Yes, you do. The 6800 reset vector is in u6 and it points to code in u2 on Stars.

The only real upgrade would be from type 1 to the offset type 2 (on the baseplates) - but you don't need to do that IMO. As for the bats themselves, the 2 piece while a heavier bat vs. the one piece plastic will flip slower, but the stiffness of the flipper gives you a solid whack to the ball. If you want a zippier flip you could upgrade the coil to the 450's. (Stock is 500 IIRC). Just rebuild them first before you worry about upgrades though, stock flippers are more than fine for this game.

There are no other flippers you should change them to - vid1900's flipper guide recommends changing all flippers on all older games to the WPC style but that's some mid-old school thinking that I don't agree with. All the parts for classic stern flippers are available in repro now or people have used originals that are still good - I can see when there was a parts dearth in the early 2000's for this stuff "upgrading" but not anymore.

If you ever want to test code from ipdb to see if it's ok just try it in pinmame it will tell you if the file is corrupted (checksums won't match). 'piname' romsets are normal romsets just named so that pinmame can load them, they're exactly the same as 'normal' romsets.

So now I'm looking for a Stars lockdown bar - I know these are impossible to find at this point, it's the one with the two pins. I would consider the newer style bar as well with the receiver (which I know Mantis remade, but if anyone has a complete one I'm interested....)

Nails in corners by apron are to prevent ball hang ups. Under plastics are to prevent drooping into the mech.

Scan the 10,000 section then cut out 0, from it

Never trust even the factory dimples, always double check, and if your experience tells you something should be moved.... move it. (For instance... there's a post on the upper right of eight ball deluxe leading to the 8 ball - it's too close to the edge and the wood will often 'break through' the side if you use the factory dimple.... has to be moved in a hair.)

Nope. It's really dependent on the slope you have your game set at as well it really doesn't work for steeper slopes.

http://www.pinballrebel.com/pinball/cards/Stern/Stern_Stars_instruction_cards.zip

Go into audits until you see the hstd 04 will be in the ball in play display. Once there press the button on the mpu to reset to zero then you can use the credit button to advance it in ten k increments.

While pulling the battery works I find it's best to do it the way it was designed.

The nylon nub wears down you need to replace it. Sometimes you can cheat a little and put some dense foam under the plunger to get some more life out of it.
Nothing to do with the solenoid though.

Yep that's where it is.

Marco sells https://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/B-10686-1 which will work if you don't mind not being 100% original.

1n4004

Only if you can wait several years for me to swap mine but that's a major back burner project.

The stock software adds either to the 100 or 1000 point score queue. Likely what is happening is that the score queue is caught up when the pop fires, and it's still firing the pop when the score queue processes, so no chime.

This could be fixed by changing the idle timer to check the solenoid timer first before processing the score queues.

Stock with a waxed playfield is fine. Stars doesn't need super duper power like the later multilevel games do, or the longer playfield wide bodies.

So the hold coil on Meteor & Galaxy are slightly stronger; ignore the upper flipper on Meteor as a -600.

Galaxy spec'd at 450's is ridiculously strong for that game, it does not need it even at crazy high incline. I think I put 475's in mine and it's still ridiculously overpowered, as in will whale into the galaxy candy cane kickbig and come right back out.

Meteor's solenoid on the power stroke of a 25-500 is exactly the same as Stars'.

I guess if your PF is slow and you're missing the aha moment, sure, up the power. Start with stock though.

As always, 'opinions vary'.

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Dragonfist should have flattops like you show, however they are supposed to be red with no design. Yours likely had broken ones and someone replaced with what they had.

Dragonfist does have some variations on what was shipped re: the pop bumper caps, some are yellow, some red, some blue. AFAIK the drops were always red though.

Stars shipped with the chichlet style with the star printed as you show, with the center star a different color from the outer 2 in each bank.

Yeah, stars is hard enough as it is. Of course I also have the outlane posts removed in mine, which is kind of insane, but it's still a lot of fun. You just learn to recognize what vectors on the PF are going to head for the outlane and try not to shoot those/nudge at that moment. I also have 3 tilt warnings on mine and I forget if the stock software has a setting to just go one bank for both the double and triple but the custom software in there I have set so easier to get the bonus X. At most you're only getting 57k in bonus anyway, it's not that game breaking. One rip of a 1k spinner will get you most of the way towards that score.

Everyone seems to chase the 100k special star anyway, so I make sure I have that turned off (although I did implement it..... there's still a bug in the software I can't nail down where the 100k lights at the wrong time. Might be time for another rewrite this time into mpu200 pigs instead of the experimental stuff I have in there now)

post some old rules tweaks ideas. I need a small break from the couple of projects I'm doing, and reprogramming stars might be just the ticket. Maybe I'll even try to do it within the mpu100 framework for extra added fun. I enjoy a challenge.

Yep, pretty much why I never changed anything, I do like the stock ruleset. But I've implemented rules for other games by request so why not. Spinner counters is for sure a no brainer.

Anything can be added to it although some of the more sophisticated effects that the arduino setup enables would be more challenging on the original hardware (or require something like the weebly extra rom/ram - that's what I have in there experimentally right now with a williams-like language implemented)

I also have options in the code right now for people to tune things, like carry over a star(s), always light one star in particular, etc. The tilt warnings are shown visually with a GI relay I added to an unused solenoid output.

The no lit star thing I tried and that causes a major screwup on the spinner scoring - it needs one star lit.

Of course, this can be fixed on a complete rewrite. What should the spinner score when there's no stars lit? 10? 100?

I did add a double drop needed for double on my experiment, which is why I ended up setting it to one bank each for 2x/3x instead... it was just too hard. The bonus pretty much became meaningless.

I thought about the 5x thing as well. As for > 19k bonus, the next 'step' up is to do the factorial bonus thing where it ramps up instead of being shown directly with a light bulb or 2 or 3. This gives you 55k with all the lamps lit. (This is the way fathom scoring works on each color). I did that in the past to Trident and believe it or not, it was terrible. Was too crazy long to count down the bonus and changed the tenor of the game too much. (The multiplier went up to 7x as well, or maybe I did 12x? Have not had the game for over a decade now so details fuzzy even though the software is still available).

I don't really think stars would need too much tweaks but these are all good ideas. We'll see how much time I think I actually have to implement any of this of course.... anything would require a minimum of jumpering the mpu board to 2x2732 for more room.

Of course, I'd add a better attract lamp show.

I've often wanted to implement the Lost Vegas rule of plunge softly, go through the spinner as your first switch, then hit <something> for increased scoring. (Within a short time period). (LV was to be a dolly parton conversion kit in case you didn't know).

With a complete rewrite, the need to have at least one star lit could be eliminated. The stock software just doesn't know what to do when there's no star lit so it just crashes.

IIRC It counts it either one at a time for each of the 1x, 2x, 3x, or you can have it do the 3x for each count. Obviously as well anything can be changed once you're in the coding.

Power input to mpu is j4 lower left connector