Gottlieb's 1980 Buck Rogers is based on the 1979 film and TV series "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.", featuring a space adventure theme highlighted by vibrant sci-fi artwork on the backglass and playfield.
Thanks to cwgoss28 for providing a playfield scan and Borgdog for plastic scans. Then of course thanks to @redbone who took those scans of the playfield and plastics and did a lot of work to get them to look so good! Also thanks to Apophis for proving video and pictures of actual gameplay as well as testing. Hauntfreaks also provided the higher resolution VR backglass images. I also want to thank Sixtoe for teaching me how to improve the playfield_mesh to avoid ball sticking issues.
For this table, I updated to the latest VPW standards, physics, alllamps and 3D inserts, backglass for desktop, roth targets, standalone compatibility, sling corrections, optional DIP adjustments, updated flipper physics, VR and fully hybrid, Flupper style bumpers and lighting. Baked GI, walls, and created a playfield mesh for the saucer physics. The vari-target was done utilizing Roth's method, but modified to work with this table. Dozens and dozens of hours were spent studying gameplay videos (several photos and videos provided by Apophis.) to match the table shots and action.
Once again, I've included several options in the F12 menu including various balls, ball brightness, flippers, caps, plastic edge colors, LUTs, and other VR stuff, including LED undercab lighting.
For the ROM... since the latest VPinMAME, there is an error with older Gottlieb System 1 ROMs (they were using a bad "CF" spider chip dump all these years). So, if you download off of Pinball Nirvana... you'll likely get an error. The "New Fixed ROMs" can be found in the required software section below, called "new fixed ROMS for vpinmame" You'll see 17 ROMs in the pack. buckrgrs.zip is one of them, and you'll need that for this table.
Please NOTE there are several items to consider on the ROM settings: The default settings for the ROM options are hard coded into the script and are based on the recommended values from Gottlieb for 3 balls. If you want to change the ROM settings themselves, you need to change the "SetDIPSwitches to 1" in the script, and then use the F6 menu to change. However... I am not able to hard code the ROM menu options. Typically, there are levels of score achievements that award a free play. The default ROM has that set to off. I've included an nvram file you can use that sets that to match the instruction/score cards and Gottlieb's recommendation (190,000, 320,000 and 460,000). Also, there are settings in the menu to set replays, sound, and HSTD. All this has been done for you in the included nvram file. I also have instructions in the script on how to change that if you wish to do yourself.
Required Software (64-bit versions):
VPX 10.8.0 final release or later: https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/releases
VPinMame v3.6.0-1227 or later: https://github.com/vpinball/pinmame/releases
B2S Server 2.1.3 or later (if B2S used): https://github.com/vpinball/b2s-backglass/releases
ROM: https://pinballnirvana.com/forums/resources/new-fixed-roms-for-vpinmame-v3-6-0-963-beta.8379/
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