After receiving a cease and desist order from the rightsholder of Bally / Williams games, Planetary Pinball, the individual who has been working on new code for Whirlwind for seven years has made several changes to the project. The main change is a brand new name for the game "Storm Blasters The Pinball Adventure" and the elimination of any references to WPC aka Williams Pinball Company in the attract mode.
Planetary Pinball should be honored that people still care enough about its intellectual property to dedicate years of their lives to improving it. The new updated "The Forgotten Tales" code for Williams Tales of the Arabian Nights started out as a homebrew project that Planetary Pinball was easily able to monetize by farming it out to Mirco (mistakenly doing so when they could have worked with Chicago Gaming Company or Pedretti IMHO). So why not let a few individuals create and beta test new Whirlwind code as a hobby without selling it in the hopes that it too could be jointly commercialized one day?
Below is an update on the new code and the changes that have been made to it that the coder "applejuice" shared on Pinside:
"IMPORTANT INFORMATION. Please read if you are interested in this 7 year project:
Some people have got in touch to tell me there may be confusion over whether this project is an officially licenced product from the Williams rights holders. I want to make clear that this project is NOT YET officially licenced. It is an original product.
In the aid of transparency and to avoid any confusion please see the following points regarding the project:
1) My hardware board is 100% original using my own electronic designs & firmware.
2) The game code is 100% original and uses 0% of the original Williams 6809 code base ('rom code')
3) There is no way with my hardware to run the original Williams Whirlwind game or any other original 'rom code'
4) The game is a DMD game not an alphanumeric game and uses newly created graphic frames, all redrawn and coloured by myself. No raw WMS DMD assets are in use
5) The speaker panel plastic artwork created to use with our dmd panels contains no williams logos and only standard wording. All art is original.As the system runs on owners own Whirlwind games there was (previously) a re-creation of the whirlwind & williams logo present in dmd form for 1 slide each on the attract mode, which have since been REMOVED, in compliance with information received and as a show of good faith. I have created a new original logo and game name for this product instead , 'Storm Blasters' which i will share below. (UKCS Registration Number: 284745765)"
