After a slight break our adventure continued. After sourcing a new MXM GPU from our friends in china and a second hand free-to-pickup CPU from the local marketplace we went ahead and try throwing stuff against it again.

The new GPU did not boot.
This card is almost certainly working.

Guess next up is the CPU...

CPU

We went ahead and replaced the CPU this time, slotting back in the original GPU. Somehow, completely against our expectations, this worked!
The table went from a AMD Athlon II of 45W TDP to a whopping 95W TDP AMD Phenom II without any major trouble in sight.

We went ahead and did a successful run of Prime95 on it, making it reach only a slight 80C. Guess the CPU is a winner!

Some of you might have noticed the image on top being Linux, because that's the next step we took into getting more bang out of this machine.

Linux

After being fustrated with Windows 7 and the clear lack of any real way to control the machine while it's in 'headless' state, we decided to install EndeavourOS on a extra ssd. Some hero built a touch screen driver already for this table and it's integrated into the kernel now, so it should be a breeze.

What a breeze that was! No issues directly from boot, gestures work, touch works better then in Windows!

But then we were wondering, what would the new GPU do in the table under linux? Well, only one way to find out!

Nothing.
The same old.
Black screen.
Suffering.

Since Linux nowadays comes with ssh default off (what were we being frustrated we didn't enable it before swapping GPU), I decided to flying blindly enable sshd and reboot in another tty.

The screen went on.
The bootlog was showing.
Success!
Excitement!

We now have a table with a three times as performant CPU and a way newer GPU! We can now finally play Pinball without trouble (aside from the table not supporting SSSE3, but that was just a bit of hacking at the code):

We also sourced some legs from the local thrift store, some second hand IKEA MITTBACK's, that can be set to a tilted pose for a more Pinball-y experience.

Next up is getting the scanner functionality back working, since that has been broken for a good while on linux it seems...

Extra

When installing Steam, I got asked for a hardware survey:

Steam thinks it has no Touch Input. Steam is very much wrong on that.