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Dnyeahh I speak good, or Sharks with Flippers?

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·58m 16s·analyzed·May 15, 2016
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.029

TL;DR

Virtual pinball code analysis and VP Cabs Shark Tank pitch reveal licensing tensions in digital pinball ecosystem.

Summary

Chris Frebus and Jared Morgan discuss Pinball Arcade, digital pinball physics code reverse-engineering discoveries by community members like Invitro, and VP Cabs' appearance on Shark Tank pitching virtual pinball cabinets running Pinball FX 2 with licensing costs to Zen Studios at 15% of sales.

Key Claims

  • Invitro successfully decompiled Pinball Arcade .rez files to read physics parameters in plain text code

    high confidence · Chris and Jared discuss thread where Invitro posted portions of readable code showing railroading built into game physics

  • VP Cabs charges Zen Studios a licensing fee of up to 15% of sales price on Pinball FX 2 cabinets

    high confidence · Jared states on Wizard model (full-size cabinet at ~$8,000), this equals $1,200 licensing fee to Zen

  • VP Cabs cabinets explicitly advertise Pinball FX 2 on their website product pages

    high confidence · Jared confirms VP Cabs website lists Pinball FX 2 tables under upgrade section of Wizard model

  • Farsight's Pinball Arcade physics engine has been in development for approximately 10 years

    medium confidence · Chris mentions Farsight is small independent studio working on proprietary physics engine for '10 years'

  • VP Cabs material cost to build a cabinet is approximately $2,686, with total manufacturing cost around $4,000

    high confidence · Jared cites VP Cabs' own Shark Tank pitch numbers for actual materials and total build cost

  • Pinball Arcade uses no code obfuscation, allowing plain-text decompilation of physics parameters

    high confidence · Jared notes Farsight did not minify code, enabling community members to read it directly

  • Tournament of the Month had 87 unique signups with ~67 actually participating across 4-month period

    high confidence · Chris provides statistics from their Pinball Arcade tournament tracking

  • Farsight has officially stated that using their software to generate commercial revenue breaches licensing

    medium confidence · Chris references Farsight's stated policy against commercial use of their licensed games

Notable Quotes

  • “So this is, number one, this is quite incredible that Farsight haven't minified their code so you can't actually read it in plain text?”

    Jared @ ~53:00 — Highlights security concern about unobfuscated code in commercial digital pinball software

  • “I'm running Pinball FX 2 on this thing on national TV and I'm like that's dicey that's pretty brave... you're getting into this whole area that Farsight has already said clearly you can't use your device to make money with”

    Jared @ ~75:00 — Identifies licensing tension: VP Cabs advertising commercial-use virtual pinball cabinets while running licensed software

  • “If Farsight could officially welcome the mod community... God, can you imagine? It'd be amazing.”

    Chris @ ~65:00 — Acknowledges licensing constraints prevent official modding support despite community enthusiasm

  • “His licensing fee, which would be to Zen Studios, is up to 15% of the sales price. On the full-size Wizard, that means $1,200 of it goes to Zen.”

    Jared @ ~85:00 — Quantifies licensing cost structure for digital pinball cabinet manufacturers

  • “So if you're voting exclusively to try and affect the top players, you're not. Just pointing that out.”

    Chris @ ~22:00 — Notes that community voting on difficult 'put up or shut up' tables doesn't strategically impact competitive players

Entities

Chris FrebuspersonJared MorganpersonInvitropersonVP CabscompanyFarsight StudioscompanyZen StudioscompanyBrad BakerpersonMike ReitmeyerpersonViking EricpersonSnorzelpersonXeniaperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: VP Cabs seeking capital investment via Shark Tank; business model relies on licensing revenue sharing with Zen Studios and third-party table developers

    high · Brad Baker pitched VP Cabs on Shark Tank seeking investment capital; disclosed licensing fee structure to investors

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball Arcade community actively engaged in physics analysis and customization; potential for mod community development if officially supported

    medium · Multiple community members (Invitro, Viking Eric, others) collaborating on code decompilation thread; Chris speculates about potential mod career opportunities

  • ?

    licensing_signal: VP Cabs operating in legal gray zone: advertising Pinball FX 2 on commercial cabinets while paying Zen 15% licensing fee, potentially in breach of Farsight's commercial-use restrictions on their own licensed tables

    high · VP Cabs website explicitly lists Pinball FX 2; Shark Tank pitch shown on national TV advertising commercial bar/location deployment; Jared notes this violates Farsight's stated licensing policy

  • $

    market_signal: Virtual pinball cabinet market pricing shows manufacturing cost ~$2,686 with 15% licensing fee ($1,200 on $8k cabinet), suggesting thin margins and licensing overhead challenges

    high · VP Cabs Shark Tank pitch disclosed: $2,686 materials, ~$4,000 total build cost, 15% Zen licensing fee on full-size model

  • ?

    product_concern: Railroading physics issues evident in Pinball Arcade despite 10 years of development; community analysis reveals explicit anti-bounce code coordinates

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.175

0:00
This is the Blockade Podcast with your hosts, Chris and Jared. You have tuned into the Blockade Podcast. Thank you for tuning in. My name is Shut Your Trap, a.k.a. Chris Frebus, or vice versa, however you want to do it. Him over there on the opposite side of the world is Jared Morgan. Hello, hello, Chris. How are you, mate? I am doing fantastic. It's a lovely May day here. Nice and sunny. Yes, it's actually a pretty pleasant day here in Brisbane as well. We're actually just watching the final of Eurovision here at the moment. and Australia is actually a participating country this time around. What the heck is Eurovision? You don't know what Eurovision is? Oh, man. That's because the U.S. isn't in it. That's why. If it's not in the U.S., then we don't care. We love, because Australia is such a multicultural place, we love the Eurovision here because we've got so many different cultures living in Australia. And there's all sorts of countries that you see in the Olympics and don't know how to pronounce. They actually do the show. It's basically not really a talent show, but it's a chance for each nation to represent themselves in music and basically tout the country and perform really well. And one of our X Factor finalists here called Dami Im, who's actually a Korean singer who actually lives here in Queensland, in Brisbane, she is representing Australia in this competition. It's very exciting to see her do a really good job for us here. So very proud. Flying the Australian flag as I wave my hand patriotically like I've got a flag in my hand. Yeah, very cool. And we're getting some votes, apparently. The final voting is happening right now, and I'm in here talking to you. So I'll find out, I'm sure. Okay. After the podcast, it'll be a mystery. Mystery. Before we get too much into anything else, I'll just announce to any of you that are listening, hoping for new info regarding the Stern Pinball app. We have none. Yep. That's actually probably a good thing to get out of the way, because if you're going to wait through the whole thing and you're only interested in that, yeah, you should turn away now. Yeah. We've got plenty of pinball to talk about, just none of it relating to the Stern Pinball app. And a lot of it digital. Yes. All of it digital. So strap on in. It's going to be a wild ride. Hey, why don't we go ahead and jump in Unless you've got more Eurovision talk No, I'm done I wish I could contribute Because you know how much I love to spin the wheels about things Not Pimble Yeah, that's right I said that a little bit too quickly, didn't I?
Pinball Arcade
product
Pinball FX 2product
Shark Tankevent
Pinball Arcade Fans Forumorganization

medium · Jared notes noticing railroading in Alien Ripley Edition; Invitro's code analysis shows explicit X,Y coordinate values designed to control ball physics

  • ?

    regulatory_signal: VP Cabs' commercial cabinet deployment may violate multiple licensing agreements: Farsight commercial-use restriction and potentially Zen Studios' terms if cabinets deployed in revenue-generating venues

    medium · Chris notes Farsight explicitly forbids commercial revenue use; VP Cabs advertising bar/location deployment; Jared characterizes this as operating in 'dicey' territory

  • ?

    technology_signal: Pinball Arcade source code is unobfuscated and decompilable, creating security and licensing enforcement challenges

    high · Invitro successfully extracted and read plain-text physics parameters from .rez files; Jared explicitly questions why Farsight hasn't minified code

  • ?

    technology_signal: Potential emergence of community-driven physics tuning mods if Pinball Arcade licensing constraints relaxed, similar to VP Cabs ecosystem

    medium · Chris speculates about possibility of modders sharing recompiled .res files with custom physics tuning; notes this could create career opportunities

    • 3:08
    Do we want to talk about my adventure? Well, it's not an adventure yet But my research about buying cars And how to get the best deal Nah, we don't want that We've got Pimble to talk about We got Pimble. Hey, so although I said that we were stopping doing the Table of the Week, Tournament of the Month, I did throw it out there that if somebody would like to take over for a month, they're more than welcome to. Sure enough, we did have one of our users on the Pimble Arcade Fans Forum volunteer. His name is Snorzel, and he is hosting this month. He's got a tournament that's going to be running four days, Memorial Day weekend. I say Memorial Day weekend as if that means anything to you because it's not your guys' Memorial Day weekend in Australia. We don't know which one it's about.
    3:54
    Yeah, Memorial Day, you know, it's celebrating soldiers is essentially what it's – that's what it's supposed to be. Instead, it's really just – yeah, it's really just, you know, also known as the official kickoff of the summer movie season.
    4:08
    Yeah, it sounds very much like Easter except, well, we don't really do that here. The big kickoff is in December when Boxing Day comes around. Yeah, see, that's your summer. Yeah, that's right. So that's our – Yeah.
    4:21
    So anyway, it's going to be running from May 27th, which is a Friday, through May 30th, which is Monday. And when I say running through, I mean as soon as it hits midnight, I believe, Eastern time.
    4:35
    No, excuse me, Mountain. Mountain time. That's where Snow's a Liz. Yeah, in Colorado. So when it hits that on Friday the 27th, midnight, or 12 a.m., I should say, boom, tournament started and finishes at midnight on that Monday. So it is a full, full four days for you to get some scores in. That's really good, though, because it lets people, if our plan's on Memorial Day weekend, they can fit the pinball in. And here's the thing. This tournament is running differently than what we did. so the main difference is it's going to be 8 tables and although it's still being requested that you only play them twice each, you are able to use unlimited extra balls which when you hear these tables, you're going to go oh thank god because they're a little bit tricky so yeah, it's going to be that and then you're just going to enter your score on a website that I still don't have the actual site name for, but we'll announce it probably next week.
    5:43
    And just any time during those four days, fit in the tables. You don't have to play all tables. You can play however many you would like to play.
    5:51
    His scoring system is going to be this. If 10 people enter the tournament, then first place gets 10 points. If 20 people post a score for that table, then the person gets 20 points. So it's based off of however many people play that particular table. That's what the top point is. And last place gets one point. Okay. So it just fills in the gaps all up and down the run there. So, yeah, you don't have to play every single table, obviously, if you, for some reason, can't find the time to fit in eight, although over the course of four days. Four days, you should be able to do that. Yeah. You should. Unless you're playing on console and you're going to have like marathon two day, like maybe two day game on, you know, that might happen. Which, okay, here's the tables are going to be playing. You tell me which table you can do a two day slog fest on because I'm good for like, if I'm lucky, 15 minutes on these. So the tables being played are going to be Pinbot, Big Shot, Space Shuttle, Eldorado EM, Haunted House, Gorgar, Xenon, and Genie. There's no marathon tables. No. They're beautiful choices, I have to say. Those are butt kickers, to be sure. They're basically all put up or shut up tables. Yes. Pretty much. I love it. What a great selection. tangent because i do those i compiled all the stats from our tournament of the month and all the tables that people were picking for table or for the put up or shut up tables they're despised tables why were people picking the like horrible tables that nobody wants to play as the put up or shut up well this is my logic behind that i i did that too like basically i looked at the list basically if it wasn't a if if there was one table in the collection that wasn't a dmd and wasn't uh like an alphanumeric like you know gorgar style i'd pick it because generally speaking they're harder they're the rule sets uh like they're usually tough because of the way they're set up but the rule sets are easy so if you know how to play the game you just keep on going and keep on playing it. And sometimes they're brutal.
    8:19
    The DMD ones often aren't because they've got ball saves and stuff like that, but the old tables don't. So if you lose your ball, if you get a house ball, boom, you're gone. And that's why it's put up or shut up. If you're good enough, you can do well on that table. If you're not, then you should take your bat and ball and go home. But see, I don't think that was... There were plenty of tables that I thought were good tournament tables that were DMD machines.
    8:45
    And I think people just plain overlooked them because they were using your logic. Oh, it's a DMD. It must be easy. It's like, no, that's not the case. And in some of these alphanumeric tables, I think they're brutal for the sake of being brutal. It has nothing to do with your skill level as opposed to you'll just get some random bounce that sends you into the outlay. And it's like, there's no proving skill in that.
    9:12
    You're just getting, I don't know. I found it kind of interesting that tables that are really despised by people and these are what were being picked, I was like, I think that was the criteria. It was like, which table do I hate the most? Yeah, that's going to be the put up or shut up.
    9:28
    Well, no, in some cases, the older tables are fun to play from a just play them perspective, not have to worry about, oh, if I stack this, will I get a better result? It's just like, no, shoot the drop targets as many times as you can and get the points. Like, that is, there's something very reassuring about doing that, and there's something quite good as a put up or shut up using that sort of game logic, because all you're doing is you're just trying to repeat the same thing over and over again, and that actually takes a lot of skill, doing the same thing over and over again. Like, shooting a ramp 50 times, for example, takes a lot of skill to actually get that lined up, because you can brick it any time. And shooting the drop targets in a particular way, like only shooting one drop target to get the extra bonus, for example, that's a shot selection technique that you can often brick when you're doing it. So there's a different skill involved in those. Okay, here's the list, just so we can properly discuss this. So we started off when it came to put-up or shut-up. Remember, the first table of each tournament didn't count. There was no put up or shut up. So we started with No Good Gophers, then Theater of Magic, and then Centaur. Those were all my picks. And then I started letting it be voted on. All right. And then chaos ensued. So then we went to Diner, which, not a bad choice. That's, you know... Again, that's a good turn. It's alphanumeric, but it is System 11, and there is a sense of progression that you can go through and you do need to know the rules in order to... That's when you do need to know the shot rules. Yes, you do.
    11:16
    Then we went big shot, which again... I don't know... It's another good sharpshooter table. You've got to know your shots. Yeah, but that one, it may be a sharpshooter table, but it's also got some of the cheapest outlane drains of any TPA table. Put up or shut up, man.
    11:36
    It's basically the only way you're going to lose a ball is if you don't save it. Yeah, but I did get to play this one in real life, and those cheap outlane drains were not there. So I don't know. That's one of those where I think it was one of those, you know, we talked about vacuum ramps. This one has vacuum outlanes. They had to tune it basically to get the, so it wouldn't go out the table. Maybe it was before they got sort of like better wall collisions or something. I had to like sort of railroad it. Then we have Bram Stoker's Dracula, which I know everybody loves to praise for being how they feel very realistic to a real table. It's hot as nails. Yeah, so I don't argue that one. Yeah. Then we have the triptych.
    12:23
    Haunted House, good God, why would anybody ever pick that table? I hate the table. and not only that so few people are actually even good at playing it why would you vote it in as a put up or shut up table then if you know that it's just going to wallop you wouldn't you tend to vote for something that you might be somewhat decent at I don't know is it strategic though would it wallop other people like you have to think there's two equations here like you may not be good at the table but or you may think you're not that great but how about those people that are always consistently at the top of the leaderboard if they have to play that as a put up or shut up no the top of the leaderboard people have no problem with any of these tables. That has been proven over the course of the year. They don't have an issue. Your average player is the one that just gets hammered by this to no end.
    13:13
    So if you're voting exclusively to try and affect the top players, you're not. Just pointing that out. The next table was Gorgar, which... Love it.
    13:29
    That one's just a brutal... That one's just a brutal table. And then, of all tables for put up or shut up, going nuts. Really?
    13:38
    Again, that was just purely the which table do I hate the most choice. Hatred table, yeah, totally. Put it this way, quick games.
    13:49
    But maybe that's what the criteria is here. Is it going to be a quick game? Maybe. Maybe that's what people are selecting here. Because these all potentially are quick game, quick play tables.
    14:00
    And then, interestingly enough, the next batch of tables, this is when basically the field significantly dropped off for how many people we were having playing. And it was now the consistent 24 people that always showed up. Terminator 2, Fishtails, and Jackbot.
    14:21
    So I'm convinced that when we had just the masses showing up that they were just making hate decisions. Yeah. Sounds like it And then things started to lock down because those three tables are good tables to play They quite balanced And you know fish sales is hard but achievable if you know your shots
    14:41
    Terminator 2, the same. You can just keep going on that table and it's fun as well. And what was the other one? Jackpot. Again, an interesting take on Pinbot. Yeah. Quite strategic in the way you have to actually play casino run at the end. So there's a potential there for big winnings, but you've got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them. I don't know if I've gone. I don't think that we've talked about any of these stats in the podcast before. I just posted them on my – No, we haven't. No, so let me run through some of these other stats. Sorry, Schnorzel, about your tournament I've hijacked. So TLDR playing the tournament on Memorial Day. Now let's get into stats. Yes. so we had a total of 87 unique names sign up for tournament of the month that doesn't mean that all those 87 played far from it but we did have 87 people actually sign up uh throughout the course of uh that year and three months four months yeah like year and change yeah um of those probably close to 67 actually did play at least one tournament. Our largest turnout for any of the tournaments was 37 players. That was a lot of fun.
    15:57
    37. Yeah, that was big. That was really cool. The brackets were very spread out. That was very cool. Our largest single sign-up, and this gives you an idea,
    16:12
    54 people signing up. So when our largest tournament was 37 people, but 54 and I don't even know if that was the same tournament of slams versus people playing, but that goes to show you how many people sometimes would sign up and then not bother to show up. Yeah. And dropouts are inevitable in anything that you try and organize. Anything that you try and do, people will just no-show and not provide an explanation. It's just what you have to deal with, which is why it was so hard to actually use traditional tournament software with this and why we had to really rely quite heavily on Xenia's tournament solution. Who's been good enough to write tournament software again for Snorzel? That's pretty good.
    16:57
    Very kind of him. So if you want to try and host your own tournament of the month you can contact us and I'm sure that we can throw you Xenia's way and maybe he'll whip something up for you too if need be. I really think you should start offering this as like a software as a service SAS platform. A little bit like match play does match play is another pretty good online or software based like cloud based tournament software that we use in Brisbane pinball club. But the problem is that it's, it's hard to drop plays out. And that's the problem that we're, that's pretty much the only barrier with using all the other like things like bracket open and stuff like that. Cause people just drop out and you could, you could put them in and just give them zero points. which is another way of handling it.
    17:44
    But then you wind up having, because we did that like the very first or second tournament where it was like, oh, we'll just give you zero points. But then there would be instances where the bracket where there was literally one person of the three or of the four people that were in that bracket was there for the play and the other three people all got zero points. And so they got full points. It was like, well, that's not fair. That's not fair. Yeah, that's right. it's almost like you need to accept people and then bracket them after posthumously.
    18:20
    So it's like, yeah, you'll be in a bracket and you won't know that bracket until you've actually played and we've had everyone show up. Yeah, because I was trying to straddle the line of, hey, it wouldn't be cool to know who you're competing against, so here's the brackets, when in reality I probably should have just never even, I don't know, I don't know what people, I don't know if that was something that people were attracted to being able to see that ahead of time or not I never actually bothered to ask that question It would be interesting to set up a quick poll about it posthumously and get people's feedback about what they liked and what they didn't It would be good to actually hear what players thought We should do that Maybe we will We should Another thing that caught my eye in the forums in vitro managed to look into the code of Pimble Arcade and examine it for the physics and how they operate. Oh, really? It's working on the PC. Yes. And a rather large thread has started going in terms of how much the railroading is built in to the game. Because it's crystal clear now. I mean, there are definitely certain instances that they were able to read the code and go, hey, look, it's saying it right here.
    19:51
    It's an X, Y, A thing. Exactly. So this is, number one, this is quite incredible that Farsight haven't minified their code. so you can't actually read it in plain text?
    20:06
    Are you saying that they were able to decompile and reverse engineer the code, or are they just looking at plain text files within the Windows directories that were created?
    20:21
    You're asking Mr. Non-Technical? No, no, this is a tough call. You have to look at the thread itself because he has posted portions of the code that he's looking at. people like Viking Eric and Invitro and a few others have actually been able to read through it and go, oh, so it's saying, and I'm going, I'm glad you guys are interpolating this for me because I don't know what. You're going to have to send me a link on that because that interests me greatly. I'm sure you would. The number one, they haven't obfuscated the code, which is like number one what you do. Because if you can read the code plainly, you can just copy it and pirate the hell out of the physics and stuff like that. Well, I don't think Invitro is not posting everything. He's only posted selected select nuggets you might say and i was very curious to i was i was like as a moderator of the forum going am i supposed to shut this down i don't know and then uh mike reitmeyer actually commented on it and i went hey if mike is cool with commenting on it then i think we're in safe grounds he wasn't it's interesting because generally speaking when you use software one of the explicit call clauses in the licensing agreement is not to decompile or reverse engineer and this is kind of what this is. If what you're saying is that they can actually read the code and work out what it's doing on what is a closed source application, not an open source application, that is actually decompilation and that may be in breach of some licensing agreements that they need to approach with caution. Having said that, if Mike's okay with him coming around, then that's kind of like an endorsement saying, yeah, go for it, see what you can learn. You know, although he's not the official, you know, voice of... No, he's not the person that would, you know, be enforcing any sort of licensing breach. But the thing is, you don't actually accept terms and conditions or EULA when you open up Pimple Arcade. So, oh, I just got a link. I got a magic link to the Magic Link Ferry. Amazing! Where did that come from? It's an amazing link. Let's have a look. So, it's three pages. While you're looking... You talk, I'll read. Yes, I'm going to scattershot some thoughts in this. But what is interesting is that although there are some railroading issues or whatever, I don't know about you, but I don't notice the railroading that much in the game. It might be because I'm not shooting it over and over and over and over again, looking for things. The only table I ever came across that I've noticed it big time was with Ripley's. And for whatever reason, I was able to key into the patterns of the ball.
    23:03
    I happened to notice it. And the funny thing is, is I got a perverse enjoyment out of those railroads. I was like, look at this. I'm exploiting this. Okay, so I'm looking through the first two pages. So Invitro and Viking Eric are having a discussion about it. So what they are, their physics information is stored in the .rez files, or the res files, and they're the things that you download and they contain all the table information, basically.
    23:34
    So they do have them compressed or encoded, but he managed to find out what that encoding is and was able to decompile. So technically it is kind of reverse engineering the code in the fact that you are extracting something that is encrypted and you're kind of breaking the encryption by doing that. It's interesting to read through what the code actually looks like and sort of see how they handle the physics. So it is an interesting thread. it doesn't really reveal a lot um if you um don't know a lot about coding but if you do you might find it quite interesting which means jared will have plenty to talk about next week well maybe maybe not i don't i'm not gonna let you obsess about it too much yeah um it's it's interesting just to like thumb through the the way they've done it and go oh yeah it's just it's just coordinates basically that's all it is yeah um yeah so i'll read through this and uh yeah One of the responses that people had mentioned though was like how come Fireside didn't just use Unreal Engine or any one of these other graphic physics engines that are out there and just license that and my response was because they've been working on their own physics engine for going on 10 years and they're a small independent studio and do they really need to pay yet another licensing fee in their game? for what is arguably really good pinball physics.
    25:16
    Yes, pro pinball might have better physics. I don't know. It's kind of one of those things where if it was a huge, giant leap, because somebody mentioned also the Microsoft pinball arcade. Yeah, that was horrible. That was incredibly floaty, bad, bad, bad pinball.
    25:34
    You know. So if we're talking minutiae here, yeah. Yeah, that's right. So yes, I think a lot of people are speculating what the values are in those res files. Like there's essentially parameters and then values in the code. So it might be like elasticity flipper when dropped and it has a numeric value or an integer, which is like a whole number. and there's not really anything in there, of course, to comment what that actually means. Like, you know, Farsight would know. Yeah. But, you know, for someone outside reading the code with no architectural knowledge of the platform, it's kind of best guess.
    26:17
    The only way you could find out is actually start tweaking the code, recompile it, and then start running it and see what effect it has. But you can pretty much guarantee you're going to break the table if you do it. like real bad you'd have to take a copy of that and start tweaking it but yeah it's interesting that if this is available and you can actually decompile it and farsight are kind of sort of unofficially okay with it then it might be that this encourages a whole new um community tuning movement on the tables and actually allows people to go in there and and tune things subtly to to have it play the way they think it should play and then share that tuning as a recompiled dot res file and have people do it and it may like even if you think even more down the track if someone gets really good at this it might actually be a career opportunity for them first time i go you actually got a bit of an eye for this we might uh send you a bit of a private note and go you you're not bad at this tuning game that is the thing with modders it's amazing how much their passion and the amount of time that they're going to have to spend doing it, but to them it's a hobby. This is what they find fun. It's not a job. This is the fun of it. Right. And that you can get these just amazing, amazing gameplay aspects out of something. I wish that Farsight could officially welcome the mod community. Obviously their license agreement with Williams and Stern and Gottlieb doesn't allow that, but God, can you imagine?
    27:52
    It'd be amazing. I think, did I read that someone had created an interface for DMDs, like real DMDs, gas plasma DMDs? I believe that just happened. I don't think I read the thread, but I think I read the thread title. Yeah, that's really exciting. And that's the sort of thing that if Farsight could, well, potentially make this type of mod easier by opening up API endpoints or something like that into their game, they could actually open up programming interfaces into the game select ones that they want to open up and then allow people to call values from the code base and then affect something it's possible they could do that or have like a framework they could release that would allow you to actually plug in things like perhaps if you wanted to unofficially make a cabinet mod you could then have an interface to detect flipper pulses and stuff like that and do exactly what VPN have done. They're the guys. Speaking of which... I was going to say, speaking of Capit... So this past Friday on Shark Tank a show that I have never bothered watching but made a specific point to at least watch this one segment of They for those who don know Shark Tank is a bunch of extremely wealthy guys including the likes of Mark Cuban.
    29:22
    I'm going to blank on how to say that word, so I'm not going to try. Rich guys. Entrepreneurs. Thank you, guys. Sometimes my... Yeah, let's just edit that right out. I'm going to leave it in because I have the power.
    29:38
    That's be good. That's going to be the title. Anyway, these guys are investors. And so people, you might call it a Kickstarter, but it's a Kickstarter of five people. So these people come, they pitch their product. They're called angel investors is what they are. Yeah, they pitch their product, and then these guys battle out whether or not they would like to invest. Only one person gets to invest, so sometimes a little bidding work can maybe potentially happen. Other times, none of them want to invest, and you walk away with nothing, going back to your roots. But people are basically looking for a certain amount of capital to be dumped on them in return for a certain stake in the company itself. So an individual by the name of Brad Baker brought to the Sharks his company, which is called VP Cabs. And what he is making is virtual pinball cabinets. And he had a couple of different model sizes. One was a full size pinball cab, then a slightly smaller size, and then one that he had that was on a countertop. Now, I don't know when this show was actually recorded. it might have been recorded back in 2015 at some point because if you go to their website now which is virtualpinball.com you can actually see what they actually are selling it's pretty good yeah no the cabinets look really solid it's all coin op as well which is very interesting like there's coin validators on the front and that's something that we should probably explore Well, if you look closely on these things, it makes a plinking sound, but it's not actually functioning.
    31:30
    Ah, right, okay. It doesn't have the functionality in there yet. So, yeah, so he basically was pitching that he's been making these cabinets, wants to make a go of it, wants to sell these cabinets. He's currently been selling them at trade shows.
    31:44
    The top-of-the-line cabinet sells for just, you know, five bucks or so, less than $8,000, so call it $8,000. the cheapest one was about $4,000 call it like a Cern LE but with all the games right so that was what got me interested right off the bat was he was running Pinball FX 2 on this thing on national TV and I'm like that's dicey that's pretty brave I know they have cab support but wow you know on national television so I was like what is he advertising exactly here you know and because he was talking about me wanting to maybe have it be put into bars and stuff like that and I'm like oh we're getting into this whole area that Farsight has already said clearly you can't use your device to make money with you know that breaks our license and everything That's right. It's interesting because on the wizard, I'm having a look at the website now, and the wizard explicitly states... Which is their top-of-the-line table. On one of the tabs under the main sort of upgrade section, it actually has Pinball FX2 tables. So they actually explicitly state Pinball FX2 on their website. Right. So over the course of this guy's pitch and the questions that were asked, you know, they're asking him about build cost and the build cost on it was see if I find my my numbers here real quick. Oh, actual materials, two thousand six hundred eighty six dollars.
    33:27
    And then he had the licensing and stuff, and basically he was saying it cost about four grand to make one of these things. and it turns out that his licensing fee, which would be to Zen, is up to 15% of the sales price. Okay. So on the full-size Wizard, that means $1,200 of it goes to Zen.
    33:53
    Yes. That would be on just the base model, I would imagine. No, that's on the Wizard model. That's on the big model. Yeah. Well, what I'm saying is that if you trick it out completely, which is what I've done, it goes from $7,000 to $9,539. Okay. So if you put all the things on that they offer as extra, like LEDs and everything, it's like $9,500. Okay. So I presume that will just be on the base version of the Wizard cabinet. Right, right.
    34:22
    So anyway, that's a pretty hefty fee, but that answered my question. I was like, oh, well, that's why he can advertise on town or have this on national TV. if you look at any he's done that though he's actually negotiated a license deal with Zen and partnered with them to actually do this and if you go on the website and look at any of the YouTube videos he's got a cool interface for selecting the tables too I don't know I mean it's not the grid format of Zen it's the cycling through of the actual titles I don't know who made the front end I don't know if he made the front end or somebody else made the front end or what exactly the deal is. Yeah. There are a lot of front ends for visual pinball cabs, and I've seen that sort of animation style before, where essentially it's like a, what is it? It's like it goes from a static picture over to the new table, and then it loads. Okay. So it's like a transition picture, very much how Android does rotation. It actually takes like a snapshot of the screen, rotates it, then puts the actual operating system back in place again. So that's a pretty common technique. So he makes his pitch and invites everybody to go up and actually get their hands on. And it was really funny because two guys of the group sprinted up to them. One of the guys, Mark Cuban, he bolted for the machine. He looked really eager. And then there was this other guy. I don't know any of the guys' names other than Cuban. But there was another guy that bolted up, and he was really clicking on it and working the table. Well, it turns out that he actually owns 10 pinball machines himself. So I thought, oh, okay. A shark would actually own it. Right.
    36:06
    So it was interesting because it was like, okay, so the two guys who were most eager to hop up, one guy that actually owns machines, and then somebody like Cuban who is very savvy on this kind of tech, game integration and stuff like that. and the there was a girl who you could swear you could tell she had zero interest from the start meh and then there was this old guy who at first he seemed interested and then he found out the price and you would have thought somebody had killed his kitten he doesn't understand the actual price of pinball machines these days No.
    36:54
    And then the final guy is the guy that actually did wind up making a deal with him. And interestingly enough, though, he was the first person to sit down. Like, I don't think he ever played the machine. He looked at him. He didn't need to play. And then he went and sat down. I know what this guy's doing here.
    37:13
    I get it. I don't need to look at this anymore. I've already made my decision. Right, right. He was always sitting down going, hmm, okay. You guys go up there and play it, so I'm going to think of an offer. So you got the gal that didn't want anything to do with it. You got the old guy that couldn't believe the price of it. Now, the guy that was actually out pretty quickly was the guy that owns pinball machines. So he started this whole argument of, he goes, you're selling to old guys like me. No kid is going to buy this. To which the guy was like, no, parents are buying this for the kids. It is a big investment for them, but it's all these tables rather than having one pinball machine. And that guy, he could not wrap his head around the idea that a younger generation would want this. It's only old guys like him. And I'm sitting there thinking, that's because you can afford real pinball machines. That's right. That's exactly right. You know, this is what I hear all the time at my league with these guys that have, you know, 12, 15 machines physically in their house. They don't understand digital pinball, what the appeal is. I wouldn't either if I had all those machines around. Yeah, I'd do like screw you digital pinball. Exactly. Would I want Farsight's offering? Probably not if I had 15 pins because I've got a pinball on tap. I don't need to fill my pinball itch. And if I'm really interested in one of these other machines, I'll probably just buy it. Trade it out. Sell it. I'll sell one of these. I'll get a new one. I have now something to physically trade and be an asset to. Chris, we have talked in the past about pinball as a commodity and a trading commodity. And we know that people flip two games to buy one and really hone their collections down. So of course they do that. That's why Pinside exists with all the sales because people are doing that constantly. And what was interesting, I think one of the reasons why the gal was the first one out was because all she thought about was mobile games.
    39:18
    And she was like, all the kids want us to play. They want to play thousands of games on their hands. They don't want this giant creation of a thing. And I'm like, oh, lady, you are not catching on to the trend.
    39:32
    Yeah, no, it's never, as we've discussed before, it's never going to be a mass market thing. but to that niche you can really lock your hooks into. I was very interested to see what Cuban said and he kept on saying that he really wanted to say yes.
    39:49
    And he sees it as a platform that Brad is a systems integrator because obviously he's not creating his own software for this. He's basically just building it. Integrating it. Extending it into something that can be played on something that wasn't necessarily being intended to be played on. And what Cuban was saying was that he likes to endorse people that are the first at something and can go forward with that because then he sees the growth that can come out of that one thing and take that gamble as opposed to somebody who's just following what others have already paved the path of. Yeah. But his thing was he saw it as a game platform, but in and of itself for the pinball, it was not a game changer. It wasn't doing enough different to make it appealing.
    40:39
    And so that left the final guy who I almost think was looking at as an easy grab, a safe bet grab. But what he actually mentioned was that he wanted to have his own company do the construction and essentially have Brad be the salesperson of it. Yeah. So I'm curious to know what transpired after after the fact. We might actually get the opportunity. I reached out to Brad and we got an email response that he would love to come on our show at some point. So hopefully we'll actually be able to get him in here and we can ask all these nitty gritty questions about what what is physically in this machine.
    41:21
    But it did make sense to after we finished this part to actually have a look at the FAQs, because there's some very interesting information there, which might be worth discussing. Well, one of the things that I noticed in there was somebody asked, can I play Farsight's Pinball Arcade? And he mentioned that they're using the NoEx mod that one of the forum members has basically done this mod to allow cabinet play of Pinball Arcade. And I thought, interesting again. finding a... Obviously, he can't get into a licensing agreement with Farsight, especially since Farsight has been attached to VirtuaPin.
    42:05
    And I'd be very curious... Yeah, with them. I'd be very curious to see what the difference between VirtuaPin and this and the VP cabs, what makes VP cabs so much different than VirtuaPin. Yeah.
    42:22
    It's a... The thing that they do say is, can I play classic pinball or arcade games? You go, yeah, you can, but you're going to need to upgrade the PC. And this goes back to the cost of emulation, right?
    42:35
    Yeah. So rather than actually running something like pinball effects, which runs quite well on normal hardware because they're not emulating anything. So interesting.
    42:45
    Yeah, because right now they just have graphic cards and a Wi-Fi connection. I don't know what kind of a computer is actually running this thing. I think the main thing is though it's like yes they can run it but you're going to have to deal with setting it up which might be not that difficult I think it's just not as easy as what they probably already have with Zen where it's going to be log in purchase done it's now on your table you know not having to download any of the ROMs or anything else like that you got to do when you're doing with the VP yeah I actually don't think you even need to download any Zen tables that's actually part of the package you get all the tables as part of your 7,000. Yeah, but does that mean you get them as more come out?
    43:26
    I wouldn't think so. It's like these are the tables on release, and then after that you download extra. Right. So you'd have to have a way of getting those into. That's what I'm saying. They might have his front end might be very easy to just be simply up by my credit cards on file It going to automatically download into this boom it there here we go just like Steam Well yeah it be interesting to see how the interface with Zen works. I mean, Zen's interface is probably, out of all the interfaces, I call it industry-leading as far as pinball interfaces go, digital pinball. It's very intuitive. It's beautifully integrated with controllers, which means that if it's integrated with controllers, you can actually integrate it with a visual pinball cab quite easily.
    44:07
    So Farsight's one is a lot trickier because it doesn't have full controller support all the way down and up the menu stack. So at least on the old UX, maybe the new UI has that and better controller integration. But the old one, certainly on mobile, there's only certain things that you can do with it. And you actually need the touchscreen to do something as simple as exit out of the table results screen. when you actually finish a table, it pops up your Hall of Fame score or your local high scores if you manage to record a table and then your overall gain score for that particular play. That's not integrated into the controls at all, so you have to actually touch the screen to do that. Take your hand off the control and touch the screen. With the new UI, I did a test because somebody brought this very question up because they have a pin cab and they didn't want to deal with the new UI and fearing that it would break everything that was working with that. I tried it with my controller and I was able to do virtually everything with... Well, I can do everything with my controller. Excuse me, he wanted to know if you could do it with a keyboard because he had... Whatever the controls were, it was essentially using a keyboard but the keyboard was hidden. I don't know. Anyway... Keyboard emulator, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The up button linked to the up key on the keyboard. So I tried using the keyboard to navigate through the new UI, and I was able to do most of it.
    45:37
    There were certain sections that I got hung up on, like if a special window popped up. Sometimes I wasn't able to figure out how to move the cursor to highlight that or the text box that you could push. Or was it a tab key? See, maybe that's why I wasn't – It could be the tab key. Yeah, so me not being a keyboard person when it comes to that game, I wasn't able to navigate around. But for the most part, I was able to navigate all the way to a game, start the game, play the game, exit the game, and exit out of the program.
    46:04
    Okay, well, that's good. Hopefully that same functionality is on mobile because at the moment, I've got a Shield tablet, right? And it allows you to connect to the TV through HDMI.
    46:15
    But on Zen, it's amazing because you can use it basically like a console. You can actually turn the screen off on the Shield tablet. It goes into what they call console mode, and you control everything with the wireless controller, except for Pinball Arcade, which you have to have the touchscreen because some things just don't work with the controller. And it's really frustrating. So bring on the new UI in that case because it sounds like they've fixed that issue. I was thinking again based off of when this show was recorded and what has transpired since then especially with Oculus and VR pinball I'm dying to know if they were making a cabinet much like what we talked about where the guy just made the used the four pinball legs and put a little controller guys there is a market if you put the PC right inside that little tiny cab so that all you have to do is plug in your Oculus and you're using all the things you're already doing for these virtual pin cabinets. Wow. Then you're really covering all those markets. Now again, though, how niche is niche? We've already talked about how the Oculus is fairly, fairly small. That's pretty narrow, that market right there. But, you know, if you wanted an $8,000 pinball controller, you could probably use this thing as that. That's true. Maybe you could. Yeah. Because looking at the specs, so the standard specifications for the PC that's inside the Wizard is an Intel i5 with a 240 gig solid state drive. It's got 8 gig RAM, which is pretty decent, and two dual 700 watt power supplies. So probably one for all the screens and stuff and one for the PC. That would allow them to supply clean power to the PC and clean power to the rest of the stuff, like the monitor, which you just couldn't run off a PC's power supply. Right. Because, you know, it's a huge LCD, basically.
    48:19
    And then you've also got things like shaker motors and solenoids and stuff, which you would need a good solar power supply for that. Like, there's no way of getting around that.
    48:28
    So it's got a pretty decent graphics card. It's got a GTX 960 in it, so that's pretty chunky. and then for the back glass and dmd it's got a gt710 so we've actually got two graphics cards to power both the main game experience and then the back box alone so that's a fair bit of grunt there as far as gpu goes um it's using 64-bit windows 7 um and they've got coaxial speakers in there as well so an 8-inch subwoofer two 6.5-inch speakers and a three-channel amp um and you can tune it with an amplifier controls as well. So everything is CNC cut, so it's really high accuracy. So it would look really good as a build quality aspect. Well, the show says that it's felt really good.
    49:19
    Yeah. Interestingly, though, it's got a non-working OEM style coin door. So there's no coin mech hardware in it. So it looks like a pinball machine, but it doesn't actually have coin mechs in. Yeah. And it doesn't say anything on there about whether you can wire that in or not. Right. And I'm sure that that probably comes back to the licensing. So it looks authentic. It's just basically window dressing. It's not there to be functional. So you could have it in a bar and have it on free play as an attractive, as an attracting device for punters to have a play while they're having a beer, but you couldn't take money for it. So, yeah. Interesting, interesting. Well, if anybody wants to check out what we're talking about, again, go to virtualpinball.com. You can check out all the cabinets that they're offering there.
    50:14
    I mean, like I said, it looks pretty cool. I'm very curious to see what kind of marketplace there is for it and what they would have planned. So hopefully if we're able to get Brad on here, we can ask those kind of questions.
    50:27
    Yeah, if I had not granted. if I had nine grand US to drop I'd totally get one nine grand being I would trick out everything on it and have all the things because why wouldn't you for an extra one and a half grand give me all the things including the PC upgrade so yeah I really do like the form factor of the Vertigo which is the sort of like tall boy version of it which allows you to also play main games like all the shoot em ups and all that sort of stuff as well. That's kind of cool to have that.
    51:04
    Yeah, because that one actually has a joystick on the cabinet, right? It does, yeah. It has a joystick. It's also got flipper buttons on the side. And it's got the launch ball button on it. It looks identical to the one that's on real-life Bally Williams games. It happens to be a single screen, so you're not going to get the back glass like you would on the Wizard cabinet. On the Wizard. But if you don't have like seven and a half grand to spend, there is the Classic, which is basically the pro version, if you like. Whereas the Wizard is more of the premium or the E version, if you like. and I'm just trying to load it and it's not really loading so well so let me just go back to the front page but it's a slightly I guess less fancy looking well it doesn't have an actual plunger and yeah I mean some of the bells and whistles have basically been trimmed off to cut costs clearly so it doesn't have all the stuff like the under cabinet lighting and all that sort of stuff it's just got basically you can upgrade the PC and all the audio. You can get a powder-coated coin door if you want and another drive. But really, it's basically what it looks like. They've still got the back display and everything, but it just doesn't have some of the extra bling, basically.
    52:41
    And a slightly smaller display, I think, as well. Well, then the step below that, they call it the mini, which is, I believe they said, two-thirds the size of a normal cabinet. So it's basically the safecracker. Yeah. And that's your entry-level four grand, same as the Vertigo.
    52:59
    So, I mean, like I said, there's lots of options for people to choose from. Check them out. See what you guys think. Drop us a comment on Twitter.
    53:07
    Good for apartments, basically. Yeah. The mini is the apartment version of the Wizard. Yeah, drop us a comment at Blockade, or you can talk to Jared at JaredMorris or myself at ShutYourTraps on Twitter. Or if you feel like writing long form, go ahead and email us, blahblahblockade at gmail.com.
    53:29
    Oh, I see the front end. The front end that they're using is PinballX. Ah, okay. So PinballX front end, which is very respected from what I understand. So it's a very interesting little foray into digital pinball in the mainstream, isn't it? Yeah, it is. It is. I imagine just the very fact that it was on a network TV show, he's going to get a lot of inquiries.
    53:56
    My Twitter feed was going, guy, for two days straight, it was just constantly, watch, make sure you watch, make sure you watch. And that was from various pinball sources on Twitter. So, yeah, I can only imagine the awareness has gone up immensely.
    54:13
    Was Zinn promoting it? No. No, wait, excuse me. I take it back. No, Zen did retweet, but Pinball Supernova was the main one that was tweeting it. Yeah, that's why I got it too. For anyone who doesn't follow Pinball Supernova and you're a pinhead, you should. So Pinball Supernova, Twitter, do yourself a favor. Yeah. Yep. Very good. Well, fantastic. I think we covered a lot of virtual pinball ground there. We really did. I did want to say I actually went to see a movie yesterday. and I'll be very quick on this. I know. I actually, for Really Real, did. I went to see Whiskey Tango Foxtrot with Tina Fey. That's like rated R. That's not for the kiddies.
    54:56
    No. Luckily, it's only Kim and I went. It was, I don't know what the trailers look like over there, but the trailers in Australia just don't do the movie justice. Yeah. It was really quite enjoyable.
    55:10
    Tina Fey being a little bit more serious than she normally is. and like really i would suggest going and seeing it it was a very interesting insight into what foreign correspondents sort of have to do uh and the conditions they put through um to bring the news to us so it's worth a look yeah i believe we're probably less than a month away from that coming out on home video oh yeah so it's been out there for a while yeah yeah yeah i believe it was a pre-holiday movie for us.
    55:44
    Oh, like in... Which holiday? Christmas. Oh, really? I think. If I'm not mistaken, it was pre-Christmas. That far behind. This is why... Do you wonder why people torrent things in Australia? Oh, I know, right? Why?
    56:00
    Movie... This is like a mini-rant. Movie distribution networks need to understand that there is no such thing as controlled regions anymore. no like there is just not so why continue to adopt that that model anyhow i'll get off it's just it's for everything video games for movies for tv i've often said the same thing with when it comes to movies or music that has gone out of print you might say where nobody is distributing it's not available for purchase hey you know what when you get it into that realm i don't have a single qualm about downloading it now because you're not selling it make it available then how am i supposed to get if I want it. No. Yeah, exactly. And if I'm buying it used, well, that's the same thing. You're still not getting the money.
    56:45
    So... A pawnbroker is, or somebody who's selling it out of their collection is. Right. Like, it's... Right. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Right. Make that stuff available.
    56:54
    Yeah. All right. Well, cool. We're going to wrap it up here for this week. Can't let it go without mentioning T-shirts, so represent.com. Absolutely not. Blockade slash shirt.
    57:08
    Yeah. and yeah, who knows what will happen this coming week that we will talk about next week, but I'm sure something will. So until then, I've been shut your trap, AKA Chris Freebus. He has been Jared Morgs. We will talk to you again soon.
    57:21
    See you later. Wizard of amusement.com. The West coast leader, classic pinball makers, custom pinball shooter rods, buyer specifications, swap out your standard ball plunger with something themed to your specific table. installs in less than five minutes with no custom tools even if you don't own the table looks great as a pinball memento to admire prices start at 39 but mention blockhead podcast receipt 10 off your order wizard amusement.com sales restoration customization don't forget to leave a review on itunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that blockade is delivered to we can't prove unless you tell us how now stop listening place it in ball