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Replies to post #124486 on NanoTech Entertainment Inc (NTEK)
Ultracade Licenses Visual Pinball
Posts from the VPForums by David Foley
Visual Pinball
Let me clarify what we have done, what we are doing, and what we are not doing.
1) We are building a multi-game pinball machine called Pinball Legends. Similar in style to our Arcade Legends and UltraCade machines.
2) We have licensed the Visual Pinball engine from Randy Davis to use as a basis for our product.
3) We are in the process of licensing other code libraries and engines for this product as well.
4) We have offered VP table & script authors a royalty to use the work that they have already done.
5) We have absolutely no intention of doing anything but bringing to market a commerical product based on the great body of work that already exists, and combine it with the rights to many of the classic pinball tables that we have secured.
6) Any rumors of us trying to change what is going on in the community is just bad rumors. In fact, we will be offering our custom designed I/O card with motion sensor and digital plunger as stand alone items so that people that wish to build a desktop pinball controller to play with Visual Pinball will have the benefit of all of the inputs for Visual Pinball, motion input to shake the table, and a real plunger encoded to correspond with the plunger. We even intend on giving our code modifications that we have been doing to Visual Pinball back to Randy to be released into the community so that everyone who has invested time and effort in the Visual Pinball platform will benefit from the work that we are doing to the engine.
If you have questions or concerns feel free to contact me directly at david.foley@ultracade.com
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David R. Foley
UltraCade Technologies
More Information
With regards to Future Pinball, we have been in talks with the FP team for several months, and licensed an evaluation only version of the product to determine how it will work in our business model. The FP engine did not fit our needs for the Pinball Legends (classic) product, but does show great promise for our UltraPin product which will be using the same hardware platform that we have developed for Pinball Legends, but will contain new, original pinball tables instead of recreations of existing tables. Hopefully we can work something out wtih the FP team and use that amazing technology.
With regards to our license agreement with Randy it is just that, a license. We have not purchased the rights to the name, nor do we own the code, we have simply aquired the rights to use his code in our product. As I said before, all of the conjecture and "sky is falling" mentality is a complete farse, and has no basis in reality. We are simply using VP as the starting point for our system.
In answer to product details, this is not an upgrade for our current machines, it is a seperate stand alone product. It is a video pinball machine. The cabinet is a traditional pinball cabinet, and the playfield has been replaced with a 16:9 display. It looks and plays like a traditional pinball table, not an arcade machine.
In answer to the table rights, the rights to the parts and physical tables were licensed to the folks in Australia, and the digital rights were secured by our manufacturing partner. We have a long standing relationship with many of the rights holders and have been licensing video game and other IP rights for decades now. We have the exclusive rights to the digital versions of all Williams tables for the platform. We also have rights to tables from Bally and Capcom. We are in the midst of negotiating rights from several other manufacturers. Our goal in licensing, especially in exlusive rights, is simply to put out a commerical digital pinball table and not have to compete with several other companies. We have absolultely no interest in changing how the VP community has been functioning, nor do we have any intention of doing anything but support the community by compensating the hard work of many of its members. Our offers are legitmate offers.
As for the MAME trademark issue, what has been posted here is a bunch of misinformation. We have been working with the original MAME authors and have a good line of communication with them. Last february we instigated the registration of the Trademark and the halting of several companies that were pirating our intellectual properties that we had licensed and paid a lot of money for, and installing games on MAME and selling it. The large amount of propoganda and misinformation that continues to be put out there is amazing. The simple fact is that we did what we had to do to prevent people from selling MAME based products with unlicensed ROMs, nothing more. We worked with the MAME authors and the name has been properly trademarked and protected to its rightful owners.
The statement that we are somehow destroying the VP community is complete baseless. Nothing we are doing has any negative impact on this community, and in fact only has benefits. We are going to be giving back the engine enhancements we make so that everyone here can benefit. We are going to be offering our input technology so that everyone here can benefit. Our target audience for pinball, just as with classic arcade games is not the people that log onto this forum. We market to non technical people. 95% of our customers have no idea what an emualtor is. Our customers simply want to play classic stuff, and they do not have the ability or desire to figure out how to log onto websites and do that. They want to buy a machine that they plug in and it presents them with thier favorite games.
__________________
David R. Foley
UltraCade Technologies
More Information
With regards to Future Pinball, we have been in talks with the FP team for several months, and licensed an evaluation only version of the product to determine how it will work in our business model. The FP engine did not fit our needs for the Pinball Legends (classic) product, but does show great promise for our UltraPin product which will be using the same hardware platform that we have developed for Pinball Legends, but will contain new, original pinball tables instead of recreations of existing tables. Hopefully we can work something out wtih the FP team and use that amazing technology.
With regards to our license agreement with Randy it is just that, a license. We have not purchased the rights to the name, nor do we own the code, we have simply aquired the rights to use his code in our product. As I said before, all of the conjecture and "sky is falling" mentality is a complete farse, and has no basis in reality. We are simply using VP as the starting point for our system.
In answer to product details, this is not an upgrade for our current machines, it is a seperate stand alone product. It is a video pinball machine. The cabinet is a traditional pinball cabinet, and the playfield has been replaced with a 16:9 display. It looks and plays like a traditional pinball table, not an arcade machine.
In answer to the table rights, the rights to the parts and physical tables were licensed to the folks in Australia, and the digital rights were secured by our manufacturing partner. We have a long standing relationship with many of the rights holders and have been licensing video game and other IP rights for decades now. We have the exclusive rights to the digital versions of all Williams tables for the platform. We also have rights to tables from Bally and Capcom. We are in the midst of negotiating rights from several other manufacturers. Our goal in licensing, especially in exlusive rights, is simply to put out a commerical digital pinball table and not have to compete with several other companies. We have absolultely no interest in changing how the VP community has been functioning, nor do we have any intention of doing anything but support the community by compensating the hard work of many of its members. Our offers are legitmate offers.
As for the MAME trademark issue, what has been posted here is a bunch of misinformation. We have been working with the original MAME authors and have a good line of communication with them. Last february we instigated the registration of the Trademark and the halting of several companies that were pirating our intellectual properties that we had licensed and paid a lot of money for, and installing games on MAME and selling it. The large amount of propoganda and misinformation that continues to be put out there is amazing. The simple fact is that we did what we had to do to prevent people from selling MAME based products with unlicensed ROMs, nothing more. We worked with the MAME authors and the name has been properly trademarked and protected to its rightful owners.
The statement that we are somehow destroying the VP community is complete baseless. Nothing we are doing has any negative impact on this community, and in fact only has benefits. We are going to be giving back the engine enhancements we make so that everyone here can benefit. We are going to be offering our input technology so that everyone here can benefit. Our target audience for pinball, just as with classic arcade games is not the people that log onto this forum. We market to non technical people. 95% of our customers have no idea what an emualtor is. Our customers simply want to play classic stuff, and they do not have the ability or desire to figure out how to log onto websites and do that. They want to buy a machine that they plug in and it presents them with thier favorite games.
__________________
David R. Foley
UltraCade Technologies
More Replies
In response to recent postings:
We have two products in development. Pinball Legends is a machine that will include all classic pre-existing tables that we have licensed the rights to reproduce digitally. UltraPin is our other product which will be the same hardware / cabinet platform as Pinball Legends, but will include only new and original tables. We are looking for table authors to create tables around some of our original and licensed properties.
We have access to all of the original ROM code and assets including sound. We have two methods to implement, one, which is what we are hoping to do is to license VPMame code and use it, second is to create our implementation of the ROMs in the system. MAME has been bundled in other commercial products recently so there is a chance.
With regards to table authors, we are looking to use the Visual Pinball scripts. That is work that has already been done, and with that we can save time and have tables that have been flushed out. Our goal is to release for Christmas this year, and the fastest path to that is to use others tested work.
With tables that have multiple authors, we will contact all of them, and they either split equally or we don’t use that implementation. We are not looking to cause trouble, or to deal with trouble. If licensing saves us time, great, if not, we’ll implement ourselves.
We have licensed the source code to VP to use and modify as we need. We are making several changes to the editor and to the run time to fit our needs. We will return all those enhancements to Randy and allow him to release those back out to the community at no charge.
Since we have the rights to digital reproduction, we can certainly allow implementations to exist outside of our product. I can not comment on the original owners of the IP, but I can only assume that they have not seen the VP community as any kind of a threat and have therefore not pursued anybody. Our licensing of the IP would only mean that they have even less interest in the community as they are now looking to us for the revenue stream, and the IP protection.
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David R. Foley
UltraCade Technologies
One other piece of information
People here should know that we have been working on this project for almost 3 years now. We are only just now getting ready to wrap things up and bring a product to market as it took most of that time negotiating the rights to the classic tables.
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David R. Foley
UltraCade Technologies
More Replies
To clarify, we are building a real pinball table, in a traditional pinball cabinet. Remove the wood playfield and mount a 16:9 display in its place. On our low end unit, that is it. The backglass will be static art, and the scoring information will be displayed in place of the rules / price cards. On our deluxe high end unit, there will be another display in the top box that will display the corresponding backglass for each table.
Classics to us, in the sense of this project is everything from 1998 and older, as far back as is practical. We plan on a mixture of SS and EM type tables.
Locks don’t prevent us from editing the tables as we have the source code to the engine to make our modifications. Regardless, we won’t be using other people’s tables unless we have permission. We have already got agreements from some table authors who we have discussed this with and are excited about the opportunities. We look forward to working with the members of the community that have put a lot of effort into these tables, and can now share in the success of the amazing platform that Randy has created.
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David R. Foley
UltraCade Technologies
So long?
In response to Computerfrk1
>> Why wait so long to say anything
We only concluded our license with Randy in the past three weeks and it took us that long to get our hands around his source code and system before we started working on the scripts etc.
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David R. Foley
UltraCade Technologies
Crude Prototypes
Just to give everyone an idea of what we are doing, here are a few very crude prootype pictures:
http://www.hyperware.com/pub/pl/pl001.jpg
http://www.hyperware.com/pub/pl/pl002.jpg
http://www.hyperware.com/pub/pl/pl003.jpg
http://www.hyperware.com/pub/pl/pl004.jpg
http://www.hyperware.com/pub/pl/pl005.jpg
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David R. Foley
UltraCade Technologies
Woodrails
Absolutely, we have no intention of changing the state of what has gone on in the community. I'm even writing into the contract that we are simply licensing the body of work to use in our implementation and that we have no claim to it with respect to any other use. We have no concerns about people continuing to get and play as they do now, we simply are looking to save time and effort in recreating the tables. Some great table authors have agreed to work with us and we are very excited about that. We have secured some of the best tables ever seen on VP, and look forward to putting out an amazing product.
On that note, if anyone here has suggestions for our product, we are open to input from anyone. We think we have a great plan in place, but are always open to great suggestions from the community.
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David R. Foley
UltraCade Technologies
Mr. Hide
We don’t' use pictures for our tables; we are recreating the textures in Illustrator to get a high quality recreation that has the proper look. This will give us the textures when rendered in our POV that will make the game have a consistent look and feel, and will be of the quality that we need for a commercial release. We wish to achieve the great quality as seen in the Scapino recreations.
As to the rude comments, perhaps those are best kept to PM or direct email to me at david.foley@ultracade.com, no need to muck up the forum with them.
So far this has been a positive exchange of information with the community, I don't think we need to get into volley's of name calling and insults, it doesn’t' benefit anyone in the forum.
__________________
David R. Foley
UltraCade Technologies
Folks it's no secret that there is and has been a serious effort to take NTEK down.
It's not going to die down between now and the new year either. I fact they are going to ratchet up their efforts. There are several short groups that plan on hitting us hard over the next few weeks and may even induce a few longs to sell.
12/07/13 10:27 PM
NanoTech will sell more units in North America than any other region
Stay tuned for information on over 300 places you'll be able to get them from very soon
12/19/13 3:25 PM
