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Stern Pinball Arcade Wild Speculation

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·49m 59s·analyzed·Sep 29, 2015
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.037

TL;DR

Stern Pinball partners with Farsight for new digital app; hosts speculate on technical specs and market impact.

Summary

Blockade Podcast hosts Chris Frebus, Jared Morgan, and Kai Fitzner discuss the major announcement of Stern Pinball partnering with Farsight Studios to create a new digital platform called Stern Pinball Arcade. The hosts speculate extensively on technical implementation (emulation, graphics engines, platform compatibility), potential table inclusion (Metallica, KISS, Game of Thrones, Star Trek, Walking Dead), and business implications for the existing Pinball Arcade app. They debate whether the new app signals the end of the original Pinball Arcade and explore monetization strategies including tiered Pro/Premium versions and mod-based microtransactions.

Key Claims

  • Stern Pinball announced a partnership with Farsight Studios to develop a new digital platform called Stern Pinball Arcade featuring exact virtual replicas of Stern pinball machines

    high confidence · Direct press release read on air confirming announcement; Farsight will develop new platform with availability and pricing announced fall 2024

  • Stern produces approximately three tables per year currently

    high confidence · Host assertion confirmed by co-hosts; used as basis for platform release cadence calculations

  • Only three Stern tables are currently in Pinball Arcade: Harley, High Roller Casino, and Ripley's Believe It or Not

    high confidence · Hosts cite specific table count; used to calculate potential Stern Pinball Arcade library size

  • Stern has produced 41 tables since 1999 (excluding Woe Nelly, not counting acquired Data East or Sega titles)

    medium confidence · Host calculation of available content pool for new app; potential 38 additional tables beyond current TPA offerings

  • Metallica was likely the first Stern table to have Farsight digital rights written into licensing agreement (released 2013)

    medium confidence · Host speculation based on timeline: Pinball Arcade launched 2012, would require time for Stern to see uptick in interest before licensing deals

  • KISS and Game of Thrones would almost certainly be included in Stern Pinball Arcade roster

    medium confidence · Host opinion based on licensing likelihood and recent release timing

  • Farsight has access to Stern CAD files for digital table development rather than requiring physical machine scanning

    medium confidence · Host speculation: 'all Stern has to do is hand over their CAD files' for late-model games, providing higher resolution assets

  • Farsight recently purchased new camera equipment for photographing pinball tables

    medium confidence · Host mention of recent equipment upgrade that would be made unnecessary with CAD file access

Notable Quotes

  • “Stern Pinball, the world's largest producer of arcade quality pinball games, announced a new expanded partnership with Farsight Studios, developer and publisher of multi-platform digital games, including the Pinball Arcade. Farsight will develop a new digital platform called the Stern Pinball Arcade that will feature exact virtual replicas of Stern Pinball's hottest terrestrial pinball machines.”

    Chris Frebus (reading press release) @ ~10:00 — Official announcement text establishing partnership scope and product positioning

  • “I was like, 'Can't you just have Stern right in the Pinball Arcade into your licensing agreement?' And Bobby back then had just kind of like, 'Oh, yeah, that'd be great. You know, we're constantly talking to Stern and seeing what we can arrange and everything.'”

    Jared Morgan @ ~11:30 — Establishes long-standing desire for Stern licensing in TPA, context for excitement about partnership

  • “So that leaves 38 tables. Currently, if we're going all the way up to Game of Thrones, which hasn't even been released, obviously, that's a huge number of tables that they can fill an app out with. That's three years plus with the current release schedule that Farsight does.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~28:00 — Quantifies content library size and discusses implications for Pinball Arcade continuation

  • “If they're only doing three tables a year as the new tables come out, well, that's not like it's a huge additional workload on Farsight. They can still continue to do things.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~27:00 — Suggests dual-app strategy is sustainable for Farsight workload

  • “There's no reason why... you can now sell those two tables at a different price point even. You can sell the Pro table for however much, and then, 'Oh, but you want the Premium version of the table? Well, that's going to be a few dollars extra.'”

    Chris Frebus @ ~32:00 — Proposes Pro/Premium monetization strategy for digital app mirroring hardware release model

  • “All the code that they've [learned from], all the things that they've learned, all the things that they wish that they could have done—now they can actually plop in.”

Entities

Stern PinballcompanyFarsight StudioscompanyStern Pinball ArcadeproductPinball ArcadeproductChris FrebuspersonJared MorganpersonKai FitznerpersonBobbyperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: New digital platform launches alongside existing Pinball Arcade app; sustainability of dual-app strategy and future of original TPA product line uncertain

    medium · Hosts debate whether this signals 'death knell of Pinball Arcade'; conclude TPA will likely continue given 38 potential new Stern tables available and planned Season 6 support

  • ?

    community_signal: Blockade Podcast position themselves as authority on digital pinball topics; cite exclusion from Stern press release distribution as opportunity for differentiation

    low · Hosts joke about not receiving press release despite covering Pinball Arcade; pledge to 'pepper Stern with questions' and call for direct dialogue

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Potential implementation of Pro/Premium/Limited Edition tiering in digital platform, mirroring physical hardware release model with variable feature sets and pricing

    low · Host Chris Frebus proposes strategy as revenue optimization; references Game of Thrones as example where Pro and Premium play 'completely different' with different price points

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Stern-Farsight partnership suggests expanded digital licensing opportunities for Stern titles; hosts speculate Metallica, KISS, Game of Thrones likely included

    medium · Hosts cite timing logic: Metallica (2013) as likely earliest table with digital rights built into licensing; calculate 38 additional Stern tables available since 1999

  • $

    market_signal: Three-table-per-year Stern release cadence aligns with Farsight's existing monthly release schedule across two apps, suggesting sustainable business model

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.150

0:00
You're listening to the Kate Podcast. wizard amusement.com the site to visit for custom pinball shooter rods easy to install totally unique mention blockade podcast for 10 off your order wizard amusement.com sales restoration customization
0:46
You are listening to The Blockade Podcast. I am your host, Chris Frebus, a.k.a. Shut Your Trap. With me, as usual, my co-host, Jared Morgan. Hey, hey, hey. And also joining us today, our other regular contributor, Kai Fitzner, a.k.a. Bonzo. Guten Tag. Guten Tag, Kai. We just had to ask him ahead of time how we actually pronounce his name. because what us Americans and probably Australians kind of face the same thing is when we see words, we immediately go and add in hard vowels and stuff and then we hear how it actually sounds and we go, huh?
1:29
I usually go to a site called forvo.com which actually has audible pronunciations for most foreign names. You should try pronouncing some of the Czechoslovakian names or the hard stuff. I'll just mutilate them instead. or shrink it down to that guy with the hair so we do apologize for last week's podcast Jared's internet in his building is absolute crap yeah it's terrible we've got wifi problems with the hardware here which they're sorting out but this week you're connected via hardline I am I have actually plugged into a LAN port, so there shouldn't be any weirdness with the audio this week. So that'll be kind of good. And with the audio problems that we had last week, we didn't get to do a particular shout-out that we wanted to say thank you to. I should take it away since you said the words last week but then had to edit those out because all it was was silence. It was just a massive void of silence. It was actually a shout-out to Nate from Coast to Coast Pinball. He was very kind in some of the things he said about our podcast and that we were, and I'm paraphrasing a little bit here, the single source of great information for pinball arcade related stuff. I think he actually said the world authority. That's right, yeah. World authority. World authority, yeah, because that's what we are.

  • Current Pinball Arcade development uses extracted audio compressed to 11 kilohertz on mobile, versus 44 kilohertz on consoles/PC

    medium confidence · Technical discussion by Jared regarding audio latency and compression approaches in existing platform

  • Stern Pinball Arcade could implement Pro/Premium tiered pricing similar to physical game releases, with different feature sets and price points

    low confidence · Host speculation on monetization strategy mimicking hardware release model; acknowledged as unsolicited business advice

    • Chris Frebus @ ~19:00 — Frames new app as opportunity to implement lessons learned from four years of Pinball Arcade development

  • “If they can get the CPU cycles down on the emulation and tweak the graphics engine so they can actually get a constant 60 frames per second. The problem at the moment is the balance between emulation cost and the amount of GPU that's used and actually getting those two things in sync.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~21:00 — Technical assessment of potential engine optimization requirements for new platform

  • “They could actually hand over the source code to them as part of their NDA partnership, and that would give Farsight a huge advantage because I think a lot of the stuff with the Williams and Bally stuff is that all of the emulation software was encrypted.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~24:00 — Explains technical advantage Farsight gains from direct Stern partnership vs. legacy emulation encryption barriers

  • “The potential of it... they can apply all those lessons to the Stern Farsight app, basically making the best iteration that they possibly could.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~19:30 — Summarizes hosts' optimistic view of new app as vehicle for applying accumulated technical expertise

  • “I would definitely appreciate higher resolution graphics and again, I think the processors that are being used—they could pump that stuff out and then we'd be doing good like that.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~26:30 — Articulates baseline expectations for visual quality improvement given modern hardware capabilities

    • Gary
    person
    Metallicagame
    KISSgame
    Game of Thronesgame
    Walking Deadgame
    Harleygame
    High Roller Casinogame
    Ripley's Believe It or Notgame
    Star Trekgame
    Mustanggame
    WrestleManiagame
    Blockade Podcastorganization

    medium · Hosts calculate Stern releases ~3 tables/year; conclude Stern Pinball Arcade pace matches Zen Studios cadence; implies continued TPA support feasible

  • ?

    business_signal: Potential mod-based microtransactions for digital pinball, leveraging Stern's existing physical mod kits (Walking Dead example cited)

    low · Host speculates on selling cosmetic mods (translites, side rails, tower mods) as digital add-ons; acknowledges this as speculative business advice

  • ?

    announcement: Stern Pinball announces partnership with Farsight Studios to develop Stern Pinball Arcade, a new digital platform featuring exact virtual replicas of Stern machines

    high · Official press release read on air; availability and pricing to be announced fall 2024

  • ?

    product_strategy: New platform presents opportunity to implement four years of technical lessons learned from Pinball Arcade development (audio latency, graphics optimization, platform stability)

    medium · Hosts frame new app as 'best iteration possible' with access to all accumulated expertise; CAD files and deeper Stern partnership enable higher resolution assets and better optimization

  • ?

    technology_signal: Uncertain whether Farsight will rewrite core engine versus incremental tweaks; Spike 2 emulation complexity (distributed computing architecture) presents technical challenge

    medium · Jared discusses technical requirements: Spike 2 uses master board with daughter board interconnects; questions whether emulation framework can handle bus transfer architecture; notes Visual Pinball hasn't managed Spike emulation yet

  • ?

    technology_signal: Potential shift from photograph-based playfield scanning to CAD file-based digital asset creation for virtual pinball development

    medium · Hosts speculate Stern will provide CAD files directly to Farsight, eliminating need for physical table scanning or recent camera equipment upgrades

    • 3:06
    So yeah, thanks Nate. We appreciate the shout out and keep up the great work with your podcast as well, mate. It's great. And then what were you just telling me before the podcast that was said in the Pinball Podcast Show? Oh, yeah. I was just on my way in on the bike this morning. I was listening to Don and Jeff talk about digital pinball, as they usually do in their podcast, a little bit. And they were talking about the fact they wanted to cover a little bit more digital pinball and Zen. But this is how they referred to the pinball. So they said, so blockades tables and Zen pinballs tables. So I love your work, guys. Thanks very much for the shout-out. Because we do, every week, make the tables. Every month we make the tables. We handcraft them from wood. So it's all us. What this tells me is that my barrage on Twitter regarding Table of the Week each week, and I'm always tagging Pinball Arcade in those just because I want all their Twitter followers to notice the Table of the Week and stuff. And also, you know, because we like to support them. Exactly, exactly. But, you know, it's like I've got Blockade branded on the Twitter feed, and we're constantly, you know, throwing it out there to the point that even somebody on Pimble Arcade's Twitter feed one time was like, can we stop linking to the Blockade?
    4:31
    Really? Did they cease and desist? Well, the person was, like, complaining, so I texted her, or I, you know, Twittered back to them, and I was like, look, we only do this once a month. And this was just for, actually it was for tournament of the month.
    4:44
    We only do it once a month. So, you know, survive the four days. I'm just constantly linking with them. And the guy, he was cool with it. He was just like, okay, fine, you know, whatever. But it was kind of funny. I'm like, that's what we're all about, baby, branding. Branding. Branding and repetition. It's the secret to success. What happens when we do make T-shirts? Oh, my God. We're going to take it to the world. We'll be like FUBU or something, you know? So I can wear it to my pinball tournaments down here. We really need to get on to that. But, you know, we need the cash because T-shirts aren't really that cheap to do. And probably, as you were talking about in the past there, Chris, we need to probably tweak the logo a bit so it renders a bit better.
    5:27
    But, yeah, if anyone's good at doing graphic design out there and wants to lend their hand with the Blackavia logo, just get in touch with Chris and he can send you the digital assets. so you can have a play.
    5:40
    And we'll give you a free t-shirt. Absolutely. When we make them. We'll make your efforts somewhat worthwhile. Yeah, so you can go ahead and contact me on Twitter at ShutYourTraps. If you want to talk to Jared, he is at JaredMorgz. And Bonzo here is at DrexClown.
    5:58
    And as always, you can contact the show via Twitter at Blockade. Hey, before we get into the meat which we haven't talked about what our normal meat is but I'm just going to real quickly cover the fact that we just had tournament of the month on Saturday we record this on Sundays in case people are wondering what do you mean it's Tuesday when this is out or Mondays from the future we don't even know what day of the week it is anyway I just wanted to cover our top finisher this past weekend was Switch 3 Flip second place went to Gus and third place went to pinballwiz45b those three names seem to always be in our top three they do, they dominate the top of the pops fourth place Eldar of Suburbia, fifth place Great Dane sixth place Shulk then we have Captain Bizarre in seventh Bonzo in eighth nice work Bonzo Loxley in ninth and Johnny3w6 in 10th.
    7:07
    Nice. Good work for representing. Yeah, glad you represented because I dropped the ball hardcore on Dr. Dude where I came in last place out of everybody that played.
    7:19
    Could not for the life of me get a game of Brim Stoker's going. It was hideous. I mean, I practiced the table like five times beforehand because I knew it was the put up or shut up table. And I don't think I even once broke 50 million in practice. I'm like, come on. It was bad.
    7:40
    So do you want to know my secret? What is your secret? The secret is those four tables may be the last played apart from stuff like Going Nuts and I didn't practice the least. I did nothing beforehand. I just played every table two times. I played Dr. Dude once. Reached 45 millions. I'm so happy about that. So don't ever practice anything and you'll be better at it. Yeah, just phone it in. That's what I always do each week.
    8:08
    Yeah, I can certainly ask our top three, maybe our top four finishers to do exactly that. It'd be nice if they phoned in every week. Yeah, we might have a chance. My Doctor Who score was actually the best I ever did this ever, ever. I even got a chance at the gazillion shot, which is pretty cool. I got 52 million on Doctor Who this week, which I was pretty staggered with. It's all about that two times Playfield, eh? It's the winner.
    8:35
    But my Drek score was terrible. It was 153. Yes, terrible. And Lutz Cameron Action, 8,300. Oh, sorry, not 8,300. 8,300,000. Something, something. Circus Voltaire was a ride at 71.
    8:53
    91, I think, on Circus Voltaire. I felt pretty good about that. I joined the circus and I was dealing with the Ringmaster, I think. I don't know. I was in the second stage of that whole mess when I finally drained out.
    9:10
    Exactly the same for me. And draining out with three extra balls during the second stage, I had to wait another minute before the game ended. That was tough.
    9:23
    But the 80 million is still okay. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, so it was a good time. so everybody knows the table of the week this week is Black Rose which had I known I didn't even think about this but Talk Like a Pirate Day was September 19th I would have put Black Rose during that week had I even used my brain power because that was my first I put it in the randomizer and that's the top table that came up and I went oh Black Rose oh it's September Yeah, Duck Like a Pirate Day is in September. Then I looked it up and I'm like, ah, missed it. Missed it by that much. So close.
    10:07
    Hey, okay, so here's the deal, folks. When we discussed making the blockade a weekly venture, one of the things we talked about was it would be so nice to be timely for a change. If any news broke or whatever, we'd be able to get right on top of it and wouldn't that be wonderful?
    10:30
    Blockade News. Not live, but mostly current. And wouldn't you know it, news broke. Boy, did it ever. Much quicker than we ever thought that we would have a breaking news. We thought it would be something that we'd actually get a heads up on or anything, and we had no warning, no nothing. What I'm talking about is the announcement that Stern Pinball is teaming up with Farsight to create a new app called the Stern Pinball Arcade, which I'm sure your wheels are turning already as to what could that possibly mean, or you've listened to a dozen other podcasts where it's all been mentioned because apparently every other website got a press release from Stern, but we didn't at the Pinball Arcade fans because we're Pinball Arcade. that's right yeah I don't know oh well can't blame Farsight for that we're going to blame Stern for that so Stern get in contact with us we'll start some dialogue and we'll pepper you with questions that's right let me just briefly read through a various portion of the press release and that is Stern Pinball the world's largest producer of arcade quality pinball games announced a new expanded partnership with Farsight Studios developer and publisher of multi-platform digital games, including the Pinball Arcade. Farsight will develop a new digital platform called the Stern Pinball Arcade that will feature exact virtual replicas of Stern Pinball's hottest terrestrial pinball machines.
    12:03
    Availability of the new product and pricing will be announced later this fall. And so that's basically where we are at with the announcement.
    12:12
    Yep. So, pretty dang exciting. Yeah, for real. This is a huge little tidbit of news. So yeah wow where do we even start Well why don we start with why this kind of has us so excited That probably a good place to start Yeah. I mean, I think obviously the most exciting part for me personally is ever since the first time I went up to Farsight, what, three years ago, and talked to Bobby, I was like, can't you just have Stern right in the pinball arcade into your licensing agreement? Yeah, because, you know, that would just make it a lot easier as far as, you know, Kickstarter and all that sort of stuff. And Bobby back then had just kind of like, oh, yeah, that'd be great. You know, we're constantly talking to Stern and seeing what we can, you know, what can be arranged and everything. But that was basically the extent of it. And now it seems like, hey, finally a reality. Yeah, it's very cool.
    13:20
    Yeah. so didn't they have I've seen some pictures about it and they seem to have Metallica in the press release but I think that was actually unrelated wasn't it I think well yeah I mean initially yeah I think that was somebody you know created just using stock footage or whatever yeah but I don't think they're far off because if you think about it Pinball Arcade they didn't come out until 2012 right yeah yeah which means that realistically,
    13:53
    in order for Stern to have even seen the numbers, and we've all heard where Gary had talked about the uptick in interest in Ripley's Believe It or Not. I mean, like a huge uptick of interest in it. And so obviously that took a little bit of time. So Metallica was the first table to come out in 2013. So that kind of makes sense that if there was any table that did actually have Farsight written into the, for digital rights, Metallica would have been the earliest table that that could have actually happened.
    14:27
    I think, now, whether that was the case or not, I would almost guarantee that KISS and Game of Thrones would be in it for sure. That seems like a gimme.
    14:41
    Star Trek, maybe? You would think because... Star Trek, maybe. Walking Dead, maybe. Mustang, maybe. And WrestleMania. those are the everything that's been up since 2012 oh well Nelly well yeah technically this is a Stern produced game and they did actually the duo that actually made that game did sell the rights directly to Stern from what I understand so it is their intellectual property now so yeah they could technically include that, that would be a nice little addition thank you Bon so you showed the gaping hole of Wikipedia I thought that site was completely logistic, or legit logistic. Hello.
    15:21
    It's as legit as all the community contributors make it. So, I mean, even at the basic amount of announcement there, it sounds to me because Stern's producing, what, maybe three tables a year now? Yeah, it's about three, isn't it? Yeah, so that would put this app on pace with what Zen does. Yeah, it would actually put the cadence just about bang on, wouldn't it? Yeah. Yeah, which I think also is, again, kind of excites me in terms of, well, that means it's not going to be a rushed product.
    16:00
    That's right. The enforcement's really going to put their effort into it. I mean, specifically in that press release it said,
    16:08
    we're talking spec-perfect representation. Yeah, I don't think so. And why wouldn't they? Because all Stern has to do is hand over their CAD files. Well, that's right, particularly for the late model games. That's exactly what they need to do. It's just like, here's a digital asset, so we don't even need to send a table to you, essentially. We can just give you these digital assets, and here you go. Although I would think Farsight still would want the table to play on just for tuning purposes. I mean, that is a big deal to Bobby, that they get their hands physically on the table. They need to see how things react in Bumper because there's only so much code they can throw at it before they actually go in and manually manipulate where balls are bouncing and stuff. But you've got to believe, again, with a CAD file, it's going to be just that much more perfect rather than them scanning the table. That's right. It's going to be super high-resolution. Yeah. Because I think, didn't the guys, you've been up there sort of semi-recently, they actually bought new camera equipment, didn't they, for photographing the tables? They did get a much better camera, yes. Yeah. Yeah, because this will just completely do away with it altogether. The resolution and crispness of all the assets should just be amazing when they do it. Well, that's what I'm thinking. They can immediately, as soon as Stern is done with their digital file and has gone into whiteboards, they could send that file over to Farsight. Farsight could start working on the digital table itself and then can tweak in accordance to any of the tweaks that Stern does, I imagine. that's right that's what you think yeah that will be that alone will actually see a significant bump in table quality I mean I'm not saying table quality that we've seen in season 5 hasn't been really good to date but you know there's having those digital assets without any lossiness with photos will be just amazing it'll be I imagine be very useful with DX11 actually doing all the lighting too because they won't have to worry about taking don't they take photos in a naturally lit room and then a dark room to get the different sort of... I don't know what Fireside's process on that is. I seem to remember that. I've never been up there when they've done it.
    18:25
    Maybe that was when they were using DX9 and they didn't have the dynamic lighting because I think now what they can do is control the environmental lighting with DX11, I'm pretty sure. Probably, yeah. So that might have actually changed. It'd be interesting to hear from Fireside about that if they They want to ping us on Twitter or something. Yeah.
    18:44
    Now, this falls into the excited, but it's also a question. I imagine that this is, and I think I read somewhere, that this is going to be using, obviously, with them emulating the Stern software,
    19:03
    there's going to be now this, what do we refer to it? the drop dead, dropping the dead weight. Yeah. There's going to be a cap limit as to what devices can actually use this. I call it realigning platform expectations. There you go.
    19:26
    There will be probably depending on when they start development of this, they probably need to look at their, they can actually get this data directly from their mobile stats which they published in the newsletter I think it was last month about what versions of Android and what versions of iOS are actually most popular and being used and they can probably draw the line at least on Android with KitKat which is the previous version and that would be fine iOS I'd probably say the previous version of iOS I would have gone to iOS 9. Yeah, so probably iOS 8, I think. You can technically run iOS 8 on older devices, but the devices won't necessarily function, so I think that's where you need to cap it at. 9.
    20:18
    Well, yeah, I'd say 9. Your device has to be able to run 9, but it would be like, you know, it's got to be an iPad Air,
    20:25
    an iPhone 5S, you know, kind of thing. At least, yeah. Yeah, I think this will be the real opportunity for Fireside to actually, in hindsight, do what they really couldn't do, potentially, on the previous platforms, on their Pimble Arcade offering, I should say, because of all that already adopted user base using any number of different Android variants. having a line in the sand I think Zen did this as well when they had a look at the user base and to make sure they could drive features for it they said yeah no older than Android 4.0.4 and that was at that time so yeah Farsight have the opportunity to do this now for their arguably the biggest market which is mobile and I think that's going to help them a lot with keeping quality up to expectations as far as graphical capability and stuff like that.
    21:25
    And I mean, I would imagine that I'm assuming that they're going to do what Farsight does, which is it's going to be spread across multiple platforms. I mean, if I were Stern, I would be like, yeah, you better.
    21:38
    So I imagine it would be the same thing where it's going to be PS4, Xbox One. We're not going to see 360 version. We're not going to see a PS3 version. No, I wouldn't think so. With dynamic lighting of that nature, I would, God, you would assumed the PC would be included in that. And I... See, here's where I love this. I keep on thinking PC is going to... is important to this.
    22:03
    But who knows? Could they maybe do dynamic lighting now in the mobile stuff? Well, I mean, ask homework. With the right engine, you can do it. Ask homework, actually do it. So if they can get the CPU cycles down on the emulation and tweak the graphics engine so they can actually get a constant 60 frames per second.
    22:25
    The problem at the moment is the balance between emulation cost and the amount of GPU that's used and actually getting those two things in sync. So if they can, they would arguably have to rewrite the engine completely, probably. Do you think that they're actually going to rewrite the engine? Or do you think they're going to just tweak what they have? I think they need to modernize it. I don't know if they're running SAM spike and the newly released spike 2 which throws an interesting challenge of distributed computing into the emulation framework because you know with the old CERN system which is one board that did all the emulation but now they've got a master sort of main board and then they use interconnects to all the different daughter boards in the play field. So whether the emulation can actually handle how the bus transfer works on that or not will be a really interesting thing to check. I don't even know if Visual Pinball has managed to emulate Spike yet.
    23:29
    So that's going to be a really interesting thing to see. It might be because they're closely partnering with Stern. They actually give them the bytecode for it and allow them to do the file. And then I think Spike runs on Linux anyhow. It's actually a Linux-based platform. So theoretically, they could actually hand over the source code to them as part of their NDA partnership, and that would give Farsight a huge advantage because I think a lot of the stuff with the Williams and Belly stuff is that all of the emulation software was encrypted. So when the pinball machine starts in real life, what happens is it checks the MD5 sum, which is a security check on the ROM. it then matches to see if it's got the same MD5 sum on its hardware, and then from there it goes, yep, those two things match. I'm going to unlock the code and load it into state. So that check is impossible to emulate if you don't have the hardware and you don't have the encryption algorithms. But if Stern are going to hand that type of thing over, then that's going to make the job a lot easier to really sort of emulate almost one-to-one.
    24:42
    So yeah, that could be the only way they can actually do it with any sort of reliability. Hey, Banzo, I bet you didn't know that we were doing a tech talk today. I actually have a question for Jared. Maybe you can tell us if with the emulation being let say deeper if Farsight might be able to do something about better sound with less latency on Android for example if they can emulate this more directly Yeah. At the moment, we all know that Farsight extract all the audio from the pinball machines, and then they call that, certainly on the mobile platforms, in respect to Android, in a big Java blob, a binary large object. And what that does is they push through the stream to the Java engine, and that actually compiles on the fly sends the audio sort of just in time to the engine, which is pretty much how all Java works.
    25:51
    And the big problem is because it's all extracted at the moment and not directly emulated from the machine, you do get a little bit of latency in there. Now, there is inherent latency in Android, which Farsight simply can't work around. It's actually part of the Android framework.
    26:11
    But they've been able to do things like recently include the mechanical effects that are extraneous to the actual emulated sound in the package itself, the Android package itself, which means that all that latency is removed because it just dumps it into the sound pool. and that's helped a lot but if they were to add all the different sounds and sound effects and voice calls and everything into the sound pool it would make for a very large package but my gut feel is well there's two things they could do they can just emulate the sound and actually do it natively or if they want to take the approach of extracting the sound they could actually put them on to the sound pool and just wear the cost because there's only going to be arguably three tables a year being produced and therefore the the hit on the download servers and their their CDN plan which is their content download network plan would be able to probably you know they could factor that into the cost of the app they could look at you know how much it's going to cost if they take that approach versus the more compressed approach they could look at what the cost of encoding the audio to 44 kilohertz, which I think is what the PC is currently rocking at the moment, or the consoles are about 44, whereas mobile at the moment is about 11 kilohertz. So there's a huge drop there in mobile.
    27:38
    So yeah, there's a lot of things they can do if they spec it from the outset to be, if they're striving for excellence and going, you know what, what the hell, let's just go for broke and go, what is the best possible way we can do it, then they look at it and go, well, what sacrifices do we need to make commercially, and then sort of get a happy balance, right?
    28:04
    All right, now that there is a ton of nerd boners sprung... Apologies for the big nerdism. Let's bring this back down to layman's talks, and that is there's the potential that Farsight is going to be able to basically take all the lessons that they've learned over the past four years and wish that they could implement, but it would be too hard to go back in time and put in and rewrite the entire TPA game, and instead they can apply all those lessons to the Stern Farsight app, basically making the best iteration that they possibly could.
    28:39
    All the code that they, all the things that they've learned, all the things that they wish that they could have done, now they can actually plop in, and I think that's what is clearly the awesome news of this, the potential of it. On the same hand, they could wind up using the same engine,
    28:56
    which, I mean, I'm not going to say I'd be disappointed with that, because I'm happy with the game. It's not, you know, I know that there's warts and bumps on it and stuff like that, but I wouldn't be terribly disappointed either if it was the same engine. I would definitely appreciate higher resolution graphics and again I think the processors that are being used they could pump that stuff out and then we'd be doing good like that but just look at what I'm running on my Android device at the moment it's a Shield tablet it's got a K1 processor in it which is like a desktop grade processor you know we have the technology now like most of this year's Android devices and certainly the iOS devices have really good GPUs in them They're capable of running graphics probably, you know, capable of almost running PC graphics. I've always threatened, give me a PC build and let me run it on this tablet and see what it does, see how badly it performs. But, you know, that's just me.
    30:04
    Let's move into another area then that is kind of like, well, what does this mean for the pinball arcade?
    30:11
    Do we feel that this is the beginning of the end of it? Bobby said they can see six seasons. Realistically, now if they're just doing the three tables a year as the new tables come out, well that's not like it's a huge additional workload on Farsight. They can still continue to do things. But, and here's the big butt in the room because we like them and we cannot lie.
    30:41
    So, not including Woe Nelly, Stern as the title Stern, not having bought out Data East or Sega, Stern has produced 41 tables since 1999.
    30:58
    We currently have three of those tables in TPA, which is Harley and High Roller Casino and Ripley's Believe It or Not.
    31:07
    So, that leaves 38 tables. Currently, if we're going all the way up to Game of Thrones, which hasn't even been released, obviously.
    31:17
    That's a huge number of tables that they can fill an app out with. That's three years plus with the current release schedule that Farsight does.
    31:29
    So, if that winds up being the case, well, then I would say that's the death knell of Pinball Arcade. There's no way they can keep up with that. But I honestly don't think that's going to be the situation. I think that if Farsight embraced the three-table release a year, maybe they kick in, they throw in another one or two tables in that time period.
    31:55
    Here's where, and I'm going to give Farsight advice on how to spend my money. I'm sure they hear this all the time from all the people.
    32:08
    Think about how Stern releases their tables, right? You've got the Pro version, and then you've got the Premium slash Limited Edition versions. Now, in some instances, the Pro version is essentially the exact same table, except for it's incandescent lights instead of LED, and the artwork is different. In other instances, you get what we're seeing with Game of Thrones, where it looks like trying to play two completely different tables. Right, yeah. So, there's no reason why, and I would be interested actually, in purchasing both the pro version and the premium version. Because they all want to play differently. You can now sell those two tables at a different price point even. You can sell the pro table for however much, and then, oh, but you want the premium version of the table? Well, that's going to be a few dollars extra.
    33:04
    There's that potential. Yeah, I think so. On one hand, I see how that would be annoying, but on the other hand, I'm kind of like, hey, if this is a business and you're trying to get the most bang for your buck, this is how you can get that bang. It's probably worthwhile mentioning too that if they're only doing three tables arguably a year, what is that going to do to the price? Because I would imagine there would have to be a minimum amount of revenue per year that Farsight would need to bring in? Well, no, if they're doing it that amount, then they'd still be doing regular Pinball Arcade. Oh, do you mean if they're doing the two releases a year type of thing? Right. I mean, I think no matter what Farsight has to balance their books the way that they're currently set up, it's they've got to release a table a month. That's just a given. So if it means that they're spreading it out among two apps, then so be it or whatever. But I think, for the near future at least, I mean, like I said, we know that they're planning all the way to Season 6. So we've just started Season 5. So we've got two years of Pinball Arcade still coming at us. I think they'll hammer out their business model, obviously, in that time frame with what they're doing with the Stern Pinball app.
    34:26
    I'm sure they'll do whatever they plan, honestly. They already know how to do it. Yeah, but here's the other thing that I was thinking about. and that's, you know, Stern has started making mods themselves for their tables. Yeah, official mods. Yeah, Walking Dead had a whole bunch. And to me it'd be like, well how cool would it be that oh, and this becomes your microtransactions kind of stuff but where it's like, oh, you want to add this model kit, you want to add put a different trans light up, you want to put the glowy side rails Add the tower rails to the Walking Dead add that special Measle Mods tower mod that they commissioned. Yeah, You want the aquarium heads on top of your table? It's fine. It's a 50-cent DLC. Oh, yeah, something like that. And then you can start following the model that... I swear I hate suggesting this stuff, but I know the video game industry, where they go and where their heads are, and this just makes sense to me, is that when you do the season pass, you do what the season pass for Call of Duty does or whatever, where it buys you all the extra weapons, the extra maps.
    35:33
    You just get it automatically. You're not getting a discount instead of going through and nickel and diming yourself for all the stuff.
    35:40
    I very much see when I heard this partnership, I just went, oh, well, how could Stern exploit the video game market the same way that... It seems like they're taking a page out of video games for what to do with their pinball machine, so why wouldn't it work by Fursa? Yeah, exactly. It sort of makes sense to me because some people would just want the default, say for example premium table, just as it was out of the factory, yet some people want to trick it out and have all those little shiny things that really don't do anything to the gameplay but make the table a little bit more nice looking. So yeah, why not have that option to include the official Stern mods in the table?
    36:21
    My biggest fear would be that you'd have to pay for tokens which would allow you to play a certain amount of games on a machine.
    36:31
    And on the other hand, that could be a good thing if the single tables are much more expensive than they are in the pinball arcade now. They could additionally allow you to, I don't know, spend $1.99 for five tokens and have five complete games on five tables or on one table. And then you could decide after that if you wanted to spend, I don't know, maybe $50, $20 for a table. Yeah, I kind of think that depends on if this winds up being a mobile-only release, then by all means I would be sweating bullets over that. Because that is completely how, next thing you know, we're going to be on the energy system for playing the game.
    37:15
    If it's released on consoles and PC, then that's not going to fly. Therefore, then we wouldn't have to worry about it. So yeah if we all of a sudden hear a press release that it mobile then yeah my my sphincter going to tighten There no doubt about it
    37:36
    I do... I've been kind of wondering, it's like, I know that they're not going to be able to mix with TPA. That kind of bums me out. I wish there would be... unless they're like what Zen did with you could buy the Marvel table pack and then discreetly import it into Pinball FX 2.
    38:04
    So whether they're selling it as the Stern Pinball app but it happens to be yes you can import it into TPA but if they're doing it that's only if the engine is the same. Obviously if they're doing a brand new engine then that wouldn't work.
    38:18
    And probably they aren't because Stern, obviously if they're part of this partnership and Stern being in the actual title, they're not going to want to be mixing with Ballet and Williams. No, they wouldn't. They want their own app. It would almost certainly be... I think the press release states that pretty clear to my mind is that it will be its own app. I have a question. You know how Stern they're doing legacy tables? I guess they're calling it. Vault editions, yeah. where they can go back and start up the factory and start doing old line. Do you think that they have to re-sign any kind of licensing agreement to do that or is that just at their prerogative? That's a good question. I'm not sure how that works. Because if it is a case of them having to re-sign a license well you would think that again digital pinroll rights would be rolled right into it. That would be a prime opportunity to go. That would be a prime opportunity, which not that Stern would go ahead and redo Ripley's Believe It or Not, but that would be awesome if we could get a brand-new-looking version of Ripley's Believe It or Not in a digital pinball game. It would be pretty, just from a physical table perspective, it would be pretty nice to have that thing using Spike 2 and having the now standard multicolor LED package that Stern are doing on most of their tables now.
    39:47
    And actually having the rom code slightly redone to actually exploit that. Now, wouldn't that be amazing with that table? That would make a pretty compelling light show on that game. Yeah. I'd just like to point out, affiliates, we're going to be going along.
    40:04
    Totally. We've blown past our half an hour time limit, but we're getting to the end here. I just want to kind of... I think it's an exception anyhow. Yeah, it's kind of an exception. A little special. Whatever we had planned normally for this week has been kicked to the curb.
    40:21
    Shunted, exactly. I was really surprised actually when I looked on Wikipedia and saw all the Stern titles. I'm just going to rattle through them and in order of release and just kind of let this sink in for what the potential is. Can you imagine if we had a Stern app that had every single Stern table in it? so starting with so will this be a yay nay or indifferent sort of vote from each of us no I think this is just more of a let this wash over you and feel if this would be even with the well the first table of Harley Davidson I mean yeah we could all just go eh screw that thing but so here we go Harley Davidson, Striker Extreme Sharky Shootout, High Roller Casino now any and all those could easily be put into TPA because no licensing. But here comes the licensing. Austin Powers. Yeah, terrible table.
    41:17
    Monopoly, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Playboy, Simpsons, Terminator 3, Lord of the Rings, Ripley's. That surprised me actually that I didn't know that Ripley's came out the same year as Lord of the Rings. Really?
    41:30
    Again, that's according to Wikipedia. Maybe that was a Ripley's re-release. It seemed odd to me. I thought Ripley's was at the same time as Monopoly.
    41:38
    But anyway, Elvis. Sopranos, NASCAR, World Poker Tour, Pirates of the Caribbean, Family Guy, Spider-Man, Wheel of Fortune, Indiana Jones, Batman,
    41:50
    the tables I can't believe they made pinball tables out of, CSI in 24, NBA, which I guess is a redo of Space Jam,
    42:01
    Big Buck Hunter, boy, that was a terrible two years for Stern. It really was a rough couple of years for him. That was a terrible batch. Right there. From 08 to 10. Wow.
    42:14
    Then we go Iron Man, Avatar, Rolling Stones, Tron, Transformers, ACDC, X-Men, Avengers, and then Metallica, Star Trek, Mustang, Walking Dead, WrestleMania, KISS, Game of Thrones. And I'm sorry, that's a pretty awesome map if you had everything in there. Even those older tables. See, a lot of those older tables from Stern never made it out here to Australia. Like, you never see Big Buck Hunter on location. You never see...
    42:44
    What was the other one they had? CSI I've only ever seen at Pacific Pinball Museum over in Alameda. And, you know, I wasn't overly impressed by it, but to actually have it to play a little bit more, who knows? You might actually grow to like it.
    43:00
    So, yeah, there's some pretty nice-sounding titles that we could get our hands on in there. Yeah, I think it's... all kinds of exciting for me. I like the potential. I like the idea of maybe seeing Farsight really put forward a strong product, the product that we've been begging for, but obviously we know it's been hampered since it's running on 2012 code. Yeah, it is. So it'll be interesting to see what lessons they learned and how they apply them and how they can move forward with this. Yeah, exactly. I think so. Hey, Kai, do you have any closing thoughts?
    43:39
    Well, I think we could all have a guess on when Stone Pinball Arcade might be available to the public. Ooh. That's not a bad idea. A little guessing game here. You know, if they're saying in the press release it said that they would announce, well, when did it say they would announce?
    43:57
    Crossing availability of the app to be announced late fall. Yeah, late fall. So if they're announcing it later this fall, I would imagine that we would see it come around, what, February, maybe? That's my guess, because you're not going to make an announcement and then not have the product.
    44:19
    Yeah. If it's going to be February. And I'm going off of what Farside did initially when they announced the Pinball Arcade. Okay. How did that go down? I think they announced it in October, and it didn't debut until January, I think, if I'm not mistaken. So that's what I'm saying. Give the announcement, give it a couple of months to actually come to fruition, and then you have it. So that's my best educated guess. I don't know. What do you reckon, Kai? well I think they might aim for February but might be a little late as it always is with coding so I'd go with late March or early April well and here's the thing okay when's Game of Thrones is probably going to drop when do we think I mean they've already got the pictures up it's probably going to drop in December maybe Christmas holiday time so depending on when Stern's next table after that is.
    45:27
    Again, are they using, is Stern going to use this as a beta to test code on? Or are they going to use it purely as a promotional to sell tables? In which case, it's still going to, you're going to want it either out at the time of release of your new table or maybe a few weeks prior to get your pre-orders in.
    45:49
    Yeah, as a promotional tool. Yeah, I think you would think maybe pre-release it. Maybe, I don't know.
    45:58
    There's a number of ways they could do it, isn't there? Are we going to actually have to start paying attention to actual new real pinball table releases? We might have to, which is easy enough to do because Nate and all the other pinball podcasts that talk about real people will do that for us. We'll just listen to them and then copy their news. We don't want to step on their toes. They do a great job of it. We'll just take all the digital stuff over here and leave them with the real stuff. I think for my prediction I think we're going to see it in June next year June? Okay I think so, I think we're going to see it in June it depends, if Farsight decide to reuse the engine then we will see it sooner but if they take the path of re-architecting the engine look at fine tuning SAM emulation and all that sort of stuff, I mean they've got a pretty good start now with some of the CERN tables they've got in the app but I think Spike is an unknown territory for them, and it all depends on what information Stern can give them to help them optimize their code base.
    47:03
    So yeah, if they reuse the engine and get some really targeted help with emulation, yep, they'll probably be out February or March maybe, but other than that... So there you go. If you're starting an office pool, you can take the shut your trap vote, which is exceedingly optimistic. You can take the Bonzo approach, which is just right down the middle, fairly realistic, and then you can take the Jared Morriggs approach, which is pessimism. Don't hold your breath. And don't hold your breath. I'll switch pessimism to realism. Really? No, no, no. Bonzo got the realism. We're giving him the neutral position here. So, yes, create your whiteboards that you hang up in your office and start collecting money. And please remit some to us. That would be lovely. Yeah, exactly. Blackade will take a 5% cut of any sweeps done in your office thank you very much send the payment information to blahblahblackade at gmail.com alrighty let's wrap this bad boy up because we really should but that was exactly why we were doing this weekly so that we could jump on this kind of news and be able to actually comment on it and be timely with it fantastic we'll get back to our regular scheduled programming next week. I was about to say next month.
    48:19
    No, not anymore. Wait, wait, wait. No, it will be next month. It will be next month. Yes, that is correct. Technically, it will be. Yeah, you're right. Technically, it will be.
    48:28
    Anyways, thank you, gentlemen. I've been Chris Freitas, aka ShutYourTrap for Jared Morgan and Kai Fitzna. Let's see if I say that correctly. Anyway. That is a bit bizarre, but anyhow. That might spite my Aussie accent or my German Aussie accent. That's right.
    48:51
    What a terrible way to end this show. Anyway, good night all. We'll talk to you later. See you later, everyone. Bye-bye.
    49:01
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    49:36
    Remember to leave a review on iTunes or any podcasting channel Blockade is distributed through. We can't improve unless you tell us how. Until next time, remember... Game on!