The FL-17636 were originally used in the prototype games but there are posts online that some production machines did come out with them on as well (although it's hard to verify this); yet the FL-11629 is what what is listed in the manual and used on the vast majority of production games. From the posts that I've read, the FL-17636 wasn't noticeably strong in gameplay - so if your game is dialed in and you hit the ball sweetly then FL-11629 is all you need. I suspect any game with a FL-11630 is simply because the operator at the time didn't have a FL-11629 on hand (note that the FL-11630 has slightly less power).

Here's a post with a pic using the purple pop bumper cap - it does look good
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/sttng-full-tilt-modding#post-3885819

11629 it is then.

Purple does look pretty cool, though there is a lot of it on there already. Blue would kinda go with some of the highlights on the playfield. Borg ships were lit in green on the show, and I may go with green "windows" on this one so green caps would match, though I'll have to check out what color the renegade ship was lit in the episode. And then I'm a purist, so there's always red. Hmmm, decisions.....

LOL - I look forward to seeing the end result

Back in stock at:
http://pinball-mods.com/url/stng-el-sskit

Revision 4 increases the lamp holes in size to allow for more light to be transferred to the top plastic.

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Hello experts... hoping you can help me with this one. STTNG has been working well, and after sitting idle powered on (hours) it went bananas, continuously firing the balls up, to the point of getting them stuck in the launcher. Switch test showed there was no balls registering for the trough. I figured the trough board (the emitter, easy one to swap out) finally went and replaced it with a spare I had, and we were back in business.

A day later, it went bananas again, firing balls and ejecting from cannons and VUK and Borg ship. I thought it was weird that both on my boards died so figured something was off upstream. I checked the voltages at the Test Points on the PDB, all look solid good 12v, 14+v and 5v steady - the PDB was rebuilt a few years ago and has been solid, fuses look good. I checked the voltage at the trough board, and the 12v is extremely low, ~2volts - that's Weird. I disconnected it, measured 12v at the receiver trough board, similar, very low. Disconnected that, still low. Read a bunch of links and posts trying to figure out what'd be causing this, run into a post about the opto board under the playfield as an occasional source of issues - this was the only board I've not interacted with on my game yet; thinking maybe I've got a bum LM399 I pull that board, looks ok, but I'm not sure how to test/validate it. What I did discover is that the 12v line came back to normal at the with all 3 boards disconnected. So I'm stumped as to what to check next.

To Summarize:
Game is ball seeking like crazy.
Test Points on PDB all check out.
12v under the playfield connector voltages are all low, ~2vdc-~4vdc depending if either trough board or the opto board is plugged in.
With no boards connected the voltage on the harness matches what's on PDB, 12vdc.

What should I try next? Thank you!

Cleaned up and de-gunked my trough diverter assembly this afternoon. What a disaster this thing was. Everything filthy dirty and the two shafts would not budge due to a paste of dried grease and overuse of loctite on the set screws. Shafts were polished smooth on my buffing wheel and will get a slight bit of Super Lube when reinstalled. Coil dust covering everything so all optos and brackets cleaned up. New subway ordered from Starship Fantasy too. Very satisfying to have this all clean and back together again.

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This screams burnt connector to me.
Trace the schematics , figure out where the pf connects to the pdb.
Verify those connections and idc connections are rock solid

Pulled all the lamp boards to wash them off and replace the bulbs with LED's today. This is what greeted me on the largest lamp board, over a dozen cold solder joints like these. Must have been the Friday before a three-day weekend at the Williams factory.

And......what the hell is with the super tight wedge lamp sockets around the edge of that big board?? I could barely get the original 555 bulbs out, and trying to put slightly bulkier LED's in their places, I felt like I was going to break my freshly soldered board in half. So it was LED's in the twist-offs and 555's around the edge.

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Common, not a wms mfg defect.
Years of heat from those lamps will do this.

I just put in a new subway in mine. Not a great fit. But it works and ball does not get stuck. Looks nice.

Pfffft… the soldering sucked on these.

Of course you can reflow those connections. I would also suggest adding and reflowing the solder on the lamp socket connections to remove the divits

^^^ THIS ^^^

It's probably a combination of the radiating heat from the incandescent and the current that's actually heating up the joint.

These lamp boards are SINGLE sided boards without through holes. There is only the solder pad. Most people recommend "reflowing" solder (whatever that means in this context - see the Pinwiki article). If you want to repair the cracked joint put some flux at the joint and reheat the joint. Do NOT add more solder to a single sided board pad. There is nowhere for the extra solder to go except to pile up and make the mountain of solder even bigger. If you want to put some fresh solder down remove ALL the old solder first. If you just add solder you will end up with Mount Everest at the joint.

I put in a a color DMD and noticed both proximity sensors stopped working. Unplugged the DMD and I can hear them registering again. I had to twizzle the pot on both proximity sensor boards after installing the color DMD. I didn't measure the voltage, but I have to figure the extra load on the 12v from the color dmd effected the sensitive proximity sensor. When you are adjusting these prox sensors, spin the pot about an eighth of a turn past the point the sense LED turns off.

The giant PF lamp board in mine had a ton of bad solder joints too. Some of the lamp sockets where almost falling out. Besides the heat and single sided PCB, the vibrations from nearby coils are not helping either.

+1 on "reflow" not the best way to do it. The old scummy solder is not going to melt and flow well unless you add more solder and at that point there is probably too much solder on the joint. If you reflow without adding new solder, most likely that solder joint is still in bad shape even if it making contact now. Suck the old solder off first, specially if dealing with ROHS stuff.

Working on this 16 opto switch. Ninety-Six 1W resistors spreading out the heat dissipation Can't decide what I am going to do with the pop rivet mounting brackets. I guess provide the hardware to mount the board with screw, nut, washers. Provide a link to new mounting brackets to marco and let the customer decide if they want to remove the old rivet to reuse the brackets.
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I basically just reheated what was already there, and they all came out well. Checked my work with a magnifying glass to make sure no cold joints.

Removed and disassembled the borg ship mech for a thorough cleaning today. Here's a head-on photo, you can see that the rightmost arm is bent upward a little, and also the vertical bracket sticking up in the middle is bent over to the left a bit. This is exactly how the part was removed from the pin but I think the vertical piece should point straight up, and the right arm should be bent down so it's parallel to the rest of the assembly (and so all the holes where the part is attached to the rear playfield wall line up correctly). Can anyone who has had their own borg ship apart tell me if this should be correct?

Also, the screws to attach the assembly to the rear wall were a hodgepodge of parts. I don't see those listed in the manual, if someone could post photos of those four screws so I can figure out what's correct and what's not, I would love to assimilate that information (yeah, I said it).
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I have not seen this board before. May I ask for more information about it? How is it better than the Homepin version?

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The manual and parts catalog show the vertical bracket as straight and the base of the rightmost part of the ship as being parallel to the main body - as you have assumed.

As for the 4 screws, looking at the parts list there are 4 x 4006-01003-06 "ms 6-32X3/8 p-ph-s" listed at the bottom of the borg bracket assembly BOM ... can't be 100% certain but it's a good chance that these are the screws you're referring to. If that's not them, let me know and I'll pull mine apart.

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Those are the four screws for the coil bracket and the grommet bracket. The four needed to mount the assembly would have to be 3/4" - 7/8" long or so, as they have to pass through the rear wall into a t-nut. That first picture is very helpful, is that from the green parts catalog?

Honestly it is probably not better, but comparable. Electrically both boards are probably identical to the original WMS schematic, but I am using a different manufacturing process. The bill of materials mine is longer and likely more expensive, but it can be mostly put together easily and quickly automated equipment. The other one is a more traditional through hole design with smaller bill of materials, but likely more expensive to assemble. They both have their advantages and I am sure you could get hard opinions from different people on why each one is better.

I will say spreading out each power resistor across six 1w resistors makes the board have less of a hot spot. It still dissipates the same heat, just spread out over a bigger area and I use the copper foil of the back side of the PCB to help. You could touch anywhere on the board where as the single power resistor gets quite hot.

Having the the surface mount LM339 staggered across the through hole lm339 pins allows you to snip out the surface mount chip and install a through hole one without the need of desoldering. The other board does look to be using chip sockets.

No electrolytic capacitor on mine to get cooked dry by the power resistors, but there is a large number of MLCC ceramics. What is the likelihood of one EL cap goes bad versus one of twenty MLCC ceramic goes short and causes a problem. I figure the leaking EL cap is the killer of most of these boards. It completely rotted away a trace on the my original board and the same thing with other opto boards. Did WMS buy bad caps or is it just these boards and how hot they get?

I was just looking at PP website. I see they have a new improved software for STNG. Does anyone know what changes are in the polished code?
I recently bought the CPU that was more LED friendly. Did it help (just a little bit).

Great info.

Comparing the 10-opto A-15430, the nvram.weebly.com solution is half the price to homepin!

Interesting about BOM, kind of wondering, I suppose it depends on quantity and what is available, but typically the SMD components are substantially less $ these days? Curious on your thoughts, since I'm just buying small quantities.

it depends, in a lot of cases they are the same or cheaper, but when I split the load 16 TH resistors across 96 chip resistors it adds up. Same with using a lot of parallel MLCC capacitors vs one electrolytic. When I switched to SMT my costs went up but labor went down enough to make it worth it and allow me to do more boards..

I generally don't push my boards. If people are interested they will do the reading and pursue their desired option. There are other 16-opto boards available.

The following boards are not listed in any particular order. The order is not an endorsement and should not be understood to be an endorsement in any way.

• Homepin board (above) available from various merchants.
• Pinball Electronics from barakandl board (above) available directly from barakandl. Not listed presently but I am sure it will be soon.
• Pindora Box board (https://www.pindorabox.com/product/opto-16-board-a-16998/) available directly from Pindora Box.
• Great Lakes Modular board (http://www.greatlakesmodular.com/index.html?http://www.greatlakesmodular.com/products/pinball/osb16.html) - no longer in production but may be available used.

I also have a board but it's not advertised (other than information posted in my thread). See https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/dumbass-test-and-reproduction-pcbs/page/4#post-5867818 if you are interested.

Note: The Homepin and Pindora Box boards are based on A-22019 and mount "upside down" when used in A-16998 and A-17223 orientation. The barakandl, GLM and my board are based on A-16998 or A-17223 and mount correctly in most machines except when used in NGG and CP which originally used A-22019 and therefore these boards mount "upside down" in those machines.

EDIT: For completeness I should mention that the board is also available from another manufacturer/merchant but given the circumstances and controversy surrounding that manufacturer/merchant this option has not been listed.

Yep the pic is from the green parts catalog.

Oops I didn’t look at the length of those screws, that was remiss of me. I’ll take look at my game over the weekend for you

May I ask what you are referencing on the STTNG Code? LX-7 is the most current and you should have it (required for color dmd btw), however that code has been out there for years. I went to PP and that is all that was listed. Did you see something different?
Thanks

I think you are hinting at mounting holes on the bracket? If some boards will be upside down I suppose that means I just need to mirror the holes on each side so the bracket can go on either way. I will look into this the next time I ordered more boards.

Thanks for chiming in. STNG is not on the list as of yet.

Planetary Pinball, the sole licensee for Williams Electronics Games, Inc is proud to announce that we will start to release software upgrades for Williams™ and Bally™ pinball machines.

Ever since WMS closed the pinball division in 1999, the games developed and manufactured by them have been in high regard with players and collectors of pinball machines. And games are continuously being restored to like-new condition. Thanks to a steady supply of new and improved parts, from small mechanical and electrical units, to circuit boards and playfields. Parts made available by Planetary Pinball and domestic and international collaborators. Recent years have also given us a number of new innovations. Bringing the games of yesteryears into a more contemporary look and feel.

Software is the heart and soul of a pinball machine. While a lot of effort went into making software for games, the framework, rules design and special effects, on some games the time has shown a few shortcomings. These might be bugs, like incorrect scoring, game progression being lost, modes being messed up etc. Or rooted in the fact that games were developed with coin drop play on locations in mind. In some cases making them less than ideal for the more contemporary use of home play and high level competition play.

The goal of software upgrades is not to make fundamental changes or redesigns. Neither to upgrade display graphics or sound. The goal is to make minor tweaks and fixes, while keeping the spirit of the game intact. And to strive for having rule changes under the users control via new and expanded feature adjustments.

Bram Stoker's Dracula
Williams, 1993
Creature from the Black Lagoon
Bally, 1992
Judge Dredd
Bally, 1993
Junk Yard
Williams, 1996
Mousin' Around!
Bally, 1989
Radical!
Bally, 1990
Road Show
Williams, 1994
Tales of the Arabian Nights

Also here a quote from Soren.

Let me demystify the thing about LED lamp ghosting. It is not because of 60Hz/50Hz AC mains power. It is true the GI is AC and some LEDs may flicker from this. But this is to be solved by using LED that can compensate for that. In other words, a hardware solution.

The lamp matrix lamps are pulsed as well. But from a DC source and due to the matrix design. So pulse duty cycle and duration is unrelated to the AC mains power. It may make LEDs flicker as well. And better LEDs may be immune to this.

The ghosting however is a whole different issue and cause. And may be visible to LEDs that are otherwise good at not appearing as flickering. It is because the original lamp matrix control system at Williams was having an overlap of the next row status and the current column strobe. So short that incandescent lamps do not respond to this to any significance. But enough that it, with the response time of the transistors, can cause LED lamps to appear as a soft glow.

The good people at Williams realised this and updated the procedure in 1995. And I like to believe it was during the development of Indy 500. It has LED lamps on the switch matrix. This exact procedure is the one implemented in these upgrades to Creature and Road Show. And same will be ported to future upgrades of other games using the older procedure.

See this short video for a demonstration. And please note. Flickering and ghosting may still appear. Due the condition of a game (power supply, control logic, transistors) and quality of the LEDs used.

I went back to take a closer look at fitment. The Pinwiki (https://www.pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php/Williams_WPC#WPC_16_Opto_Board_.28A-16998.2C_A-17223.29) has an image for comparison and shows the difference. The later board (A-22019) can be installed in either orientation but the original board A-16998 can only be mounted in one orientation due to the lack of two sets of holes.

The number of machines that use A-16998 and A-17223 is many more than the number that use A-22019.

A-16998 and A-17223

• Star Trek: The Next Generation production count = 11,728
• Dirty Harry production count = 4,248
• No Fear: Dangerous Sports production count = 4,540
• WHO dunnit production count = 2,416
• Scared Stiff production count = 4,028
• Junk Yard production count = 3,013

Total maximum available machines = 29,973.

A-22019

• No Good Gofers production count = 2,711
• The Champion Pub production count = 1,369

Total maximum available machines = 4,080.

Today was ramp clean-up day. A pleasant surprise, I hadn't taken a really good look at them until now and the Alpha and Delta Quadrant ramps must have been replaced sometime recently. No cracks, crystal clear, nice blue flaps, and that sturdy, thick plastic which I believe would make them Starship Fantasy replacements. Of course, they now make the Beta ramp look like absolute ass in comparison - scratched, cracked, rusty flap, faded decal. Should have checked them out before ordering the new subway from SF earlier this week, but now I get to pay for shipping again!

I'm a newbie when it comes to optos, but something doesn't look right here on the Delta setup. Every opto I've come across on this game so far had a green board with an orange emitter, and a blue board with a black receiver. Delta ramp had the two in the photo, the receiver looks like it's probably correct but the emitter has been spliced in from somewhere else, it's the wrong little board (same part # as the receiver) and the bulb is blue. I'm going to assume that this is non-working, is this what I need to order? https://www.pinballlife.com/williamsbally-led-and-pcb-board-set.html

Lastly....the wire harness for Delta was just hanging down from the ramp, all the holes normally used to attach it with zip ties were empty. Anyone got some good photos of their Delta ramp showing how/where the wiring should be zip tied to it, and where the wires should be fed through holes in the ramp? Thanks guys.

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Looks like someone has soldered a replacement IR LED onto a receiver board (the difference with the boards themselves is just the labels and colour) - so I'd suspect that it'll work fine, however swapping it out for the correct board would be ideal such that it doesn't confuse the next person when they are having to troubleshoot an issue. The Pinball Life link you had is correct, or you could simply buy the emitter https://www.pinballlife.com/williamsbally-led-transmitter-emitter-and-pcb-board.html

So just dropped a pinsound into the game and what a difference! Its like playing with the London Symphony Orchestra in the room. So far I've only used the Ultimate mix, but it only seems to change the music, not the sound effects. It is obviously possible to change the music, but how about the sound effects? I'm thinking a nice GD it Q! from Jean Luc Picard at the ball drain would be fitting. I'll mess with it and if I can figure it out will have alot of fun putting together a nice package.

Last 5 seconds of this.

Or the "that's unexpected" at the 1:03 mark here at the ball drain.

Still love this game!

Hi guys. Just fixing up a friends STTNG machine and it came with a small enterprise mod. It runs on 12v on the bench but has no instructions. Can anyone point me in the direction of where it connects under the playfield? Thank you.

Pinsound on STNG it's epic! I also have it and hoo boy!
BTW, the general light on my stng went down, what it can be? a fuse?

The GI lighting is broken up into 5 sections / strings - each one has a separate fuse (F106-F110). So if the entire GI is out then it is unlikely to be a fuse.

All GI power comes into the Power Driver board via J115 connector, while the backbox GI strings connect via J120 and the PF GI strings connect via J121.

https://www.pinballdecals.com/STTNG_EnterpriseShipPage.html
?

Its likely a fuse, however why did a fuse blow? Have you inspected ALL of your fuses for the proper sizes? In addition, always inspect ALL of your connectors on the large power driver board....use a BRIGHT light. You are looking for "burnt" connectors.

thank you all, am going to inspect that
Thank you for guiding me

Mine uses the same bolts as are used to hold the 2 right-angle brackets on the PF back panel - these are 4008-01168-10 "ms 8-32X 5/8 pl-hh-s"

https://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/4008-01168-10

The wires from the Borg Entry opto are grouped together and tied to the front edge of the upper Deltra ramp (pic1), they then go under the Delta return and back up on the other side where they bundle with the Left Ramp Made wires - note the Left Ramp Made wires feed down through a hole in the ramp plastic, and the bundle is zip tied to the underside of the ramp (pic2). The wires for the Left Ramp Entry, along with the Lock/Jackpot lamps, are zip tied to the left side of the ramp - firstly near the lamp sign (pic3) and then further towards the back near the Romulan ship (pic4). Both sets of wires join together into a larger bundle (just zip tied together) and go through the PF hole in the back corner.

Hope this helps

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I’ve done some of that and other Patrick Stewart quotes I borrowed from other sources. It’s fun. Some may be offended with a swearing Capt Picard though. We laugh our heads off every time. I have it set up random with many quotes for many things so it doesn’t always swear. Funyy when we have someone over and they realize “did capt picard just say what I think he did?”. Here is a small sample:

Very helpful, thanks Manny. I also unsoldered the wires to the ramp mouth switch and the Lock/Jackpot lamp board so I could run them through the holes in the ramp like they came from the factory. My Lock/Jackpot plastic was curled backwards from years of lamp heat so I un-riveted it, flattened it with the sun/glass method, and re-riveted a now very flat plastic. This also gave me a chance to polish the bracket and buff the switch wireform on my buffer, restoring it to shiny silver. Next up is new optos and clear plastics for it, then it's done.

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Also received my Starship Fantasy subway in the mail yesterday. Kudos to SF, this thing is built like a tank and the metal liner dropped right in.

If anyone's subway is in such bad shape that my old one would be an improvement, just take care of shipping and it's yours.

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VERY NICE......!!!

Folks, I just swapped in a NVRAM on my new (to me) STTNG and I'm seeing some funkiness. Game plays, but all playfield lights are lit all the time, in battle simulation no balls come up to launchers, etc.

I suspect a switch matrix issue, but would appreciate some help to confirm

Could someone share a picture of what a normal switch matrix looks like in test mode? I'm not sure which switches are normally on and normally off in this game. Mine is attached, which looks like a lot lit up

Thanks in advance!

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Just a dumb guess, but first thing I would check is are all the connectors plugged back in correctly. Ribbon cables backwards? Plugs off by one? Etc

What pinsound mix are you guys using? I just set up the ultimate mix and I'm a bit disappointed. Callouts are neither custom nor loud enough and music keeps cutting out. Will try another mix or throw on LOTR soon. I know lots of effort went into these so thanks in any case.

I made this mix last year: https://www.pinsound-community.org/index.php?/files/file/375-sttng_mathazar_mix_v17zip/. One of the first things I did was normalized all files (Music to 89.9db, SFX to 91db, Voice to 91.5db). The link also has a 26min video demo.

I've looked at this so many times, I may be thinking the wrong way is the right way (this machine also has had a lot of work...what I'm used to from my TZ may not be "right" for how this machine is wired). I will definitely look at it with a fresh set of eyes today and hopefully have a head slap moment.

Take ALL of the balls out of your game and then compare T.1 results to page 2-42 in the manual; the switches are that are shown with a gray shading in the manual will correspond to the switches showing closed in T.1. Your right return lane switch is stuck closed...