I was forced to buy a new whitestar board as my board was unrepairable, which sucks and I bought a brand new one. The game would not retain any settings. I started diagnosing the keep alive memory circuit and to my suprise there was no diode from the battery source connecting to the chipset. Never saw this before. I put in a diode and fixed the issue. It has voltage now and retains settings. Figured I would share this for anyone that has a memory issue.

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Diode installed and it works fine. Confused as it did not have one installed in circuit?

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Nope original board was destroyed by a 70 plus year old man fiddling with his machine. I even sent it out to Eldorado games, he has been able to fix boards above my level. And this is the first one he said everything is fried and I have been with him since the nineties. I posted this for anyone that might not be tech savy enough that might buy a new Stern whitestar board that has same issue. I get the ram chip option. But I move the batteries off the boards or do button battery.

Done.

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Thanks Rich. I have never lost a board to batteries on any machine that I owned. I change them every year. However, because of this missing diode I got to exchange emails with a game designer that I am a fan of. And he was nice enough to answer questions I had with game developement. I would have never bothered him otherwise so it worked out. I really posted this so if someone bought a new stern board with memory issues maybe this would help them see the problem right away. Diode is right below battery pack in picture. Some collectors are not tech savy, but the post has pictures and would be easy to understand.

I can answer that. I do not have any nvram chips in my house. I do however have diodes. And I wanted to play the game that day with saved settings. Less than a buck to fix. And less than five minutes to install diode and remote battery pack. Enabling me to play the game with saved settings and scores over ordering a chip and waiting a few days to install it then play the game. No other reason. Its really simple. Not being weird or rude, just saying it was a post to help anyone in the future with a new whitestar board that does a search might have same issue. I was only trying to post a helpfull topic for someone. Not a debate on nvram over batteries which this turned into.