MBr Mid-Production CPU Change

First I'd like to say how awesome the pinball community is! 

We have had a headphone kit for AFMr for some time.  We had many customers ask when we would have a headphone kit for MBr. Now being a small company we can't have every machine in stock that we need to make a kit for, as much as Mark would think that was fantastic!  Frequently our amazing customers offer to help us out and will beta test for us.  This was the case with MBr; Mark designed a headphone kit for it and we were happily selling it. 

Last week we ran into a problem where a couple of customers ordered a headphone kit for their MBr and they couldn't find where to plug in our board that goes in the back box board. Hmmm.  The customers had emailed wondering if they were missing something or if we had sent the wrong part and were looking for guidance.  After a bit of emailing back and forth, we discovered it wasn't them; rather, their machine was missing something. Well, it was missing if they wanted to install the kit we designed.

Now we needed to figure out what was going on.  With the help of the customers we started investigating.  We needed a few things...

• Pictures of the CPU
• Rev # on the board 
• Model of their MBr  
• Serial #

This is where the first sentence in my post comes into context.  No problem, they were happy to help!  A bit of emailing back and forth and we discovered that CGC modified their design of the CPU at some point during production. 

Pinnovators reached out to Chicago Gaming to see if they could tell us when the change took place during production.  They were quick in responding.  Unfortunately, they didn't have that data easily available and we didn't want to get in the way. 

Mark got right to work on a solution!  He built a prototype.  Now we just needed to beta test. 

Mark tested it on MMr and everything looked promising but we really needed to test it on a new MBr. Thankfully one of the customers mentioned above was happy to beta test for us.  We shipped it out the other day and learned that we still have a few more bugs to work out in our prototype.

Here is what we have learned thus far...

• At this point, we believe all MBrs had a change during production.
• If you own an MBr and would like to help us with our data collection please email us the Rev # on your CPU and your serial # and we will add it to our spreadsheet.
• If you have an MBr and your board says Rev 0 our PinPAC 7 CG2 headphone kit should work.  If you want to be sure before you buy, email us with the Rev # on and Serial # on your CPU and we will let you know.
• If you have an MBr that says Rev 3.1 email us and we will let you know when our new headphone kit is ready to ship.

We'll update this blog post once we have more data.

Thanks for reading! Now go play a game of pinball!  I think I might too!  It' going to be Aerosmith, which I will have Alexa turn on for me.  That will be a whole other blog post. 😀

~Sandra