE was the last one

i used to classify myself as one of the bigger new pinball buyers but i seen the writing on the wall when i couldn’t justify the price

for the very little i was getting , i lined up all the LE’s in order of release and see the big cost cutting and poor workmanship

with every game you would thing these machines were getting made in china and no the US - even china have upped their game

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Time for a new tech champ :-)

 

That's a 50c part!

 

rd

 

$1.70 from element 14 if you buy 50 at a time

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On a technical note about construction: Pinball machines are made in tiny volumes, even Stern machines. There is NO REASON at all to be using crammed together SMD on a board so small - NONE!

 

Through hole parts are easily available and cheap excepting some micros that just aren't made in DIP any more. Making boards like Stern is doing is very dumb for a lot of reasons and simply not necessary.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

 

$1.70 from element 14 if you buy 50 at a time

 

....and, that is complete robbery!!! Time to change your supplier methinks.

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Let's hope so - that would sound about right and it will have been for a lot more than walk in-change one transistor-walk out-five minutes-thankyou-cha,ching

 

some techs i talk to charge 150 just to rock up , i know the part is cheap but if you got no idea how to fix it what do you do ?

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I enjoyed watching that video and watched a few of their others. I hope he continues making them because they are very informative and well made.

 

I agree with the 'idea' around the new system being problematic, but as a person working in tech all my life, I just think it's inevitable and part of technology moving forward that you can't avoid. Sure the initial change might piss a few people off, but ultimately Stern would be doing this to lessen their costs, increase their profits, and reinvest that money back into the business to (hopefully) pay their people better and innovate and improve their designs.

 

Are they innovating at the moment? Well, they do still make the best pinball machines around in my opinion, even if I have personal issues with some of them (never been a fan of Steve Ritchie regardless the era). And they have moved on to LCD and all of the animations and things that go into that - which would be incredibly expensive to produce (at least initially until it becomes business as usual).

 

All of the boards might be proprietary for now, but I don't think anyone needs to be concerned that you are suddenly locked in to buying Stern for the rest of your life. Look at older pinball machines with new boards and reverse engineered chips. As well as arcade machines that have encryption that takes decades to break, but once it is broken the thing is emulated or can be reproduced. The tech heads will find a way and, with something so incredibly popular with very (very) passionate fans in pinball, you can bet without any shadow of a doubt that someone will get replacement boards produced if Stern falls off the wagon and is suddenly not around anymore.

 

Tech always moves forward (pinball very slowly compared to everything else) and it pisses people off for sure. I remember back when I used to repair PCs and got annoyed that suddenly everything was swappable boards instead of components you could repair - but now you don't even have to think about how to fix a PC you just swap something out and off you go. Maybe pinball will be like that too soon.

 

Anyway, as an operator it's probably a lot more of an issue, but I'm just a home user and tech enthusiast who has long since given up shaking my fist at innovation. I sure can't fix my mechanical watch myself if it suddenly dies - but that old grandfather clock maybe!

 

You make some excellent points but I'm not sure I'd agree with technology moving forward, I think we've gone backwards.

Disposable "anything" and especially pinball is not a good thing and is incredibly wasteful and unsustainable and dare I say unnecessary.

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There is NO REASON at all to be using crammed together SMD on a board so small - NONE!

 

In fairness to Spike (or unfairness to SAM), when I look at the two boards in my POTC, there is only a single chip that is socketed, and that is the boot ROM. Absolutely everything else is soldered on, and is SMD. The exceptions are the flyback diodes, driver transistors, and large capacitors and rectifiers (which, due to the switching power supply, are no longer needed with Spike).

 

On Spike, the driver transistors are still through-hole mounted, so they are still serviceable. (I don't know about the flyback diodes on Spike; are those through-hole?)

 

So, the main difference with Spike is all the node boards with their SMD LEDs, which we've discussed at length already. But, in terms of soldering, SAM doesn't look all that much better than Spike because, other than lamps/LEDs, things are surface mounted just the same.

 

I don't know how many of the components on the node boards are standard parts that are readily available. I would assume most them are, but whatever software runs on the node boards would definitely be proprietary. So, if some flash RAM goes bad on a node board, it's not fixable by just replacing the component.

 

So, the node boards still look very much like a service disaster to me, unless their price miraculously were to drop by about 90%.

 

Michi.

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Mike when TAG comes out will it be user serviceable?

 

Thanks for asking, YES, very easily serviced and using through hole parts where possible although we are obligated to include the mandatory wording as below for insurance purposes (IE: if Joe public sticks his fingers where he isn't supposed to and fries himself we can say "we told you not to do that")

 

Also, sockets where sensible, wiring plugs that have screw terminals, test switches where helpful, extra large pads on driver transistors so you don't lift tracks as easily when replacing transistors - many other things.

 

(I should really be putting these pics in the TAG thread but I'll hide them here LOL)

 

new1.thumb.jpg.ba77d9c2464779b7829063375377aea9.jpg

 

new2.thumb.jpg.90f1a84fef061079a86c7e967a0770a6.jpg

 

 

This board measures 55x73mm - it is rubbish to suggest things need to be made using SMD for pinball. It doesn't save space or costs at all!

 

 

new3.jpg.341a22b9d377cbe905a10f5fa76e54aa.jpg

 

new4.thumb.jpg.c92052abe5caebc8a1793cbcda31ebc3.jpg

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

maybe in china it's cheap but not in AU :)

 

Here you go - about AU$5 for 10 pcs including post - direct from Shenzhen where 90% of them come from anyway:

 

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/in-stock-GST5009BM-LF/1946249315.html?spm=2114.search0104.3.60.r9HTTt&ws_ab_test=searchweb0_0,searchweb201602_2_10152_10065_10151_10068_5400015_10307_10137_10060_10155_10154_10056_10055_10054_5370015_10059_100031_10099_5380015_10103_10102_5410015_5430015_10052_10053_10142_10107_10050_10051_10084_10083_10119_10080_10082_10081_5390015_10110_10111_10112_10113_10114_10179_10312_10313_10314_10315_10078_10079_10073_10120_5420015-10120,searchweb201603_5,ppcSwitch_5&btsid=73914ba7-cc5b-438a-a3cc-5af267164ae5&algo_expid=d6d936c5-2bfd-46de-ab1f-b95643d1dfd1-8&algo_pvid=d6d936c5-2bfd-46de-ab1f-b95643d1dfd1

Edited by Homepin
spwelling agin
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"if Joe public sticks his fingers where he isn't supposed to and fries himself we can say "we told you not to do that"

Thanks Mike, I'm relieved that you did this your way. Your quote made my day, I just wish that warning was there 50 years ago when I stuck my finger in a live light socket. :lol

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George Gomez has answered some of these questions in pin chats and interviews before but he was happy to answer them again. We tried to Catalog based on the time a statement or question was asked on the video.

 

2:55 — “Considering the abundance of empty space inside a pinball machine, the use of a microelectronic system is completely unnecessary and almost always makes faults far more inconvenient and expensive to repair”

Response:The Spike systems use modern, state of the art technology. Like many modern systems it is based on a distributed network and it leverages the flexibility and features inherent in surface mount components, LED lighting and switching power supplies; not unlike mobile phones, computers, automobiles, jet aircraft or any product designed for use in the world today.

The system is designed to be modular in order to allow the system to scale to the requirements of the game. Stern Pinball intends to develop games at many price points to satisfy many existing and future market segments. This means that a simpler game is not burdened with the cost of resources that it doesn’t use and a more complex game isn’t limited by a fixed set of inputs and outputs. Previous systems used a finite number of drivers and resources, extra drivers could be added but it was awkward and expensive.

3:34 — "Serviceability with Spike is not enhanced, in fact quite the opposite it true”.

Response: All new technology requires some acclimation period amongst service users. The Spike systems currently use menus that are directly based on the SAM system. A more updated diagnostic system, which takes advantage of the user interface available thru the LCD screen and built in smart diagnostics is currently in development. There are also numerous programs in development to train and educate the technical support community, operators and customers on troubleshooting techniques specific to the new system.

3:53 — “The previous SAM system already featured 100% LED illumination.”

Response: This is only true because the game referenced (Star Trek Premium/LE) was essentially a SAM/Spike hybrid with preliminary node board architecture from Spike running the LEDs.It was a modified SAM system, utilizing Spike technology.

The power budgets onthe Spike system are designed to allow the designer to use a substantially greater number of LED’s than the previous systems incandescent lighting; whilealso using similar amounts of power.In addition, the system allows for the use of color changing LED’s, giving the designer substantially more feature flexibility, more attractive light shows and greater design potential; this was impossible with incandescent lighting. LED’s are currently used in the vast majority of consumer products due to the intensity of the light, reliability, color flexibility and low power consumption.

4:03 — “It’s worth noting the Spike system is quite sensitive. If you were to replace one of the few removable LEDs with a traditional light bulb it will cause the Spike system to shut down or reset at random”.

Response:The Spike system is very robust and has passed rigorous laboratory testing that subjected it to shock, vibration, extremes in temperature, electrical shocks and radiation events way beyond what it sees in real world use. Spike is designed to work with LEDs. If an incandescent lamp is installed it draws excessive current, which is sensed by the overcurrent detection circuit; then outputs of the driving node board are turned off for ½ second. Since the overload persists, it will have the effect of disabling that node board until the offending incandescent lamp is removed. This is not a failure condition; this is a design feature to protect the system. This also allows the system to protect itself from potential shorts when someone is poking around under a playfield with a tool and accidentally shorts across components.

5:01 — “Being a microelectronic system, Spike’s circuit boards are far more delicate…”

Response:In reality small boards with SMT components are less likely to suffer failures due to mechanical shock loads due to the lower mass of the components and inherent lower inertia. In addition the same types of components are used in consumer, industrial and commercial products throughout the world today,specifically because they are more reliable and stable. Every mobile phone in use today sees much greater potential shock loads and uses the very same types of components.

5:40 — “… it would have been a wise safety precaution to have fuses in some key areas”

Response:The coil outputs have overcurrent protection.Shorted coils should cause no damage to the driver board. Sizing fuses is a non-trivial issue considering how much current a large coil can draw — a fuse which is large enough to not blow under normal conditions may not blow under a failure condition, either. This is especially problematic if a single fuse is expected to protect multiple coils.

6:16 — "Spike is definitely not a better system for operators to work with, diagnose, or repair in the field”

Response:Again, a modular system is preferable for service. LED’s are far more reliable. Service and diagnostics menus are the same as on SAM. As said before, Stern is constantly working to improve its products including serviceability. The roll out of node diagnostic code will further improve serviceability.

7:05 — “Spike diagnostics are essentially identical to the previous SAM system…”

Response:Yes, this was by design so that on system roll out operators familiar with SAM games would be able to navigate the system until training schools, support materials and more sophisticated troubleshooting methods could be introduced. As mentioned above, we are developing a suite of tools to ease the burden of diagnosing issues.

7:25 — “One of the most common Spike criticisms is that Stern has created many different playfield node and LED boards…”

Response:The variety of node boards has narrowed. Games have unique LED boards and this will likely continue to support unique game features.

The LED boards that are a unique shapeare specific to the game.

9:00 — “Some Spike boards have switch blocks but little information is provided about them”.

Response:The DIP switches are all documented in the manuals.

9:41 — “Replacing them is an expensive, time-consuming nightmare” (referencing the SMT LEDs)

Response:Again, this is common technology; SMT parts are currently used in consumer, commercial and industrial products worldwide.They do require specific techniques, training and tools but years ago when pinball went to solid state, that technology seemed equally daunting at first. There are numerous YouTube video’s on SMT repair tutorials.

9:50 — Lack of sockets for lighting …

Response:LEDs fail far less frequently.LED’s are not stressed and being SMT will not be affected by vibration.

In addition we are in the midst of transitioning most of our connectors away from insulation displacement technology to “crimp and poke” style connectors for additional reliability.

12:00 — this is a common refrain - that everything was done to increase Stern’s profits at the expense of quality.

Response:This is simply not true. Stern employs some of the most dedicated and passionate game designers, developers, artists, sound designers and engineers that have ever worked on pinball machines. Their collective portfolio of hit games, patents and awards have been accomplished under the brand banners of the best pinball companies in the history of the game and the portfolio speaks for itself. They are all players and consumers of the Stern product and guardians of the vision to create the best pinball machines in the world.

The Spike system has brought significant power to the designers; with the ability to create an inventory of flexible and modular components that allows devices that are designed for a specific game to be brought to bear on a different game with different game play results. In addition the system has brought scalable power to lamps, LCD displays, coils, switches, sensors, electromagnetic devices, motors and numerous other components.

14:40 — talks about how LCD should be less expensive than DMD.

Response: The LCD and DMD hard cost is similar; the cost of electronics to drive the LCD is much more. The art and code development cost per game is much higher.

15:48 — Power switch.

Response: The power switch was moved to the backbox in order to comply with FCC testing standards and to increase safety by removing all main power from the main cabinet; if a few cents in wire length was saved it was incidental and not at all the design intent.

On ELG

Response: the original ELG games that the operator refers to were intended to test a market segment. Every game was sold and the program taught us a lot. We intend to have a presence in consumer products at many price points and that research effort is ongoing. The Spike system was not designed specifically for those games but those games did provided an opportunity to do a pilot run of the system in order to increase reliability once the system was launched in the commercial games. The ability of the system to scale up and down was a design parameter in the original design brief for the system.

On Batman and the notion that we are going away from designing full games:

Response: We produce 3 cornerstone games every year. In addition we may produce smaller runs of studio titles and other special games. Every cornerstone is designed from scratch and includes a Pro, Premium and LE version. Batman was not a cornerstone game; it was an anniversary edition designed to celebrate 30 years of Stern Pinball. The designers chose to build on their previous Batman model in order to improve on their own design. The game was also the first Spike 2 LCD game which required substantial effort from the design team for that reason. Development on the code is ongoing and the team is dedicated and committed to finishing the game. The key members of the team intend to buy the game with their own money and add it to their personal collections and to that end they want it to be something they can be proud off. They will not abandon the game.

JJ

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Very political responses, not one negative to agree on. It reads as "we did it right and everyone else is wrong".. IMO

 

I was thinking just that, he'd make a great politician.

Whats the point of having diagnostics if you can't repair the issue?

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