I'm one of the guys working on this. We're going to talk more about it in the "Making Pinball, Making Friends" session at 5:00 (45 minutes from now) if you're here.

Long story short, Mike Pacak gave us a blank playfield and a few milk crates of parts at expo last year after we were talking to him about the Mission Pinball Framework and FAST Pinball hardware. Gabe Knuth spent the past year building the playfield up (needed to wire from scratch, and figure out a bunch of undocumented mechs that were never finished, and fab a bunch of missing parts). We also got in touch with Jon Norris who wrote a 19-page document for the rules based on what he remembered and what he thinks he would have done back then.

We started putting together an MPF configuration for it a few weeks ago. Gabe brought the playfield to Expo, and meanwhile Mike had found a cabinet (and his son I think made the cab art). So yesterday and today we've been wiring the playfield to the cab (switches, etc.) and installing the power supply, speakers, amp, backbox lights, fuses, etc. We hope to have the cabinet wired up tonight, and we've got an MPF game config (that's not done, but playable) which we can toss on there and play. There are a bunch of modes framed out, with an playfield LCD stage display and an RGB DMD in the backbox.

This was just a project that we did for fun. (Don't worry, we're not producing them!) Mike still owns everything, and we're going to hand it off to him at the end of the show. And then hopefully never listen to a BnD song again.

Here are a few pics. One is Gabe cutting a larger hole in the cab for the subwoofer.

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Here's a screenshot of one of the MPF tools we have to work on the game virtually. The top red frame is the stage display which is on the playfield, and the lower is the DMD. The right shows LED and switches and stuff and lets us interact with it as we're writing the configs and testing.

In additional to Gabe and me, the other two core developers of MPF (Jan Kantert and Quinn Capen) are here at the show too. (We did an MPF hackathon starting on Monday.) In addition to their core contributions to MPF, they've been crimping, soldering, and assembling stuff to get this thing rolling.

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B&D update: We (mostly Gabe & Quinn) got the playfield married with the cabinet and got it up and running yesterday while Jan & I worked on the MPF config. We're able to play games and everything, but it's far from complete. Most of the modes are framed out, but they almost all need dots and sounds, and there are no light shows and no callouts.

There are also a few hardware tweaks to do.. a bunch of little adjustments, maybe a better amp and isolated power to it, and we have to integrate Scott Denasi's startup/shutdown controller.

Gabe is taking the machine back to his place and we'll work on it a bit more over the next few months and then bring it to the Ohio show in March to show it off and hand it back to Mike. We'll take lots of photos and video and write the whole story when we're done. The immediate goal is to not listen to any Brooks & Dunn music for a few weeks.

Gabe put a small LCD on the pf with a 3D printed stage for which shows the music videos during the five main modes that lead to the Metal Rodeo (whatever that is), and My Maria is definitely one of those songs.

The main toy is a jukebox, and in one mode, it plays bad country music (and the videos) and you have to keep hitting the jukebox to change the song until finally your "reward" is to listen to a BnD song. :/

If anyone happens to be at the Ohio show this weekend, GabeKnuth is there along with the Brooks & Dunn machine. Current MPF configs for it are here: https://github.com/gabeknuth/bnd