Yes, it's really something that needs to be seen in person. It's great and I'm glad I've spent the time to perform and tweak the upgrade on my machine. It was well worth it!

I just put LEDs in my AC\DC over the weekend, so I went ahead and placed a pre-order for another LED OCD board on the website last night. Have you tossed around any ideas as to when you may run the next batch of Stern boards? I'm not sure what the pre-order demand has been so far.

Yes, it really is an amazing piece of work. I look at my Rolling Stones sitting next to my AC\DC--which TRS has the board, and AC\DC does not--and the difference is like night and day, TRS looks leagues better. The end result is a far more natural look, and once you've got this board in one game, there's really no going back.

YES!!!!!

(obviously it's not a guarantee it will happen soon, but I'm glad it's at least a few steps closer now, haha)

You will like it even more with this board in it.

It's okay, I balanced it out for you.

Received mine yesterday! Looking forward to installing it tomorrow.

You can use it as is, but I highly recommend configuring it properly. Especially for certain games where there are certain lit shots that strobe really fast. With how the LED OCD makes everything pulse by default, it will be hard to see which shots are blinking quickly.

You can run it as-is. Just keep in mind while you're playing, if you see a light on a shot that looks weird, and you go, "Hm, this was supposed to blink really really fast, but isn't doing it now," you need to adjust the settings for that insert. Unless you are fine with how it looks by default and you get used to it.

Anyway, don't let it deter you from buying the board. I'm probably making it sound a lot more scary than it actually is.

I'd go with T2 as well. Lots of bright, in-your-face lights on that one.

I will once a new batch of boards are made..

That's great news! I was worried the newer Stern machines with board-mounted LEDs may not be compatible. I was always under the impression they used their own form of special hardware that the OCD wouldn't be compatible with.

Huh.. I figured since they were using color changing LEDs in ST Pro, that they were using the same hardware as the LE games. I wonder why they went for the different hardware between the ST Pro and the LE, considering the look of the inserts is pretty close (if not identical?) to one-another.

Herg, any tips for mounting one of these in a Whitestar game? Have you found the included adhesive stands to be sufficient (assuming you test mounted a board in your LotR)?

Cool, I'm glad to hear the adhesive stands work fine. I had tried the adhesive stands in my BDK just for grins, but it didn't work out too well and the board came loose after a few weeks of play. However, the wood backing of the SAM games isn't nearly as smooth as the metal plate of the Whitestar games, so I guess it made sense.

I want to let it be known to folks with a RBION, you probably don't want to install the LED OCD in this specific game. I can't get things to smooth out, even after trying countless brightness settings.

I think the problem is that RBION purposely strobes the inserts as an intended effect. And I mean STROBE--like 20 times in a second, over and over. It does this for about 50% of the attract mode, and it does it for all shots when you are in multi-ball or any other important mode. So, for about 50% of the time, you have tons of intended strobing the OCD board can't fix, then for the other 50% of the time you have the nice, smooth pulsing of the lights that you would expect from the OCD board (i.e., when the game isn't purposely strobing the inserts like crazy).

So yeah. Avoid the board for this specific game. But definitely buy it for others (I can personally vouch it works great in a lot of other games).

I think it's just that the game is purposely strobing at insane rates, rates I haven't seen on too many games. It did this with incandescents as well, so it's not so much an issue that is a result of using LEDs.

I have been playing the game for the last couple of hours and I don't notice it much now. There are also a lot less modes that use the fast strobe effect on the inserts, mainly your multi-ball modes, but that's it. I can mostly take back what I said in my last post, although you will notice the strobe effect if you stare at the attract mode, haha.

If you do get a chance to play around with the settings on his machine, definitely post your findings (or solutions, hehe) here. Let it run through the attract mode and you should be able to see what I am talking about. It runs the strobe portion of the attract sequence for about a minute straight, then goes to a non-strobing sequence for another minute, then back to the strobe portion.

I would like to reiterate though to potential buyers that the hyper strobe effect happens much less during actual gameplay, and when it does you don't really notice it much.

I slapped together another video of the before/after with the board. You can see the flicker pretty badly in the "before" clips, and you can easily the tell the board smoothing things out. Link:

I was not, although I don't really notice it much now. I think I was just being OCD about it. No pun intended.

The next time I LED out a machine and put another one of these boards in, I'll be sure to get some earlier footage showing standard incandescents. I would have liked to have done that with this video, but didn't think about it until I had already LED'd out the whole machine.

Thanks for taking the time to tinker with this on your friend's machine.

The issue where I am having the strobing problem is indeed on part of the attract mode. For about 1/3 of it, where the game is lighting up every bulb rapidly, that's where I get the bad flicker. Another 1/3 of the attract mode does a basic stepping pattern where it lights random bulbs on 100% solid then 100% off, so no problems there. Likewise, the last 1/3 of the attract mode does a nice wave motion back and forth across the playfield, and it lets the bulbs fade in and out smoothly. Obviously that is fine, since the OCD especially excels in those situations. Keep in mind the part I am having a problem with strobes/flickers intentionally and it does this with standard incandescent bulbs, but with the LEDs I have it's even more noticeable.

I will have to try some CoinTaker Super Brights. That's what I had put in my last three Sterns that had this board. In RBION, I used the same clear-domed, two-LED model that I used for GI. I wanted to see how the lights would work using the same bulbs above and below the playfield, just like with how a game is normally configured using incandescents. It actually looks good for the most part, but I've been meaning to start color matching anyway, so in the process I'll get some Super Bright CT bulbs for the inserts that have an obvious problem (like the tic-tac-toe board, that's the biggest offender in the attract sequence).

Awesome!! Did you end up trading something? Either way, it's a great game. Enjoy it!

Cool! RBION can be a pretty long playing game too if it's set a certain way.. On the other hand though, it can absolutely destroy you at the same time. It's unique in that regard, haha.

Wait, what?! System 11 board? Did I miss something in this thread?

Ahhh.. OK, I see now--it's just the WPC boardset. I didn't realize the same board would work with DE *and* System 11 (I thought it was just DE). Now that I have a System 11 game, I might have to try it.

Yeah, it's awesome. When I have new people over they always have to do a double take when I tell them when my playfield inserts are actually LEDs.

I can confirm it works in Stern's 24.

I'm pretty sure X-Files is on the Whitestar hardware, so it will work with a Stern board.

Has anyone gotten the OCD software to work in Windows 8.1? I haven't tried it yet but am curious to know what others' results have been.

Yeah, plug 'n play for TSPP. I have only had to adjust one game so far because of shot indication issues (The Rolling Stones). The only other games I have had to adjust manually are games where I installed extremely bright bulbs (Ripleys and Goldeneye). Pretty much everything else I installed it in looked good out of the box.