BlahCade Pinball Podcast you are watching the BlahCade Pinball Podcast i'm your host chris freebus aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway across the world jared morgan G'day, how are you going? I'm going just swelling How about you? Swelling? That's really a word Swimmingly is what I was going for Swellingly swimmingly Yeah, going alright Nothing really to report here Everything is okay And over here stateside we just had our Thanksgiving I hope everybody had their filling of stuffing and turkey and pumpkin pie. I know you did, Chris. I had minor portions of turkey and a big old wedge of pumpkin pie because that's Thanksgiving for me. Your main course was indeed the pumpkin pie. Actually, you could probably say it was I had pumpkin pie with my whipped cream. Right. because I make sure that you can't see pie you just see whipped cream and then you discover that there's pie underneath it it's the mystery revealed it's amazing and then of course yesterday was the Black Friday that wasn't yeah it was the Black Friday that's all virtual which hey I think that's a win totally you don't have to go anywhere and you can still get the deals it's awesome that's going to be like the new normal now and that's a good new normal to have right absolutely because i don't understand i've never understood the appeal of going into a scrum to find you know four dollar dvds uh no that's literally zero appeal yeah no you see it's funny like when i see all the black friday madness going on over there in the u.s i have to remember that Thanksgiving over there is pretty much like our boxing day here. So the 26th of December here. That's when all the stores reopen again, and people, because they've been locked away for literally one day, they go stir-crazy, and they have to get out, and they have to go en masse to the major shopping centers and buy up all the stuff that's literally just been marked up so it looks like it's discounted. That's how they do it. Well, my favorite thing is that the TVs that everybody goes, oh my God, look at how cheap this TV is for. Those TVs are literally only manufactured for Black Friday. Oh, really? Because if you look at their serial numbers, as soon as Black Friday is gone, you'll never see that serial number again. And prior to Black Friday, you never saw that serial number either. They literally, it's screens that are made by the various companies specifically to sell on Black Friday for a song. And if I know anything about how they make flat panel TVs these days, there is this gigantic panel. and from that they go okay from this we're going to cut uh you know six uh 75 inch tvs and you know 16 40 inch tv or whatever they basically tetris the entire panel and do that cut and so depending on what the largest sizes that people are are interested in that determines the sizes of all the smaller tvs that's why you no longer see certain size tvs because it doesn't fit into the pattern of doing the cut. And then from there, they check the panels and see what the quality is. And based on how good that quality is of that particular panel cut, oh, okay, that gets kicked up into the expensive one. And this one has not quite as... They're all being cut from the same panel, but obviously certain sections of the panel don't have as strong of quality. Oh, really? Yeah. And so all the lower quality panels, those get set aside. And guess what they get packaged into? They get packaged into your Black Friday TV. There you go. I never realized that. I wonder if that's the same for the Boxing Day sales here. Probably. Probably. And then you think about, you know where Arcade 1-Up is getting all their monitors from. Yeah, well. Because all their monitors are literally five years plus old. Yeah. and they're buying those things in bulk, basically from these leftovers of these cuttings. So these have been in storage for ages, and there's nothing particularly wrong with them. They're just a different grade monitor, and you don't need a fantastic resolution monitor for the games that you're playing on them. Well, where it's going to become interesting is they have a lot of 4x3 monitors, and eventually those are going to run out, and all you're going to be left with is the leftover remains of 16x9 monitors. So what are they going to have to do cabinet-wise? Are they just never going to then be able to produce? Or are they going to have to buy large 16x9s and mat off those areas to preserve the 4x3? Well, you see plenty of converted arcade cabinets with a Pandora's box system in them these days, and they're all 16 by 9 screens because that's what you can get. Yeah. And it looks perfectly fine. I think what they ended up doing is just letterboxing the content on the screen itself or just marqueeing it by putting a fake digital marquee on it. That's what I'm thinking. They mask it off. Yeah. And that looks actually really good. Yeah. So I don't think that would be a problem at all. So that's why everybody was complaining about what the Wave 1 cabinets so things like, I mean like, you know, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and since then, they've been manufacturing these things still, especially the Mortal Kombat, and everybody commented about how the Mortal Kombat screen, the colors, are better now. And then they look on the back and they compare the serial numbers and they go, oh, yeah, because this monitor is from two years after this other one. And that's why the technology got a little bit better. And this is an argument for as much as it would probably kill everyone that I'm going to say this is to actually kind of wait for the second round of these pinball cabinets because it's going to be the same thing like they're going to they produce inspect out these cabinets in a year that's unprecedented and you know when supply and everything starts ramping up again and availability of monitor types actually start ramping up again they're going to be choosing ones that are probably going to be cheaper but better when they're actually doing their bill of materials for the cabinet. So if you buy now... Here's the thing with the wait-and-see approach. This is what has me worried. I didn't think that we were going to talk anything about Arcade 1-Up today, and here we are. Oh, no. Yeah, I think it makes sense to do so. Arcade 1-Up kind of is approaching their marketplace as these are collectibles. And I heard John D. refer to it as such. And I started thinking about it as, oh yeah, this is you buying collectible cups. Yes, very expensive ones. Right. But you're buying the collectible cups. So yes, you got this original Pac-Man cup. And then the following year, hey, it's the return of the collectible cups. And hey, it's another Pac-Man cup. It's different than the first one that you had, but if you're a collector, you need both of them. Yeah, you do need. You need both of them, yeah. And so, but the thing is, is that they're not necessarily making that original cup. And I think that's also with Arcade 1-Up, there are certain cabs that just have never been produced again. They're gone. And people are now clamoring for those because they're like, oh, shoot, I thought that those would be available just at any given time in arcade one-ups like no we're done we're done making that cabinet um but on the flip side then they've gone and started making 12 and 1 cabinets rather than the 4 and 1 or 3 and 1 cabinets of a lot of those titles that are no longer available on that other kit so it is kind of this do you wait and see because you're taking a gamble of it just plain not being available at all down the line or is it going to be available down the line and even better We don't know because this is the absolute first wave of these cabs. Yeah. I think you could, the only way you can make a, I guess, a guess would be to see how well they're selling. Well, I mean, I think we all know that they're going to sell really well. I mean, based off of pre-sale numbers where they're selling out like that. Yeah. They're literally vaporware at the moment. So you can't buy one. Yeah. So, you know, I'd say based on that strength, you're going to see another wave. And I mean, all things are basically pointing towards the fact that they will be doing a V2. Because even Mel is sort of suggesting a future-proofing towards V2 now. Sure. Or like, you know, so... But then the question becomes, hey, is that V2? You know, here's version two of the Marvel cabinet, but it's got the remaining Marvel tables, not the original Marvel tables. and no, you're still not able to add on tables. Now you're going, oh, I should have gotten, you know, that's the big if. Yeah, shoulda, woulda, coulda is always hard, isn't it? And I think there, that's a nice dev tale here. Well, let's talk about the Legend of Pinball. We're going to do a lot of that today. Well, we need to talk about one more thing. Oh, what's that? For RK-1UP, and that is that we actually have now seen RK-1UP product down here in Australia. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Jerry went shopping at Costco. I did. I went into Costco, and then they've got a big Christmas area in Costco at the moment. I walked up in there, and lo and behold, there was a Super Pac-Man cabinet from RK-1UP sitting there with about seven others on the pallet, all set up. and it was getting a fair bit of attention um from people walking past i mean this is this is the curb appeal of these cabinets right so before you before you reveal the price i'm not going to reveal yet okay we're going to talk about more yeah okay okay but i just i want to make sure that we'll go there but we're gonna have to prime our audience in terms of uh what australian dollars are to american dollars uh before we get into that okay continue with your uh your magical mystery palette the magical mystery palette so um it looked like the palette had about 10 um originally on it but um it was down to seven plus the one that was actually set up so the i talked to the guys at costco and they said that look they they were not aware that this was coming until two weeks prior so i i said hey this is cool this okay well it's cool so when are the pinball's coming of course i'd ask that right but they said look we we don't even know we were surprised that we were even getting these um so um yeah it was it was interesting to sort of see how from the the back side of things how it was actually sort of told to the the store um very much a surprise so obviously this big container load of them have has arrived on australian shores and it's now being farmed out to a couple of different companies. So Costco have got an allocation. Another company here called Harvey Norman, which is sort of like a department store style. They sell white goods and stuff like that. They got an allocation, but they also got the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cabinets. Okay. Now, I won't say the price of those yet, but they are at a different price than the little single cabinets are because they've got four controls on them, which is to be expected. And then there's a couple of online retailers, one's called The Gamesman, who are selling them for what it seems to be a little bit even cheaper than Costco. So there's a little bit of margin in these from what I can see, and it does seem to pay to shop around, even in Australia. So, yeah, it's funny, you know, I was standing beside it and people were going, oh, look at this cabinet. I wonder if you can use it in, like, paid mode. And I quickly said, yeah, no, you can't. You're like, folks, let me get a little dissertation here. Better yet, why don't you tune in to our podcast? I should have just slapped a blockade logo on it and said, tune in for more information. But yeah, I was totally doing the sales pitch on it. And, you know, they've got really good quality. This is arcade hardware they've got here. And, you know, they're actually proper buttons you see in the arcade. But these are definitely home use only. You can't wire them up for an arcade use. so you know I think one person was looking at it for like the waiting room of their doctor's surgery which is a perfect use for it honestly that's where I first put hands on any of these arcade one up units I was getting an oil change and the automotive place that I went to their waiting room he had three arcade one up cabs set up and I was like what a great time killer yeah it's great if you wouldn't want to leave and the next time i went the next time i went in there which was about a year later he had two more and then i said you know they're coming out with pinball and he was like so so jared was your reaction uh with seeing these things in costco the same as my reaction because i don't frequent the walmart so i never have seen them in the walmart but i frequent Costco on a weekly basis and I'm wandering around the aisles of Costco and right there on the corner of the aisle was an NBA jam. And I just went, ooh, pretty lined over. Pretty much. Yeah, I went, uh? Like that. I was wide-eyed. And then of course my eyes dart straight to the price. I'm like, come on, Costco discounts. And it wasn't really different. I think the only thing was that they were offering it with a stool i think a stool or no excuse me excuse me they weren't offering it with the stool they were offering it with it had a topper and lighting on the back that's the costco difference that's the costco difference and the super pac-man is actually only available at costco oh is that right so that's not the case with it so when we're referring to super pac-man we're referring to the cabinet that has about six versions of pac-man plus galaga on it, right? Say that again? Galaga. Interesting. See, we all thought Galaga. Galaga. Not Galaga. Galaga. And then it's Galaxian. Galaxian. Or do you say Galaxian? No, we don't. It's Galaxian. So it's Galaga. Galaga. Okay, here's a tangent real quick. Hold on, hold on. Tangent real quick. Yeah, yeah. How do you pronounce the name of the shoe that has three stripes on it? Well, it used to be Adidas, but then we got Americanized and it's now Adidas. Hooray! But it used to be, everyone used to call them Adidas down here. See, we never did because, you know, there was a little band called Run DMC that had a song called My Adidas. Yeah, that's exactly how we learned how to say it right. It's totally how we learned how to say it right, yeah. So the first time I ever heard anybody, and this was just like maybe, I don't know, 15 years ago, say Adidas. I was like, what the heck are you talking about? Quit being a prick. Grant is that Quit being a prick Oh yeah Yeah Yeah i totally that so okay so pricing here in america okay the super pac table is 399 at costco jared how much is it in australia it is you won't be able to see this but it is 799 well 749 at the moment 749 and then It's going to be $699.99 is the introductory price. That's the introductory price. And it's going to be price after offer is $789.99. Wait, I don't understand. What do you mean introductory price? So because they're brand new and they've never carried the line before, they have this thing called introductory price. At Costco? At Costco, yeah. Okay. So it's $699.99. So $700. $700. Okay, so $700 versus our $400. what is the Australian dollar conversion rate currently? It is about 73 cents to the greenback. Okay, so there is how you see not only the conversion price but also the markup for shipping it in to Australia. So the problem with Australia is that they have rather stiff duties on imports. So I found this out when I was thinking of importing a whole lot of Pascal boards for the Gottlieb machines. Yeah. And I did the full price up. I got a quote for shipping, and it adds about half again onto the cost of the total order. So it's a big hit with the import duty. So that price reflects both the exchange rate and the import duty, and there's not a lot of wiggle room in that price left over. So what was the Mutant Ninja Turtles? Because that's $100 more here. It's $4.99. It was selling for $1,200. Oof. yeah $1,200 for that now I've seen some actual official what they call leisure and allied industries turtle cabs down here which were like a dime a dozen very recently with Pandora's Box you know 2001 game system selling for about that price down here on Gumtree or like you know Craigslist so that's the thing you better really love Ninja Turtles because it's only two titles on that cab is it literally two titles yes yeah nah no sign don't sign me one up for that um that's the only reason why i would buy that cab is to mod it to strip it to gut it and put a computer in and then i can have my four four controllers so that you you can play yeah that and gauntlet properly yeah but do you and nba jam as well yes yeah unofficially but that's a lot of money yeah um and this is my fear like you know when i said a couple of shows ago that i think down here the machines like the one up pinball machines are going to be around eight or nine hundred dollars i'm adjusting that now i think they're going to be about 1 300 at least based on this well i i don't think i don't think they can do it for anything else because if you look at the extra costs of the turtles cabinets with the four controllers um and the larger cabinet side like there's a lot more wood on the pinball cabinet there's more hardware like there's two monitors and a whole lot of other gear in there as well well i'm just thinking just i mean price point alone here they're going for they're going to be 550 so yeah it's 50 bucks more than the turtles cabinet so yes the math on your end do the math like it's going to be at least 1 300 I think probably you might be able to get them for that through Costco. But the $1,200 price was through Harvey Norman, and they're always more expensive than Costco. So they were selling the Pac-Man through Harvey Norman for about $999, I think. Okay. So you've got pretty deep pockets if you want to get into arcade one up down here. so that's where it's going to become it's going to have to become economy of scale they're going to first have to get a base that prove they have to prove that these things sell and then the retailers might actually purchase more so the price can be a little bit lower yes that's what they're going to that's exactly what the shipment is for it's approving shipment yeah um to work out you know whether there's an appetite for this product at this price down here okay there you go There we go. That's enough arcade one-up talk for today. Because again, I didn't think we were going to talk anything about it, but there you are. Let's talk about what I thought that we were going to talk about today. We're going to talk about Legend of Spinball. So last time, we already talked about the redesign aspect and everything that went into that. No sooner did we record that than about two days later, all of a sudden, there is a new announcement. that new announcement is that they are going to have zacharia pinball on their cabinet sometime in 2021 probably the second quarter so spring of 2021 what do you make of that jared uh good like i think it's great that zacharia pinball is going to be on this product um i think it's probably a better home for it i think it's a much better room for zachary pinball right i even tweeted out when when well played was first announced i tweeted out to zacharia i said happy you're out you're entering the fray wish it was on a better machine yep so now they're on about now they're on a much better machine than what that well played one is And that just kind of went into, we were saying that it was well played, done on arrival, and Jared had said yes, and now I can definitively go, yeah. Yeah, pretty much. Although, you know, there is some opinion out there that, you know, there's a product for everyone. So maybe if you don't want to spend the extra, you know, $200 or $300, I think it's about that sort of difference. So, oh, because we're in the cabs? AtGames is $100 more than Well Played. Now, also though, figure this... AtGames, you're going to have to purchase these tables. Yes. So there's the 27 tables that are built into Well Played. I mean, you're talking literally that's going to be a $30 cost. So again, it's negligible. if you really want to play the Zachariah pinball your best bet is going to be to do the AtGames Legends pinball cabinet it is, unless you're really short in cash and you can only afford the smaller cabinet but honestly you'd want to save your money and just get ready for the pinball cabinet really the AtGames one I would love to know, as usual information, scarce other than the announcement and the announcement, everybody's saying that it's 105 plus tables By my math, it's 106 tables. You're not going to be getting the deluxe tables. So it'll be the solid state, the EMs, the remakes, the retro, and then the award tables. For those of you wondering what the award tables are, the award tables are not Zachariah tables at all. They're not based on Zachariah tables. These are tables that Magic Pixel had made for a mobile app, and they have converted and put into the Zacharia pinball program. So it's kind of, you might in a way say it was the precursor to the remakes, using all their own licensing. Or, not licensing, but their own themes. Themes, yeah. So yeah, it's going to be 105 tables plus the 22 Gottliebs that you're going to have. So that makes an impressive library going into that. And these ones are all locally installed as well. You don't need to stream them. No, and I just found out today that basically, because I was like wow, how big of a memory does this have? Not enough. pinball not enough but what it is is you're gonna have to have a uh a thumb drive and you're gonna so those slots that we were referring to that the poor placement of slots that's what's going to be in one of your slots if you want zachary a pinball it's going to be a thumb drive yeah in fact a lot of uh a lot of the um i think the i was gonna say the vpx ones but no they're they're not um because they're going to be streamed so yeah it's really the two you it's getting to the point where you almost need to have the um the mountable thumb drive system as the primary place that you're storing all these titles it's gonna i think moving forward they might even move away from the on-board storage on the boards and just run it all from the thumb drive because it's going to be it's gonna be a lot easier to manage updates to tables if you just unplug the thumb drive plug it into your pc you know update it plug it back in again etc um the interesting thing though is that you know if you're getting one of these things i don't know maybe the market is different for at games where if you know if you've got an app games table you need to expect that you will have to have some sort of computer which is i guess a fair expectation these days but um to actually manage your games i have a feeling that the at games customer is very much that customer that's going to have a computer. Just saying. Yeah, you're right. AtGames is a very different market to something like, for example, Arcade 1UP, who just want to literally turn the thing on and play it. Yeah, you're targeting it. The AtGames market seems to me an open source community. Yeah, very much. DIY community of that sort, yeah. Yeah, they're used to screwing around with USB drives. Yeah, I think they'll be fine. I'm just saying that more as a warning for others. If that's not your game, then this is not your platform. Right. So the question, though, that I have, Zachary of Pinball has Cabinet Mode built in to their game. You also have the ability to have a second screen, unlike Pinball FX 3, which you have to go find your own screen, which I watched last episode and downloaded where all my screens are. They actually offer technically animated back glass. They have it. Scores are built in to where they need to be built in. Lights are going on the back glass. It's not the highest res quality, but it works. It functions just fine. But that's PC. These are Android-designed builds. So is that second monitor going to be used for Zacharia Pinball, or is it going to be just again like what's on well played where the dmd is going to be baked onto your play field i've got a feeling that considering that the press announcement was literally signed like a week or two ago the deal i think that they're probably going to put in the extra effort to make it better integrated with with the platform because i think early expectations are this isn't going to be out until quarter to 2021. So they're certainly not available now. So I would think that they're going to do a little bit of engineering work to make this work properly on that games. Be interesting to see. Definitely. Because I mean, I hope that that's the case. It's a golden opportunity for them to do it. If I was buying them on that games, I would expect that Backglass integration to be done well. Yeah. Even if it was just the scores up there. Look, I'd be okay with just having the scores as the single display at the back. But, you know, what would be better, of course, is the full back glass display. And if they can do animated, then that's pretty good. I think if they're going to do animated up there, they're going to need to sacrifice graphics quality on the main play field, though, because they're going to run out of resources on the at-game system. So if you happen to know the answer to this, anybody, feel free to comment and let us know. Because I'm definitely curious. And again, this information may not even be available yet. In which case, we would say those that have conversations with AtGames, maybe recommend that. Yeah, if you've got an inside line to them, please do strongly recommend that they do this, because it will be a really great reflection of their product on the AtGames platform. Exactly. I've noticed, because they've also were announcing that all these are going to be playable on not just the Legends Pinball cabinet, but also the Legends Gaming and Legends Arcade cabinets. But on those cabinets, they're only going to be running 720p at 30 frames a second. Now we're back into that whole argument of do you really want to play pinball at 30 frames a second? No. so in short no but what i what i think i've seen is that on a lot of these builds when you're playing pimple at 30 frames a second what that results in is a slower ball not necessarily a janky ball but a slower ball so the table feels really floaty this is certainly what we saw in the toy shot cabinets when they released at 30 frames per second um everything felt really floaty and really sort of like a very very flat early 80s got leave that wasn't just farsight well i mean come on there is a precedent there but the reason why i'm saying that that seems to be the case is because when the version 1.2 and 1.3 boards came out with um uh from uh from toy shock you that problem was eliminated then they were running at 60 frames per second so i think if they're running at 30 expect the ball to be slow i'm just i'm kind of kind of confused as to why this is the case um because the legends arcade i assume their monitor is a 1080 monitor and your controls are connected directly to that so why can it not transfer at 60 frames i don't know is that seems a little weird to me i think it'll be the um the actual hardware system they're using in those boxes um it's just not capable of pushing the frame rates that high because remember those those cabinets were designed for like retro style games yes and and not pinball so they're available on this now they've been allowed to you know be loaded on but i'm not super confident that the hardware was ever designed to run a pinball like experience on them I guess the nice thing is that because this is all part of the AtGames ecosystem, that if you only have a Legends gaming pad right now and you bought the pinball, and then one day upgrade to a Legends pinball, well, it's going to still work. You're not going to have to rebuy a second time. That's right. And that's a really big advantage. If you like the AtGames network and you like the ecosystem, it's essentially like a custom version of Steam, really. But not Steam, because it's not a PC. It's like a custom storefront where all your purchases carry over between products. And, you know, that's a very big attraction for this platform. It's the way they've actually done their ecosystem. I think they've had a fair few years to perfect it, and it sort of shows the pedigree is definitely there. And then the key thing with this too is so long as you subscribed to their arcade net all these Zachariah titles, all the Farsight titles, are going to also be available for their leaderboards and for their tournaments that they run. so that'll be that'll be key because i mean and again as a steam player tournaments are fun that's with with pinball fx3 oh that that literally within the week of first getting fx3 you know i'd been obviously die hard playing pinball arcade as soon as i saw tournaments were available it was like boom gone tpa you've lost all interest to me these tournaments are the thing. Yeah. Competitive play on pinball. Oh, yeah. You know, it's what you need. And, you know, like, you know, as a very quick aside, you know, IFPA have now essentially wound up operations. So, you know, this ability for particularly folks in America to actually have competitive pinball, I think it's going to be moving very heavily online. and certainly over 2021, you're going to see a big jump in people wanting to play pinball competitively online. Well, just look at what happened with the Guns N' Roses machine from Jersey Jack Pinball. It's shipping with Scorebit built into it. I know. Scorebit, for those that don't know, that's the... It's a chip that can be applied to any pinball machine that creates worldwide leaderboards. It basically makes a connected pin. Like, it's an incredible bit of technology, and they've built it into Jersey Jacks now. How cool is that? Yeah. And this is even something that Mel said was the appeal of these full-size units that they were going to be putting into Dave & Buster's. The Dave & Buster's builds, yeah. Because those would be also leaderboards across all of those. Dave & Buster's, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. Very cool. This is the big question. When will Stern embrace this? Because if Stern embraces it, then that's official. It's on. It's on. Yeah. I think Jersey Jack have done a very, very sensible thing here, partnering with Scorbit. I think it's basically they are the frontrunners here now for tournament play, connected tournament play, because this makes it so much easier for tournament directors to actually run virtual tournaments everywhere. So there we go again with reasons why you would want an AtGames cabinet. They're not making these collectible. This is the cabinet that you're going to own, and they're going to make sure that you have content for this cabinet. Again, you're going to have the 22 Gottlieb tables. You're going to have now 106 Zacharia tables, possibly more if the deluxe tables wind up being put on. You're going to have the Taito cut tables that are going to be being made. And then this is going to shift into our next kind of thing. Yeah, VPX on the Legends pinball. How does that work exactly? I think you said something about streaming, Jared, but I'm not in the loop on this. So tell me what you know. So from what I've seen on the forums, because there's been a fair bit of information floating around there recently, is that the VPX tables, due to the license of Visual Pinball X, does not allow the product to be installed on a commercial machine. so these tables and also because virtual pinball is very much a windows centric product it doesn't have the libraries that's needed to run on the games which is sort of like a hybrid android from what i understand so therefore the only option for these vpx tables designed by community members um is to stream uh through the um the arcade net system so um that's going to be an interesting experience so i wonder then i'm assuming that these tables are going to be part of your admission price you might say to arcade net that you're not going to have to buy these tables because i don't think so i don't think so i think it's going to be if you're paying your money for arcade net on a monthly basis you're going to have access to these tables just like you're going to have access to the the library of uh games that they have on the cloud that's right it's essentially a perk it's it's another reason why you want to go and get that membership if you want to access these tables so from what i understand the tables such as the Leprechaun King, and there's another one called, I think it's called Pizza Time. Yeah, Pizza Time. That's the one that there was a trailer for. Yep. So those two tables have been designed by some of the leading VPX development teams, and they've been sponsored by AtGames, according to the press release that was released recently. So when I hear the word sponsored by, that says to me that, AtGames paid them to build them. But the thing is that they've also made them available free of charge to the VPX community as well. So developed for their platform, but also to give back to the open source community, they've made them available to the VPX community at large. So because these are going to be streaming, that means, and like you said, that this is running on a hybrid Android platform, those that are interested in thinking that oh well i'll have the entire vast library that is unavailable on vpx why would i possibly need another uh you know a different cab when i can just download that's not going to be the case because it's going to your your choice is only what's going to be available on arcade net it's not you being able to bring in whatever you want No, that's right. You can't, for example, download the table assets and load them somehow onto the AtGames system from what I've seen so far in the press releases because you need to have that VPX system available on the system to do that locally. So you will be accessing any VPX content will be accessed directly through the online system. So you pointed out to me a conversation that was questioning whether AtGames even has the ability to stream VPX. Why don't you delve in a little bit to that? Yeah, so there was a discussion in one of the AtGames forums on Facebook that one of the community members was concerned, in a rather accusationary tone that, you know, not Arcade 1Up, AtGames was doing the dodgy on this. And, you know, there was accusations being flung around that, you know, AtGames hadn't paid for the use and it was breaching the license agreement for Visual Pinball that, you know, it's a non-commercial product and it was being used in a commercial setting. So, you know, with our lawyers with our fake lawyers hats well and truly affixed to our heads this would be Jared and Chris Esquire Jared and Chris hacklegalteam.com best prices available what I did is I sold Jared and Chris got me 8.1 million dollars 8.1 million internet dollars not bitcoin internet bucks internet dollary dudes so I did some hunting around and I thought well they're citing this licensing text from the visual pinball code archive so I went hunting and I found the updated licensing agreement as per the Sourceforge code so I wonder if you might have that available to bring up on screen Chris Sourceforge which one that's the one with the special line 29 i believe correct that's the the magical line 29 that's the one here we go so if you can let me highlight line 29 here it says redistributions may not be sold nor may they be used in a commercial product or activity so if you're reading that you can pretty much draw some broad conclusions that well hang on isn't at games a commercial product how could then VP be used in a commercial product but this is basically the same thing, I mean probably why people questioned it, this is the same kind of argument that Xen is using against well that's exactly right so I think this is the reason why this discussion happened in the first place and it's a pretty short license text thing as a lot of open source license techs are, but that's essentially the addendum to the standard GPL3 licensing rules that are dictated by this particular product. So this, I think, is where the discussions stem from. But then if you go and do some digging around, you'll find that there's actually a bit of a precedent with using visual pinball in a commercial setting. and that was back well it was about 2005 i think chris where they were um doing this product called um it was called ultracade ultracade so watch this there it is there it is so this was a bit hard to find this was actually linked off the wikipedia article about visual pinball in the footnotes um and what you're seeing here on screen is from the google's wayback machine or the Internet Archives Wayback Machine. So this post is spanning between 2005 to 2016 as you'll see from the timeline. Now, from a historical perspective, around 2005, the guy here, David R. Foley, approached Randy Davis, who is the creator of Visual Pinball, to actually license Visual Pinball for a commercial platform, being the Ultracade. And the whole idea behind the Ultracade was they were going to work with Visual Pinball to put 12 Belly Williams tables onto this product and then sell it as a commercial pinball cabinet. This was way back in 2005. So that's an interesting bit of digging because it suggests that what AtGames have done here is they've just done exactly the same as this guy did and said, hey, look, we'd like to actually use this commercially. How much do you want? And the guy said, well, I would like this much. And they've probably just gone, okay, here you go. Thanks very much. And that's the end of the discussion, really. Yeah. So I was originally wondering as well if this was legit, but it does pay to do your research. And I think in this case, it's probably totally above board from what I've seen. So maybe call it. Basically, we have to assume it is until proven differently because that's not... That's not for us to determine and really not for anyone to determine. It's very much a by commercial arrangement only, and that's not something we're privy to, nor should we be. In fact, nor should the community be because it's a business deal. So, you know, I think Bill from the forum, he was rightful to actually say in the chat message there in the conversation, It's just like there's no ill will done. Licenses have been paid. Everything is above board. And you really do just need to take their word for it that everything is good because it is. I kind of get why the visual pinball community would be a little scared by this. Because as it stands, basically just call it stern now. But for the entire time of Visual Pinball, going back as far as when I was into it, which was 2001, 2002, basically the manufacturers looked the other direction. There's a fair bit of copyright infringement happening in there, which the manufacturers are okay with until they're not. Right, and basically with Stern, the general consensus, the idea was, hey, so long as you wait three years from the time that we make and are selling this pin, if you wait three years and then you post the ROMs and make the tables, we're good because we're no longer selling the table anymore. Yeah, basically, if we top the production line, we're happy. right right so that's why i say that was the the manufacturers just kind of looking the other way because the community wasn't necessarily hurting their sales if anything they were keeping pinball spirit alive that's right they're actually doing a service to the industry right so if all of a sudden a full-size digital cab at a really inexpensive price point that's going to get a whole lot more people on one of these things than a six thousand dollar unit that's going to potentially pucker the sphincters of stern who then might go wait a second and then all of a sudden actually come hammering down on the visual pinball community which is in essence what happened to the main community uh that was posting all the roms and all of a sudden eyeballs focused on them and went yeah we're going to cease and desist you yeah every one of you basically I can really understand that as you say Chris they don't want that to happen that would just destroy the community so you know and making original games like you've seen come up like the Leprechaun King and Pizza Time that's not an easy endeavor it takes a lot of effort so So losing three quarters of the library through a cease and desist would be terrible for VPX. So, yeah, I can imagine people are really holding, like at the mention of commercial and VPX, they're probably holding out games pretty close to the fire to make sure that they're held accountable. But I think, from what I can see, no ill will is happening here. it is because they're controlling the way you can actually manage and install things and it's all through their ecosystem they can actually control all the licensing particulars so as a consumer you don't need to worry about it so you've got these this option you've got a cabinet this is where the portion of the show where people might hate us Oh well Oh well Opinions right Everybody else got one We have them So here you've got And this is I'm going to couch this by saying You personally Jared Right I'm not going to put the theoretical If you're this kind of gamer You've got one option where you're going to have Well over 100 pinball tables available to you to play natively on your machine. And then you've got this other one that going to have 10 Where do you land Are you happy with a whole mess of Zachariah and Gottlieb tables or would you be happier with some 10 Zen originals or would you be happy with 10 Bally Williams? That's a really tricky question. Now, I've got all of these tables all on Steam. As do I. As we both do. So it really does come down to form factor, product inclusions, etc. Now, for a similar price, I can get both cabinets. You'd say that's correct. Hey, Chris. What do you mean? For a similar price, I can get the hardware. Yes. So based on that, AtGames. You're going to go the AtGames route. Mm-hmm. Because you can connect your PC to it and play, you know, with a less experience probably than you could play like on the arcade one-up cabinets. But still, it's a bigger screen and, you know, there are hints that the guys at AtGames are going to be doing this connected ecosystem thing. so you know if i was a betting man i'd probably say that at games has the hardware and the price point that you know putting my extensibility hat on that in the future you know your future is unwritten but it all seems to be leaning towards the community being able to make the zen experience work pretty well on it. Whether officially or not, I think that's what's going to be happening with this product. Okay. So that's... And I mean, look at the prices. Chalk one up for Jared. I just look at the price. If I was going to have to spend $1,300 on a cabinet, I'd spend it on the at-game ones because I'd buy it once and I can potentially extend its life and its usability by putting other games on and connecting my PC to it to literally play anything. So there's Jared's perspective on why he would choose The Legend of Pinball over either of the arcade one-up cabs. My perspective. I have this. I have my PC with all these games. I can rotate my monitor into horizontal. I've got a second monitor for my screen, for my back glass right here. So I can play these things that way. I'm already configured that way. Would I buy a PC and have it right next to the AtGames machine to do and then to plug in? Well, my question is, how are you going to get that second monitor running? I assume you're going to have to crack open the back of the cabinet and hack into that second monitor with another HDMI. I've got a feeling that, again, the future has not been written, but I think that... I'm talking about with what you're purchasing right now. Right now? Yeah. Yeah, there's no way of getting that second monitor working with the current hardware that's inside that machine. Correct. um there's also no way of getting it to react to rumble or accelerometer for any of the zen games i can do that i can do that on my cabinet so i've already got that aspect of things covered so to me it comes around to then again you're you are dealing with four impactor of of the two cabs um a three-quarter size versus a virtually full size nearly full size yeah um and then what games are being included on it if i'm looking exclusively at the bally williams stuff so the the attack from mars table i will take that every single time over the 120 some tables that are going to be available on at games reason being how often do you play zachary pinball or pinball arcade I don't play pinball arcade at all, particularly the godly ones and I don't play the Zachary pinball titles that much because I'm missing some of the collection I don't have unlocked keys for them and I tend not to gravitate to them The only ones that I don't have unlocked for me are the deluxe tables but the amount of times I open up Zachary It's just like me sitting down and going, yeah, I feel like playing Zachary a pinball. It doesn't happen. The only time I ever open up Pinball Arcade is either to compare it to what has been, Zen has done on a Bally Williams table, or the occasional time where I'm like, man, I really want to play Addams Family. And so then I'll open that up. But it's, we're talking slim the amount of times I do that. Yes. And I jokingly said to Jared one time, I said, look, I would rather have three or four really high-quality Transformer toys than the entire run of GoBots. Yeah. And look, you know, there is, like, the only reason why I'm making my claim about what I choose is because of the information they're releasing about this open and connected pinball platform stuff. like to me as a betting man I think that with that and even if you had to pay $200-$300 to get a special board that just opens up everything and you know for example turns the sensors and the haptic feedback that's already in the cabinet and makes it accessible to games on Steam like FX3 like Pinball Wicked for example you know as a betting man i'm looking at that going that's worth the risk um to to have that in the future um and like the stuff that at games announces and stuff like that from what i've seen in the community they follow through on it so this isn't just one of those vaporware things that they're announcing it's actually something they've got planned out so from my perspective given the exchange rate and the cost and everything like that, I don't have the luxury of just buying one Belly Williams cabinet from Arcade One-Up and being satisfied with that when I have all those tables in steam. And it's the difference, isn't it, right? It's the difference between what is essentially an impulse buy and something you really have to think about with money on hand. And that's the only reason why I'm like that. I'm going to still be very curious to put hands on the Arcade 1-Up Cab and see for myself how it feels. Because if the experience is less than me playing on that on my PC, that will be very disappointing. From what I can tell, the experience is supposed to be better. And that's what I'm hoping for, is that with those solenoids popping, and with that custom view angle on it, and having the DMD where it belongs, I'm really, and with the accelerometers and everything, I'm really hoping for that premium experience. That really immersive pinball experience. And look, I'll put on record saying that I also hope for this as well, with this product. Like, the Arcade1Up product is, like, you put all of the positives that AtGames has from what the hardware is, and what they're trying to do with the platform. And you put that in the same sort of line as all the things on the arcade one-up line. And the only real differentiating point between those two products for me is the experience. And that's really what it comes down to. That's what your money is buying on these things. How does it feel when you walk up to it and you want to actually interact with the product and play it? Now, if we're talking now... experience really is what you're buying with these two products right now if we're talking about the zen originals the star wars cab or the marvel cab um i'm not happy with the tables that are on this star wars cab no i'm not happy with the table selection at all um those are literally some of my least played zen tables out there i play those almost as much as i play zacharia pinball so So if I'm deciding between Star Wars and AtGames, I'll pay to skin that cabinet into a Star Wars form factor, which is what I like about the arcade one-up machine. It looks good. It looks good, and then I'll deal with the games that I can get on that. The Marvel cab, I like a lot of those. I like a lot of those a lot. I had a lot of fun with Iron Man the other day. I started experimenting with a few of the Marvel tables just to sort of see. And there's a lot of good stuff on there. Unfortunately, Iron Man is not on that cab. No, but I'm... Well, sorry, Spider-Man. Spider-Man, yeah. Yeah, like that's... You need to read the rules. As I said in a couple episodes ago, you need to understand how to play the tables. Once you do, you can have a lot of fun on them. There's nothing wrong with those tables. So the Marvel cab would be... there's where i'm like again if the experience is what i'm hoping for i think that'd be the tipping factor for me see marvel marvel with all of the physics in place yeah um count me in like that would change it really really quite a lot um i do like the smaller form factor so long as i'm not crouched over and leaning over i don't think that's going to be the case um because mel's not exactly short from what i understand and truth be told so this cabinet here is standard pinball height um because i measured it to my tables that i have outside in the garage um if even if this was down two inches um which i have a feeling that's what it's going to be that's still more than playable um yeah you're not in it basically it's instead of having your hands up high with you your arms are extended down a little bit lower but you can still be you know straight up and down now if if I felt like gutting the at games and or if my purpose of buying let's say the arcade one up one was to gut it and put my own PC in then no way get the at games there's no reason to do that to an arcade one up cab and if that and if that was just plain my intention in general that I'm using this purely for the monitor and the as a shell and I'm going to slap a PC inside of this thing then I do think the AtGames is the better option there. It makes more sense. It's just got more of what you need up front in it to actually mod it. Yeah. So, I don't know folks. What do you think? Are we making sense? We've been getting a lot of messages about how we've been we're rather biased and i'm yeah trying to explain where that bias comes from yeah for me it comes down to what i actually play uh that's the key the key number one factor um and for me it's just literally guessing because i have no real way of touching any of these products down here in australia so you know so it's more about what i see online right and and what i can i mean now I've actually touched an arcade one-up cabinet in the flesh. I know what the buttons feel like, the controls feel like. But, you know, who knows if we'll even see the pinball cabinet down here, the suggestions that we are. I don't think it's going to be until at least quarter one, at least over here. And they may not even do it. They may hold it over until next Christmas. Who knows? And do wave two. I mean, that's a distinct possibility. my plea for at games at the moment but my plea also goes out to arcade one up quit marketing just solely to the person that's going to walk by it in the store the casual fan that's going to read some bullet points and go oh yeah give us hardcore people the information that we want we want to know what is the actual height of the dimensions Yeah, me standing there. What is floor to top of the playfield? What is that height? How is the store going to work for purchasing these tables? I don't know. There's all manner. We were talking about last time how we just want to see DMD or second monitor and playfield interacting at the same time. Because there's things that we can key into and pick up on that we want to know. In terms of with app games, what is the ability to just only purely show the score up on the monitor? Or is it always going to be baked into the back glass so you can just magnify it or something like that? I don't know. These are the questions that we need real answers to, and we need them to be answered with video. Video or clear pictures with measurements and stuff. And it's literally just talk to one of us. And I'm saying just me or Jared. I'm talking to any of these content creators that are into digital pinball. Because we all have the same questions, and we're not getting the answers. Which is why you're getting such wild and varied opinions on the internet. Because when you don't supply hard facts and information, people speculate. So if you don't want that out there, don't give us the fodder to speculate. They actually give us information, and we won't do it. Right? Easy peasy. Sounds good to me. Please and thank you. It doesn't seem so hard. I don't know why they're using content providers and content affiliates to do their marketing for them at games. That's the thing I don't understand. And, you know, to be fair, essentially they're getting Mel to do the same thing for Arcade 1-Up as well. Yes. But the difference with the content we're seeing from Mel versus AtGames is that it's actually content and he's actually playing the product as you would play it in your home. And that is the big difference. The Archive 1UP, from that perspective, are well in front of AtGames with their ability to communicate the value of the product. Right. Well in front. And AtGames, honestly, they need to catch up and they need to do it fast and they need to do it officially. Yeah. So, there's our The More You Know. Indeed. All right. Well, we've been on a roll here, Jared. We've managed to produce, what is this, three weeks in a row, four weeks in a row of shows? I've lost count. I really don't know anymore. It all just blows into one. It's so weird doing quick-fire shows like this. You know, we literally said, hey, so long as there's information, we'll have a show. And information keeps on dropping. So stay tuned, subscribe to the channel, then you'll be notified immediately. Check out our socials. There's mine, there's Jared's, and there's the show's. Make sure you log in and sign up for that way. And beyond that, hey, we're going to see you when we see you. And the kind of things that we will be talking about is Jared's favorite. Stuff and things. There you go, folks. All right, until next time, bye-bye. Bye-bye.