MPF on Spike 2

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Jeff Ballard

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Mar 2, 2026, 10:55:42 PM (10 days ago) Mar 2
to MPF Users
Hello! I'm getting started with MPF and wanted to start my homebrew experimentation by making a custom game for an existing Spike 2 machine. I followed the instructions here to install the bridge on an SD card, but I believe I was unsuccessful. When I start the machine with the new SD card it, it shows the Stern boot screen with the "..." progress, but then those dots continue until they fill the rest of the screen. Nothing else happens after that and my  USB to USB Null Modem Cable never appears to show a connection.

One difference with the instructions, S95game now appears in /etc/rc5.d on the Foo Fighters v1.03 image which is where I made the change, but I'm not sure if that is a sign of other changes needed. Any ideas of other changes that might be needed or any tips to get more info I can use to debug this issue?

Thanks!

Danny Gibbons

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Mar 3, 2026, 4:52:03 PM (10 days ago) Mar 3
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I have no idea what your talking about sorry

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Shawn Bazzle

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Mar 3, 2026, 9:16:59 PM (9 days ago) Mar 3
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I have tried quite hard to get the MPF bridge working and have been unable myself. I was able to get closer and get some amount of the boot process to show across to the PuTTy connection but was never able to communicate with it. I felt that maybe Stern had changed something since it was written, I don't think anyone is maintaining it now and I was never able to get any answers from the community. Id love to collaborate with anyone else that has some level of hardware hacking experience and would gladly buy a spare Spike 2 board for testing if I had to.

Suffice to say in all my research I think they actually rebuilt the OS for Spike 2 without the drivers necessary for the null modem to work cause ultimately the only way I was able to see the boot process was through soldering a header to a UART area of the board that was header-less by default.


Jeff Ballard

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Mar 7, 2026, 11:06:36 PM (5 days ago) Mar 7
to MPF Users
Looks like it was written by Jabdoa (who owns this group), so I guess it is "official" to MPF? I have never written Rust before, but I took a quick look through the code and it definitely looks like a big translation layer that runs in the Spike environment. Stern changing their OS completely borking this makes perfect sense, though I curious how this translation was figured out in the first place and if can be repeated to update the bridge. That said, it might be a losing battle if this is a constant fight with each firmware update per machine.
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