I just wanted to take a minute and report back on my conversion of STTNG from all incandescent to all LEDs. I specifically avoided LED machines when I bought this game because at the time I hated them. I still do when used incorrectly on old machines. Then I got my hands on a WOZ and an STLE, and poor STTNG looked so dull compared to them. So I set out looking for a solution.

My biggest problem with LEDs was the harsh on/off flashing of them. It drove me crazy, and turning off GI dimming also took some ambiance out of the game. Newer games made for LEDs don't have that problem, of course, but older games are just too difficult to play when your pupils are constantly switching from huge to small. Then I found Herg's LED OCD, and it changed everything about LED's for me.

I bought both the LED OCD and the GI OCD. They took about an hour to install, and that was all really straightforward. The best part about them is that if you do nothing at all after installing them, the boards still work great! LEDs fade on and off just like incandescents. You can tweak the fade and each LED's brightness, if you want, but even out of the box was good. My favorite thing to do is open up the management app for the LED OCD and put it in passthrough mode. That turns off the LED OCD board and shows the playfield the way it would have been if you just put in LEDs. Turning back on the LED OCD brings back all the fading voodoo that Herg added in. Worth it's weight in gold right there.

As for the LEDs I used, once I saw the kit from Pinballbulbs.com, I couldn't resist. Originally I was going to go with the NoFlix bulbs to address my second biggest issue with LEDs (the flickering), but I still would have had the issue of no fading.

The Pinballbulbs kit is unreal, and when paired with Herg's boards, the end result is a super-colorful, brilliantly lit game. It doesn't look original, but it does make an old machine look good next to new ones. I was dead set against modding STTNG (I thought of myself as a purist), but I'm so happy I did it. Thanks to PinballBulbs for their efforts in assembling a great kit, and especially to Herg because there's no way I would have done this without the OCD boards!

I'll see what I can get picture-wise. Trying to find a way to accurately show the lighting without it looking too blue.

@Herg - I did change the String 4 and 5 to the inputs rather than having them be always on. I'll have to look at the mod port, because that might be useful tweaking the LED strips that come from PinballBulbs.

If I had to change anything at all, it would be to make the blue light strips a little whiter so that it matches STLE a bit more. I really like how ridiculously white that game is. The purple lights that come with the kit really do a great job on this game (not sure about others, but since STTNG is already purple, it works), so maybe purple light strips? @PinballBulbs - do you guys even have those? If they lit it up as cleanly as the purple supers, that would be pretty cool.

And yeah, @Aurich...I've got a Road Show en route that isn't even mine that I think I want to outfit with LED's and Herg's board.

A side note - if you use the LED OCD board, make sure you mount it high enough in the backbox to access the USB port. I didn't pay attention to it, so I had it mounted too low and had to move it.

See, I can't get past the fact that the light doesn't pop off the screen the way the DMD does, especially in bright rooms. I do respect the hell out of the solution and the way they've implemented it, though. If that screen could be brighter or the black darker, I think that would go a long way.

Could just be the settings that the games I've played have configured, though...maybe they can be brighter?

I took a quick video of Herg's board in action. It shows the LED kit and the board both off and on using a feature of the configuration app called Passthrough. It's seriously one of my favorite things to do!

Also, here's a few other pictures. I took these with the lights on in the room and I think it accurately represents how it looks when you're standing there in the dark. Most pictures taken in the dark look way bluer than they actually are.

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That is, for the moment, the only one that I dim as well. The blue LED looks cool in there, but it's really, really bright!

You bet. Here's a shot of the LED OCD in the upper right of the backbox. This is my first mounting location, and if you look closely you can see why there was a follow up The USB port is below and to the left of the big IC, and I didn't pay attention when I mounted it. So when I went a few days later to hook up the cable, I had to move the board up an inch or so. There's plenty of wire to make that happen, though. The kit also comes with an interconnect board, which sends the column/row headers up to the OCD board (from which another pair of wires comes out of the OCD board and into the PDB). You can see it mounted to the bottom right floor of the backbox.

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Here's the GI OCD. This one was a bit difficult. I think there's a difference in the way the backboxes are designed on WPC95 games, and that piece of wood that the speaker panel hangs on is not as in the way as it is on a WPC89 game.

Herg suggests loosening the screw so that the board sits at an angle. I wanted it tight, though, and not bent, so I decided to lop the corner off the piece of wood with a pull saw. The speaker panel fits fine, and the USB cable barely fits without putting pressure on the board. I actually cut some of the rubber back from the USB end so that it wasn't so long and fit easier. Figured if I screwed up the cable, they're cheap enough to replace.

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The cables that Herg sends are long enough to run from the backbox out the coindoor. Since I won't mess with GI nearly as much as inserts, I just ran my trimmed USB cable with enough slack to reach both the GI board and the LED board. It barely sticks out the coin door, so I'll probably put a 3' extender on it or something, but it works if I sit right next to the coin door to make adjustments.

@Herg - I was going to buy a right angle adapter, but I everything I saw still would have interfered with the metal bracket that holds the speaker panel on. I could have moved the board back a bit more, but then it would've been a pain in the neck to get to.

Plus, I figured that block of wood is just a little 1x1 of MDF, so if I ever wanted to return it to it's original state it would only take about 10 minutes to find a scrap, cut it, paint it, and nail it back in

The 10' cable is perfect, but since I chose to run just one cable that could easily reach both boards in the backbox, I have less cable to stick out the coin door. It is not a problem at all, though, so if you have comm problems with the 15' cables, stick with the 10 footers.

Also, with regards to lighting (not that anyone asked!), I find the back right side is a little dark using the kit. I ordered a 4+1 purple tower LED from cometpinball to see what happens if I put that in the pop bumper under the right ramp. I have high hopes! I hadn't seen them in 6.3v models before, and I thought they looked cool. http://www.cometpinball.com/product-p/4s-1s.htm