Stern Insider Connected/Scorbit

[Chris Bardon]

I know Nick has tried out Insider Connected with Godzilla, and the current word is that retrofit kits will be available later this year and run $200. It's a neat idea, but not necessarily a cheap addon. I'd also heard about Scorbit a while back, who makes an addon board that looks like it'll work with most Solid State games. It looks like you need a subscription for those though. JJP games on the other hand, have been adding scorbit features for the grand total of free, which made it worth a shot

I suppose there was a cost to start with of a wifi dongle for the game, but those were $14 each (I used these ones), so I picked one up for Hobbit and Dialed In. Once I got the latest code updates on the games (full install), I was able to get the games online eventually. If anyone else is trying this, a couple of things I noticed:
-It took a few scans to find my guest network (which is where I've put most of the IoT devices)
-It looks like connections were failing on Hobbit until I rebooted the game with the wifi dongle connected. I could scan networks after a hot plug, but it refused to connect
-Despite saying that they were dual band, nothing could find my 5g network. Could just be signal strength though, but my laptop could see it down there. Even an extension cable moving the dongle outside of the game didn't make a difference.
-I haven't tried adding a hub to keep the BT dongle on DI, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. JJP recommends running another USB extender though. Might be an issue with power on an unpowered hub, but for only 2 devices it should be reasonable.

Once you have the game online, the scorbit pairing is really simple with the in-game wizard. Now, when you start a game, it'll give you a QR code to scan in the app. It did seem that connectivity was a little flaky-you're supposed to be able to get live updates on scores/achievements, but the first few times it just spun on "establishing session" for a while. It seems that once a spot is claimed by a player it works though, but there doesn't seem to be anything quite as obvious in-game as there was in the Stern version. I liked that it showed the popup with the player initials/name as people scanned in so you could confirm that you got logged into the game. There's also no way to save/auto login a profile for your own games (i.e. "if nobody claims this slot credit it to me"), but I think IC has the same limitation.

Seems like an interesting start to the platform at least, and I could see it being really cool for tournaments. It's a big investment if you're buying the boards for older games though, and I don't know that it's quite as seamless when it's not built right into the game code. Anyone played in a tourney that used Scorbit before? I don't think they were this far along pre-pandemic, but maybe now that things are starting to come back we'll see more of it?

 

[Chris Bardon]

I managed to get Godzilla online last night, and I found a few things that might be helpful:
-If you get a used game, make sure the old owner unregisters it from their profile. Once that's done you can claim it. Glad this was built into the system (it very easily could have been "original owner only").
-The wifi reception in the metal backbox is garbage (go figure). I was able to test with an extender though, and it worked as expected. I'm going to try something more permanent with running one through the cabinet JJP style to have it closer to the front of the game. If that doesn't work, I might just keep it external on the top of the game using the topper hole.
-Code downloads are really slow (could be related to the above though). I might finally need to replace my old router. Does the canakit adapter that Stern uses support AC?
-You can actually claim a spot anytime during a game. I scanned in on ball 2 for example at the tournament we did at P1 a couple weeks ago.

 

[mwong168]

I pulled my Stern IC kit out of my Godzilla and since updating to 0.85 code I get this error on startup. No big deal as once game is booted up it goes away and plays like normal.

 

[Chris Bardon]

So it looks like Scorbit will stop working in JJP games pretty soon. Got an email from Scorbit saying that JJP didn't want to support it anymore-I gather there were API changes that had to be made in the game code, and JJP didn't think it was worth doing the update work. I get it-anything that adds extra work to a dev team does take work internally, and it's probably not something they're seeing a lot of direct value from, but it still sucks. I didn't end up using scorbit as much as Stern Insider, mostly because IC with Home Team is so much easier to log in with. Guess there's no point in keeping those wifi dongles in my JJP games now-wonder if they'll try to do their own thing?