It's a MSI Global Motherboard.

MS 7788 Ver 1.0 (H61M-P31/W8)

Thank you very much for this!

So did this info come direct from Keith Johnson?

A better question is:

Should I do a MB swap to get faster graphics on my WOZ?

And has anybody done this?

Yeah.. I was thinking about this too..

And what to stop a guy from installing a faster processor too? As long as it's within the same family it should work.

Someone asked about this on the JJP message board and I think Keith said it wouldn't make a huge difference in what's going on on-screen.

I have read there is a JJP google groups but I haven't been able to find it. Searched groups.google.com and came up empty.. Do you have a link to this discussion group?

You need to be invited to it by Jen @ JJP. Just email her and ask her for an invite.

What came directly from Keith is that the Hobbit motherboard will work in WOZ ... and DI

and don't forget ... "as long as it has intel onboard graphics of at least the generation the game shipped with, it should work well enough."

And this really is the rub.

How long will 5th and 6th gen intel products be available.
I already have a replacement MB, CPU and ram for both games. As well a a couple SSD drives.
I just happened to have them in old stock...

Intel is on the 7th gen right now, its near impossible to build a 4th gen PC for windows XP brand new right now.
SSD drives are on their way out, the new model is to support M.2 on all platforms.

Mini ITX is dominant now also. Although ATX still dominates more powerful systems for now.

Look at the MMR and spike systems, I imagine I could run a pinball machine off my cell phone CPU and mainboard soon.

So...M.2 to USB adapters should be ok?

Imagine a Hobbit or WOZ booting from a 2500 mb/s pro m.2 drive....

This is the issue with all games based on PC technology. It moves forward so fast that eventually you can't get parts for your game anymore..

Same thing happened to P2K.

Since you have spares, perhaps you can fill in all the specs JJP is using so I don't have to take my game apart to find out on my own.

Also, on the SSD drives, it would seem that any SSD of the required capacity would work unless JJP is utilizing some special feature of Intel's SSD firmware or something. Correct?

But, like Pin2K, the PC hardware becomes so fast that it can just emulate everything better than the original anyway. If there's a market, it all works itself out. Stockpiling PC boards is a bad idea because the caps still age, just not as rapidly as if they're in use.

True on both counts.. *If* someone takes on the project of emulating whatever it is we need to emulate..

Yes caps age.. But aren't we past the whole leaking cap thing on motherboards?

I was collecting back in the bad old days after WMS closed and there were no parts to be had or very few NOS items for BIG dollars.

I'd rather buy the critical parts my game needs to run now and stash them in a closet.

Nope. Leaking caps are still an issue. Whenever price matters more than longevity, caps will still leak. I just recapped a computer monitor that was only 3 years old. Samsung TVs have had leaky cap problems recently, too. It's ongoing. Nowhere near as bad as at the peak around 2000, but still way worse than it should be. And even if they don't leak, they can dry out, and they don't work then, either.

Oh.. I thought most of that leaking cap baloney has been solved by now. Guess not.

But wait!! MSI uses "Military Class 4" components!! Those won't leak!

I'll take my chances and hoard a motherboard anyways. Caps can be replaced.

So I am wondering what processor The Hobbit has in it's H81M board. Anyone know?

Its an LGA 1150 mainboard, the next generation up from the lga 1155 platform (WOZ).
Both games have an i3 processor in them, both have integrated intel GPU's supporting 1080p.
Something comparable to an i3 4370 would be good as it has the on board Intel graphics GPU that supports 1080p at a really good speed for its class.

Both of these platforms support high speed DDR3 1333 ram, way more than you need for a pinball machine.

Both of the mainboards JJP uses are all solid core cap design, they should have a very long service life.

My concern is the audio amplifier on board, they can fail after awhile. They can be repaired (i have done it a few times) but its not simple for the home repair guy, and its one of the main reasons I have had to replace these mainboards (dead audio).

I was wondering if a PCI-e Realtek add-on board is supported by the OS driver kit.
That would be awesome as you could just snap in a replacement sound card and be done.

Interesting.. So you have actually replaced a JJP motherboard and found an i3 installed?

If so that conflicts with info I was told on the JJP google group that JJP uses celeron processors.

I suppose if the drivers for whatever sound card you wanted to use were already included in the kernel it should work. In theory.

Celeron or i3 should be perfect, In fact the celeron is also way more CPU power than a pinball machine needs and both use the same driver model.

Yes the sound is Realtek in the MSI mainboards.
Maybe just disable the onboard audio in the CMOS if using a card.

I have been messing around with Dell R710s and other such beasts lately so I have been out of touch for several years on the desktop stuff.

I agree that for basic pinball machine functions that either processor is overkill. It would seem that most of the cpu horsepower JJP uses in their games is the onboard graphics processor on the core cpu's. I was under the impression that onboard graphics on the celeron processors was not as good as i3. But then perhaps the demand on the cpu is low enough that a celeron would be just fine.

Resurrecting this old post to share further information on this subject.

I can say from first hand experience that the H81M-E33 mainboard does NOT work in WoZ. The system gets to "system init" and just keeps rebooting over and over.

The only difference between this board and the H81M-P33 is that the E33 has HDMI and 4k support whereas the P33 only has DVI.

Both board are based on the same H81 chipset and both boards have the exact same features except HDMI vs DVI. So there must be something different about how the chipset handles video or something the JJP software does not like.