So what changed my mind? Seeing some of the cool stuff other pinball manufacturers and hobbyists are doing. Started off with Heighway pinball showing off a promo video with the LCD in the playfield:
Yes! that's totally awesome! Ok, I'm just gonna move the screen to the playfield. Hell if I want I can play without a backbox if I really wanted to. Then I thought.. Where the hell am I going to put a screen in my layout? Lose the lower playfield? (DONT COMPROMISE THE DESIGN). Maybe just a strip of the LCD, like the lower 1/4 of it.. Ok sure, even if I go with a 15" monitor, I'm going to have to tilt it at a weird angle so I don't sacrifice the rest of the space taken up by the monitor. Ok kill that idea.
Then I started seeing some of the cool LED flasher animations the hobbyists are starting to put in Stern backboxes:
Crap! that's so awesome. My favorite backglass of all time is still by far gottlieb's haunted house because of how they animated a still image just with lighting:
Ok, so I'm stuck on glass again. I'm not sure I really want to have nothing but LCD like a JJP machine. There's a reason why people complain about it, and it's not just because it looks bland when it's off. I want that backlit art, maybe even add some strobes that are attached to the same playfield lighting. Then I had another idea (maybe the first of it's kind). What if I had a mixture of LCD AND backlit glass? Keep using the lower portion for scoring, but then use the upper portion of the LCD for artwork that pops up (maybe even animate). I'd have cutouts in the art (like they used to do before DMD days where the scores would be embedded in the backglass), and I can have various sections be blacked out when the machine is off, but when it's on, those empty areas fill with LCD dots.
This isn't necessarily what it's going to look like, but you get the gist of what I mean by this photoshopped rendering:
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