A tech brought in the USB slots on Friday.  He is working on finding a new replacement that will fit properly.  Did not want to fool around trying to do a half ass repair on the old ones, but rather replace with new.  the cable going to the USB's will also be replaced.  Hope it will work well when it's done.  As of an hour ago, he still had not located a new one that will fit the mounting bracket.  Will try to remember to let you know when I hear that it's all done.

No idea on the practicality of this, but in software design, a common goal is to do everything you can to keep outsiders from touching (and therefore unintentionally or intentionally breaking) the real parts, and this led to an idea.  My dad has a retractable coiling USB extension cord that cost like $3 at Fry's because the USB port for his dart board's updates wasn't placed well (it's one of the full size coinop ones, and yes, it does have patches from time to time for some reason or another), and I'm sure you can still get them there or online somewhere, so you could have the real USB hub inside the machine, and run the extensions to the surface (cheap and hot swappable if they break, plus the retractable cord means nothing is dangling).  This is of course dependent on the assumption that the machine isn't already built like that (that is, the USB ports are directly connected to some sort of board or chip and then a cable runs from there to the box); I've never seen the innards of the dedicab, so I don't know how exactly it was designed.  It would require a custom plate to be built to handle the extension cords, but repairs from then on would be pretty simple as long as the mounting system was done right.

Interesting idea!  I will mention this to our tech's. 

  I hate to be a bother, but if it's going to take a long time to get them replaced, and if it's not too much trouble, can we just reinstall the old ones until then? It's not like they didn't work, you just had to restart the machine to get it to read sometimes and *some* of the songs on your card sometimes wouldn't read. I think maybe reports that the USB slots were broken are overexaggerated. Just like to keep track of my scores on my USB and it's nice to be able to keep my combo and modifiers between sets, and not have to put in GRAK manually every set, and be able to take screenshots, etc. All those I was able to do before anyway... Thanks! Appreciate it! 

Okay, please let us know how the new port is going to work.  The game has a USB again, brand new as of today.  I guess we will now find out if the problems were in the actual port or something related to the operating system.

Awesome! Thanks, Bill.

Apparently the only USB slot at Acme is upside down and in the wrong spot. The 1P USB slot is connected to the 2P side so you have to play on that side to use your USB

Played on it tonight. All the songs I couldn't access before were working fine The length thing still is limited, so you can't do the longer songs for multiple rounds still, and you still have to restart the machine to get it to read your card sometimes, but other than that, works great! Thanks Bill!

AHAA!  It must need two USB's.  Will let the tech know.  He was not sure if it really needed two, but sounds like it does.  '
As for long songs, Kevin says he will be tweaking some more soon.

Okay, I think we are done?  Please let us know.  The machine has two new ports now.  Hopefully things will work better now.

If things are loading in general, that's a sign the USB ports are fine now. The remaining issues actually have to do with the way ITG reads USB drives in general. It's not the new software either; the original game has the same issues on older dedicabs. Still, I'm sure pretty much everything that had been happening lately was due to the ports themselves.

As for the long songs, I'll either be doing the changes tomorrow or this weekend. I'm free again!!! Woohoo!

Also, RAM is going in whenever I do the changes.