I have had my KISS LE since January but activated it in March as it was meant a birthday present and kept it in hiding. I blew out a node board almost 2 weeks ago, less than 100 plays. After getting in touch with Stern tech support I was sent a new one almost immediately. Hope this helps.

How do u know if your Node board blows?? Because my wrestlemania just stopped working, there's power going to the machine I can tell by the 2 led lights on the board in back box but that's it nothing else, no lights dmd or anything else...

Call your distributor. They should be able to help you.

Talking to Chas at Stern he implied that they are only covered by Stern for the original owner for 6 months. But when we had one go bad on a GB as a second owner and 1 year after the original owner bought it, our distributor hooked us up.

Now, that may be our only 'get out of jail free card' as I don't think they'll keep doing that every time a node board goes bad in the same game. If you have multiple board failures over time you may only get a replacement once. That's the scary part is if people keep having multiple node board failures. That will get very pricey.

Node boards are unique though, right? Not like you can order three spares and use them whenever a random node board fails.

Wonder if it's your power distribution board.

Not sure, need to take it to the distributor, I have no idea about this spike system.

I'm not sold on spike yet either, and I loved WWE. Either way I would say power distribution or power supply issue.

5-10 years has turned in to 2 years... Stern really should have made the node boards uniform across all games. All those slight variances make sourcing node boards for the late dmd era games rather...challenging...after just a few years. It’ll get worse before it gets better.

I just saw/posted this in a similar thread... It is a concern, but i thought stern released architecture to third parties for support? Facts?

E2DDF50C-79EE-4D5D-99D5-4786A528AD37 (resized).png

If these boards are NLA, and cant easily be fixed, why would anyone ever buy a game with them? They aren’t TV sets that you toss when they break. Just terrible. Stern needs to ensure there is an adequate supply to keep these games going for many years. Either that, or release the schematics so someone with the expertise can make them? You can’t not release schematics and allow the supply to disappear.

There should be a thread or database on what boards across all generations of games are NLA, then buyers can make better informed decisions.

Looks like pinballlife has them in stock

7A1CFF4A-8903-4D9F-8264-C2490C153CFF (resized).jpeg

They've released schematics.

https://sternpinball.com/support/

A good friend of mine does pinball service for a living and he & I talk about the "newer machines" all the time. He & I agree owning anything newer is pretty much INSANE. A few years down the road there are going to be a hell of a bunch of newer Stern, JJP and other machines sitting dead because expensive boards are no longer available for them. If you don't believe what I am saying just look at how hard Williams System 9 and 11 boards are to find these days at a decent price. You guys really think someone is going to make aftermarket replacement boards for JJP & Stern machines sometime down the road as involved as those new boards are? If that isn't bad enough look at how many little game specific boards each of those machines uses under the playfield.

Guys with more money than brains can keep buying all of this new stuff. I'll stick with nice older classic machines I can still source parts for at prices that are not totally INSANE.

To people with "deep pockets" stuff like this is not a huge deal but to the average working guy having to buy a $1200 board to repair your pinball machine is a hell of a hit.

Hopefully boards can be remade then. Is there any proprietary technology or software in them that could hinder remanufacture?

Older games have issues too with part availability. Coin door interface, opto boards, all getting harder to find.

My guess is there is some proprietary firmware, but honestly don't know. With schematics though they should be repairable by someone knowledegable.

The biggest difference is someone can make those boards for earlier machines because for the most part they don't use surface mount parts. Making boards & repairing newer boards with smaller surface mount components is nearly impossible for most people.

Also if my $2500 System 11 machine dies and I can't find parts for it I'll still likely be able to get $2000 out of it just taking a $500 hit. But once parts start failing on these newer $7500 + up machines the market is going to be flooded with them.

I would never pay $7500 or more for a toy anyway but I think nothing of buying 3 earlier machines with that same $7500

So right now then, there is no established supplier making these apart from Stern?

That Ghostbusters “old” not supported comment is not jiving.

I don't think you will ever see an "aftermarket supplier" making boards for any of the new machines with surface mounted parts on them. Process is just way too involved to do small runs of those boards & demand wouldn't justify the cost of set up - etc to make larger runs of those boards. So once the "original supply" is gone people will likely be SOL.

Who is going to invest $50k to $100k to make a run of a few hundred of a very game specific board? Even at $750 to $1000 each it would take forever to get that investment back (if you ever did).

Sad fact is down the road their are going to be a lot of $6000 to $10,000+ machines sitting dead with no parts around to repair them.

Hopefully I am wrong but I'll be darn if I am going to take that chance!

I just reached out to a distro at Pinburgh. She got with a stern engineer there and said Jurassic Park and games going forward will only use the node 8 board...

I will call Stern on Monday and see if that means complete standardization for all games starting now...thoughts?

Change that to say "They've released *some* schematics".

Me too. Please PM me if you or anyone can confirm this faster than me.