7 years and running!

Longest run continuously, pretty sure yes. Not quite if you count vaults, Spider-man came out in 2007 and was vaulted in 2016.

Seems someone really has an issue with someone disagreeing with his staste.

If it is node board 9, which exists twice on the machine, this is going to happen to every one with a blue PCB. Stern fucked it up and they all fry after about 5 years. They revised the PCB and you need to purchase them at around USd 200 a piece. No warranty. The new revision is green.

Attached a photo of my friends board. I replaced mine before they died. It's happening a lot. The ones I bought were the last two of a big order shipped to my distributor from the USA.

signal-2023-05-02-13-10-31-244 (resized).jpg

Why not just replace the toasted component. Surface mount soldering isn't voodoo magic. This is as crazy as replacing a whole WPC driver board because 1 transistor cooked.

yes it is necessary to change this regulator as well as the large diode D9, it is however necessary skill and material to desolder and resolder the regulator, I use a hot plate .
it is also necessary to desolder the large chemical capacitor to be able well flatten the circuit on the heating platehot plate (resized).jpg

Because it doesn't solve the reason why it died. You can get it repaired by pinball universe in Germany, but it just resets the clock and you will be back at the same point in five more years. Then maybe without available spare parts.
I kept my intact originals, so no harm done.

Is this problematic board used in other games? If so, is there similar behavior or is this SW specific?

Is there a trick to keep the death star egg together so the light doesnt bleed out the seam?

20230821_221712 (resized).jpg

I think it is star wars only. Haven't heard of any other games being affected, but can't say for sure

Have a look at this install video. I’m sure I’m here he shows you how to get this to mate up nicely

https://pinside.com/pinball/market/shops/1472-crcades/07779-star-wars-prem-le-death-star-2-mod

recently added a new star wars shooter rod to my shop

https://pinside.com/pinball/market/shops/1428-reflex-mods/09146-star-wars-thermal-detonator-shooter-rod

The thermal detonator shooter rod is cast in resin and hand painted.

DetonatorShooter (resized).jpg

When did they change over to the green pcb for node 9 boards? I think mine is a 2022 build.

No idea if they did at all. Taking that they realized that the burning boards are a design flaw, which is clearly their fault, and not acknowledge it and send out free replacements, I would expect they would still use up all existing stock of fraudulent design. So maybe they are still going in. Who knows.

Fraudulent design? How about that? Stern is a fraud. They are criminals only out to rob you.

Ok, maybe to harsh. Does flawed sound better? I can live with that.

Improvements are commonplace in all industries and unless the existing components are defective and don't work, they will be used, as they should be. My 2017 build SW has no issues.

Just wait. They will. And if a company discoveres such type of problems they usually recall and replace. It's common practice. I just got a replacement for a Philips product from 2018 due to potential overheating of a component as a result of bad design. Not doing is might be legal in the wild west but not decent behavior.

I’d love a pm if anyone has a code that combined IC and the modified soundtrack. It’s been done on stranger things, and I’d love to see it done for Star Wars. If it’s been done, I’d be happy to contribute to the creator…

Do you have a link to a post somewhere outlining what the flaw is ? I'm curious, and would like to see if it's both repairable and fixable. Just for the sake of engineering of course

Thanks

I unfortunately don't. What I know from pinball universe in Germany is that the repair is possible and that it simply resets the time of the problem. They do it for you and they are normally very open in explaining what they do and why. You could send them an email. They do speak English. I'm thinking about machine value in potentially 15 years, which is why I removed the intact originals boards and bought the replacement. Despite the rather high cost, I'm convinced the amount will seem like a joke in the future, when the boards cannot be obtained anymore.

I love this speculation that boards will somehow not be available anymore. Just like old SS games and WPC? Williams has been out of business for over 20 years. Replacement boards are plentiful. Lol. There is a market. There will be replacement boards..

I respectfully disagree, because there's a fundamental difference: older boards did not require specific firmware to even boot, and even when they did, it was easily reversed engineered.

These node boards are a different beast altogether: they have a private bootloader on them. It's not readable, and Stern did not publish it. If they don't, even if I recreate the node board (schematics are available), it's going to be as dumb as a piece of plastic.

Sure you can perform reverse engineering, but there's a significant cost linked to this, not to mention the communication protocols keep evolving.

See the Spike 1 CPU board situation: they are hard to find, and Stern has expressed little interest into building more. And there's no replacement available today.

Ashram56 is right and said it better than I could. Games up through WPC and Whitestar are repairable because it's all bare hardware - we know the purpose of every single wire and pin and circuit trace and disassembled bit in the ROM, we can literally see the bits going in and out of the CPU and the other boards. That's nowhere near true for Spike, where most of the communication is in software, with who knows how many layers of operating system and communications bus and compiled software code.

Look at video game consoles for a comparison. Nobody is producing Playstation 2 or Wii motherboards to replace on units that fail, and the supply of working units is starting to dwindle. At most what we're doing is encapsulating those into emulators that can run abstractly from underlying hardware. Maybe that could happen with Spike 2 eventually.

I couldn't even find a video demonstration of the alternative soundtrack. I'd be curious to know what's out there.

A couple questions. New poster / first time pinball owner, please be gentle

1) TIE Extra Ball and Mission EB are set to AUTO by default. Does anyone know exactly how that works, and/or roughly when they kick in on an average machine? Like, NIB, is it something like 50 ties for EB and 4 missions? Had the pin a few months, play pretty much daily, and I'm getting better, put up an 8B the other day. But now we can hit ~70 ties and 3-4 missions with zero EBs and I don't think it used to be that way? There are some young pinballers in my house I don't want to detract from their fun just because dad has an addiction.

2) What's a good place to get mirror blades? Cointaker?

Thx in advance!

Streaming some Star Wars Comic Pro tonight, come hang out! https://www.twitch.tv/pocketholeshot

Set Tie Extra Ball to 90 (where it was before auto was implemented). Mission EB I can't remember but 3 or 4 sounds right... I hate auto changing settings.

Before the Auto setting, mission Extra Ball default was set to 5. While the EB from 90 TIE fighters and 5 missions tend to be achieved very close to each other (and that is something coders tend to try and space out) I also didn't like the Auto solution. In a home setting if you find you're achieving too many EBs in quick succession you could try turning off stacked missions.

Anyone hear of any upcoming runs of Star Wars, premium in particular?

Regrettably sold my SW pro with topper, missed it so much that I snagged a premium, miss old R2 up top, are they rare as rocking horse shit now or anyone still selling them and willing to ship to UK?

Out of curiosity, what does the R2d2 topper do? Anything of note, or just look pretty and make some sounds and cost a kidney?

What do they go for realistically?

The topper just turns and beeps but it is still very nice and wish I didn’t sell mine, I believe they are around 2000.00 or so now.

I feel like R2 is your companion on the journey. Some have asked silly money on the 2nd hand market, im sure some have paid it, to me $1500 is fair and probably about my ceiling, about x 2.5 Original retail price I'd have thought.

Original retail was $749, which most thought was outrageous at the time. It's in this thread, thousands of posts ago.

Search the word TOPPER in this thread for a good laugh. Folks whining for YEARS for the topper to get released. Finally it gets released and then everyone loses their collective minds at the price as being way too high. As if licensed SW/Disney stuff would be cheap lol..

Hello Guys, i joined the club, i have questions about which side blades to buy, recommendations? Does anyone have pictures of the saberlight blades from tiltgraphics ?

Pictures of these installed on their machines

IMG_0044 (resized).jpeg

Mirror blades. Looks amazing on a sci-fi/space games. Really helps brighten up the game as well. No extra lighting required. I've posted pics in this thread. Just look up my posts.

+1 for mirrors366B0DD7-6198-4C6A-93C6-A3C6C579A028 (resized).jpeg9F4D548F-6A64-4501-ABF4-273C6ACB1174 (resized).jpeg

+1 for mirror blades. especially on the premium/le

I put mirror blades to all my machines. It makes the game brighter and the space feels wider. And it looks stunning on my SW Prem
With art blades it is even worse feeling than with the bllack walls, because it feels more boxed to me.