I went with a mix of frosted cointakers and incandecents in my back box. A couple green behind the fish & title, blue around the water & clouds, along with some white and soft white strategically placed. Went a little overboard with the green/blue and moved those extra LEDs up to the fish topper. I might get more LEDs at some point... most likely white (not soft white) frosted.

Not sure what to do about the flashers though. I got a couple green Ablaze 9 LED flashers but they don't diffuse enough for the backbox. Not sure if the Cointakers would look better.

Thinking about putting a color changing LED behind the topper lure... but not sure how that would look.

I put a bunch of vibration dampening tape on the different parts of the solenoid assembly and fish to dampen the sound. Best mod so far... I get most of the machine shaking effects with 1/3 the noise.

I'd guess you could substitute weatherstripping from the hardware store.

I'm too lazy to crack the topper open again... but really just anywhere the solenoid assembly strikes another part.

There is a metal plate on the back side of the fish that the striker hits. I covered that & the surrounding area up with a few layers of different foam tape. The solenoid assembly has that rubber grommet/stopper behind it. I covered that up with foam tape.

It just took a little playing around.

In addition... I put some vibration dampening tape on the back of the fish's tale 'cuz I noticed that was slapping the background every once in a while. Basically anything that made contact with something else up there I worked on.

That rubber ring on the armature is a good idea too... I might have to do that next time I open the topper up.

This link has info on how to fix the "xtra balle" font bug... if you're creating a no-ghost ROM while you're at it.

http://pinhacks.com/showthread.php?tid=12&pid=15#pid15

To fix the bug: 0x25 at 0x6C6AA needs to be changed to 0x14

I can verify it fixes the problem.

You'd need to edit the ROM with a hex editor and then apply the no-ghost patch.