My understanding is that Spike emulation is two factors: That it’s a whole operating system that needs more power to emulate (it may require an actual virtual machine like you’d run a Windows testing sandbox in), and that Spike2 is close enough to it that they’re choosing to treat them as one and the same in terms of the rule that “must be at least three years since the last table that used it” before attempting to emulate it to avoid catching the wrong sort of attention from Stern. (There’s actually been some unpleasant rumblings over at VPF about The Munsters being recreated anyway, albeit in an original table style instead of actual emulation, some people are taking it as a violation of the spirit of the three year rule.)
Ghostbusters LE was a special case, someone figured out a way to use part of Farsight’s Stern Pinball Arcade to get that working as an emulated table, and the resulting takedown came from Farsight because it used their code specifically and violated the EULA. And that emulation proxy trick had some quirks, among others that you couldn’t really set ROM options that would persist, because Farsight had it set up that way for the sake of their software.
I fully expect anything from Jersey Jack, American, Dutch, Spooky, and Heighway to all be similar in that it may require much more power to emulate. Plus, honestly, they’re all still unknowns in terms of how much unofficial emulation and recreation they’ll tolerate. All the older names, we already have a pretty good clue (mostly hands off, Gottlieb the exception in that they’d rather we delete all their content and never play any of their tables again).
Creator of the first PinupPlayer PostDMD mods for VPX - PostDMD for Masters of the Universe VPX and Jaws VPX.
Head Proprietor of Pisces Pinball, a VPX table developer.
Lead Technician of MC Chase Amusements, a private arcade in our home basement.
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