Chances are, you've played a pinball machine at some point in your life. They used to line the walls of an arcade when I was a kid. Nowadays, you're lucky if you can find one.

Pinball machines manufactured from 1975 onward contain electronics in it just like a computer or even a video game in an arcade. It doesn't need much horsepower as all it's mostly managing physical hardware. It plays sounds when you hit a rollover or a drop target, it keeps track of what you need to hit when, and so on.

The main "brains" of the pinball machine is called an MPU board. It's like a motherboard in a computer. While there are hundreds of different pinball machines out there, they were all made by a handful of manufacturers. And while each machine only had a run of a few thousand each, many share similar parts. This allowed the manufacturers to take advantage of economies of scale and simplified troubleshooting and repair.

The folks at Alltek Systems designed an MPU board specifically to replace MPU boards from Bally and Stern machines manufactured between 1975 and 1984. They call it The Ultimate MPU. It's a feat of engineering as they took the designs from Bally and Stern-pinball machines of that area come with schematics-and modernized it. It's about half the size, but fits properly inside the backbox. It supports many different games without needing the original ROMs as they are included.

They've also enhanced the original design by adding additional diagnostics-something older pinball machines need from time to time-and adding "free play" to Bally machines, thus eliminating the need for inserting a quarter for a machine in my own house!

I recently purchased this for my ailing Eight Ball Deluxe Limited Edition machine, and it works exactly as advertised. It is wonderful that there is a company that loves old pinballs so much that they make better-than-original replacement parts.