I strongly agree with the LED OCD and GI OCD crowd. I wasn’t entirely sure and didn’t really even know what the GI OCD did, but I took the plunge and ordered them both anyway. Absolutely worth every penny, it’s not sexy like other mods but if I had to choose between a game with LED & GI OCD boards and...anything else, I’d take the one with the OCD boards.
Since I had no idea what they did before buying and couldn’t find any clear answers, I figure I’ll share my experience here.
In addition to evening out the flashing of inserts, smoother dimming of bulbs so they don’t get that weird quasi-flicker when the game dims them, and getting rid of ghosting entirely:
- GI OCD lets you set the Minimum and maximum brightness of each of the 5 lighting “strings”, which also lets you set the overall brightness. It also lets you trigger different brightness values for each string based on whether the game is active (ie if a solo kid has fired in the last X seconds). This lets you do cool things like dim the backbox lights and raise GI illumination when playing the game, and inverse that when a game isn’t going on. There are no presets per game, but there are basically only 5 lights to set (5 strings).
- LED OCD lets you set each individual light on the playfield. There are presets that populate the labels of each light so you can easily see what it is, but no preset brightness settings (they’re all the same default brightness as a normal LED).
It doesn’t let you control flasher brightness, at least not on TAF.
Another note on brightness: you may think the brightness is fine or not too bright, but dimming all the lights made such a HUGE difference. I didn’t realize how fatigued my eyes were from the brighter lights. Also, colours are way more vibrant at dimmer settings. Green and yellow in particular look much more “green” and “yellow” with lower brightness. I did not expect this, but if I did it would have been a huge selling point for me. Plus when comparing side by side with a newer machine (Alice Cooper Nightmare Castle), the LEDs on that machine are not nearly as bright as an LED converted pre-OCD Addams Family. So this normalized the brightness, which is also a plus.
You can also test different settings before you apply them, load all the settings onto your game to see it in action without having to commit (save), and save different overall configurations as files and load them whenever you wish.
Configuring it does require a laptop, which you only need when changing settings. You don’t have to have a computer continually hooked up to your machine.
There is web software that can be used for Linux or Mac, or native applications for Windows. I am a software developer with a Mac and I honestly got a bit frustrated trying to set up the Linux/web version, even with the provided VMware image (there’s no free VMware client for Mac), so I loaded up a free Windows developer image (available from Microsoft) into VirtualBox (also free) and used the Windows apps. They worked great and was easy to use.
Hope that helps somebody!