[en] Last October and November, we had prototype runs at LAMPF to test our designs and to confirm the background and trigger rates predicted by our Monte Carlo studies. Since these two runs, our hardware efforts have been directed toward beginning mass production of the detector elements. In parallel, we have been continuing our pattern recognition efforts, pointing toward the goal of having subroutines ready for the intelligent, second-stage trigger by this coming fall. During October, our group carried out an experiment on a prototype detector in the LAMPF Test Channel which allowed us to study the performance of our scintillators, light guides, phototubes, and electronics in a well-controlled environment. This was followed in November by the first major prototype run inside the MEGA solenoid at the LAMPF Stopped Muon Channel (SMC). For this run, we fabricated a plane of 12 scintillators, each 1 x 5 x 180 cm³, together with Al and lucite sheets whose thicknesses were chosen to reproduce the mass and radiation lengths that will be present in the real photon detector