That's for all the positive replies, friendly bunch of peeps over here.
The reason why TZ was chosen as one of the initial FreeWPC tables was due to the amount of toys and features it has (clock, miniplayfield, 4 flippers etc). This means we can cover a lot of hardware in one box and all of the drivers can be ported very easily to different tables when we get to them.
Another reason TZ was chosen was because it's a very popular table and once FreeWPC TZ is released I'd like as many people to try it as possible, hence why we haven't made extra hardware a requirement. My personal opinion is that most people aren't going to drop $600+ to play some different rules, for that amount of money you could buy a whole new table! As I said before, changing to FreeWPC is as easy as upgrading a ROM, all you need is a $5 eprom and 2 minutes to fit it.
The other reason why WCS, Corvette and TZ were chosen was because those are the tables we own, simple.
We actually have a BOP build that's playable to a certain extent, but after seeing the Dutch guys video I sort of lost interest in it. BoP is such a good target for FreeWPC though. The normal ruleset is pants, having a billion target randomly awarded when the next nearest score is 50M is a ridiculous score unbalancer. Couple that with the fact that the only rule that gets you points is "Shoot the shuttle ramp" it quickly descends into a one shot game. The ruleset I have in mind is more 'build the robot by doing different things'.
Another good reason to pick BoP is that it is wired and fitted with a 3 ball trough from the factory. It's physically capable of locking 2 balls on the playfield, but they decided on a two ball multiball. Doh! As I've said before, with no hardware mods other than another pinball and an eprom with FreeWPC on it, you could be playing a 3 ball multiball.
Yet another reason why BoP would be a good table to FreeWPC is that it doesn't have a DMD. It takes a lot of time and effort to draw and sequence DMD animations nicely (hence why Stern have such trouble with it), with an alphanumeric it's a case of just writing some text to a screen, no need to worry about what font, size, position on screen etc etc.
Whoops! I Didn't notice that the link was wrong. To be honest I just copied and pasted a post that I had written on another forum and obviously it didn't copy properly. I'll edit the first post now.
