Recreations of new Stern Pinball machines

Honestly, I play VP to test out tables that are for sale locally that I would like to acquire, I play VP to play tables that I grew up playing in my youth and will never get a chance to play again. I play VP to get a chance to play tables that I have never seen or will ever see. I live in Med Sized city but there are no arcades left, NONE, the only modern Stern game I have ever seen is a BBH at the local theater and let me tell you when they removed it recently I shed no tears, worst table I ever played. I have never seen any of their other tables and probably never will so I will never get a chance to play their games and based on my BBH experience I wouldn't consider buying one of their games without testing it first. I am currently building a VP Cabinet to go alongside the 13 actual pinball machines that I currently own and I am looking at picking up an additional 2 games this week after taking them on a test drive with VP first to see if they were any fun.

I own a Sega Genesis, PSOne, PS2, WII but they sit collecting dust as I prefer to play my real arcade jamma cabs, and I will take a real pinball machine any day over any video game including VP. But with no arcades left the only chance I get to play pinball is by either buying the table or playing it on VP.

I think Gary Stern is missing the point, the more people that play pinball, the more demand there will be for pinball, if the VP version is good, people will hunt down the real thing. Also maybe Gary should enlist the help of a decent table designer and sell VP versions of his tables from the Stern Website creating an additional revenue stream. He could also use the community for beta testing new concepts or selling VP versions of games that were created but never released in a production run.

Same thing goes for the Copyright holders of the Williams, Bally and Gottlieb trademarks, who have invested their time and energy into destroying the pinball community by hunting down and suing people for producing cabinet art or replacement backglasses to keep our tables looking good. Seems a shame to me that an actual working pinball machine could end up in a landfill because the owner couldn't get a backglass. I would gladly pay to own a copy of the hi-res artwork for the games I own. And as in the muti-million dollar home video game industry you buy the console then you gotta buy the games.
 
Stern recreations advise for STERN

" The problem for us (in theory) is that a week after Stern releases a new machine, there could be a recreation available for download
This is not good for Stern.."


I think that STERN still doens't realise that the rules of the game have changed.
The costumer is the one that is in control, and has the money that other companies and stern, wants to have.
"The Internet" is the connection between costumer and those companies

So STERN could earn a lot of money if they would release a STERN certfied recreation of their own tables for Visual Pinball / Hyperpin themselves! for a price of for example 7 dollar a table STERN could earn a lot of money!
because there are a lot of pinball fans in the world!

My advice for STERN:

Make a STERN Hyperpin cabinet that can play STERN orginial visualpinball tables!
These tables are connected with internet so new virtual tables can be downloaded for a small price. and high scores, tournament play is possible.

STERN should also recreate their newer tables for other platforms like Pinball Arcade (FairSight)

I think this is the way to go for them, if they don't make what the people want, don't start crying if the people make it themselves!

I wish STERN pinball all the luck, and I'm glad that they are still alive in this diffucult time, but they should adapt to this computer/internet century were we live in now.
 
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I just noticed that Stern themselves are now hosting relatively recent ROMs. For example, here's the ROM for Tron Legacy: https://sternpinball.com/?post_type=game_code&s=tron (Search results for “tron” — Stern Pinball)

No idea when they decided to be more liberal with the SAM games, but it certainly looks like they've okayed a bunch of relatively recent games for emulation. Getting back to Tron Legacy, the machine came out in 2011 and Stern seems to have offered the ROM online in late 2017. Maybe that means there's now an approved six-year lag after which VP is allowed to emulate a Stern game. Or maybe there was a technology jump like in the case of when SAM first came out, where they said "you can't emulate any SAM games, but you can emulate all the older stuff."

EDIT: After a quick check, it looks like with the release of Stern's Wrestlemania in 2015, SAM is obsolete, and SPIKE is Stern's new MPU / IC system. So all the SAM games are presumably welcome for emulation.

EDIT: Now it's SPIKE2!
 
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Hmm, I feel like even if people can download and play these tables at home, there will always still be people who play the machines at arcades. I mean, the Xbox and Playstation didn't totally kill arcades. People still go to arcades and dump money into all sorts of types of video games, which is honestly a bit baffling to me. To be honest, I can't tell you the last time I went to an arcade. It would have to have been in the mid 90s. Even if virtual pinball didn't exist at all, I still wouldn't be going to arcades.
 
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