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Stern Star Trek Pro

Stern Star Trek Pinball Machine | Game Room

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This Covid Christmas season the home game room gained it’s most recent and most modern pinball machine. A 2015 vault edition, pro level, Steve Richie designed Stern Star Trek found a spot in the limited capacity game room squeezing into the line up next to Stern Lord of the Rings, Gottlieb Wipeout, Bally Hangglider and Gottlieb World Series.

We live in what is known in the hobby as a pinball desert. Out here in the sticks there are not a lot of pinball machines that come up for sale locally. So when a newer machine with a family favorite theme came up only 15 minutes from the house, I jumped at the chance to convince the wife that we needed to add it to the collection.

Stern Star Trek Pinball Machine

Stevie Richie’s Star Trek pinball machine was released in 2013 around the time of the second JJ Abrams reboot of the Star Trek movies featuring Chris Pine as Kirk in an alternative timeline that would become known as the Kelvin Timeline.

The flowy, fast, and wild gameplay proved to be popular with pinball fans earning the game a reissue in 2015 as a vault edition. Next to Lord of the Rings, Star Trek stands out as a very bright game (you’d almost expect the JJ Abrams lens flares to appear) and very fast with lots of flow provided by the plastic ramps and third flipper.

The ball is completely crazy in this game often hitting the glass and otherwise becoming airborne and landing in all kinds of unexpected places.

The main toy, the large Vengence ship provides feedback by vibrating and shaking as it takes hits, meanwhile underneath the ship a drop target guards a magnetic ball lock and a solenoid that actually shoots the ball back at the player at certain moments in the game.

The “punch it” button in the middle of the lockdown bar tempts the player to take their fingers off the flipper buttons to fire photons at the Vengence.

  • Star Trek is Stern’s first all-LED Pro Model.
  • The playfield features seven multicolored LED paths that lead gamers on easy-to-understand color-coded routes.
  • There are six missions for casual players matched by 18 complex treks to immerse enthusiast players deeper in the game.
  • As players attack an oncoming threat with three action-centered flippers, the all-LED playfield will captivate onlookers and enhance the player experience with features like phaser flashes and photon torpedoes.

Game play on Star Trek is fast with all kinds of unexpected surprises as bounces can fire the ball straight down the middle which makes the player thankful for liberal ball saves and the ability to collect shields for a recuse.

The third flipper exists mainly to hit the satisfying Warp ramp which can be combo-ed at most three times if you are very fast, earning a chance at an extra ball.

My machine came with a shaker motor, the first in the game room, which provides satisfying feedback especially during one of the best “pinball moments” in the game, the Klingon Multi-ball. Klingon Mult-ball starts with a “what the hell was that” call out from Bones and a great lightshow as Klingon battleships come out of warp. Awesome moment in pinball!

MODS

My game came with a few mods that I”ll list here:

ColorDMD

My Lord of the Rings came with a ColorDMD and after seeing the red LED screen on the Stern Star Wars I knew something had to be done. Red for Star Trek is terrible – blue would have much more appropriate and the LED matrix is so bright it hurts my eyes. And you can see the grid pattern. Plus Star Trek has so many animations it took the team at ColorDMD years to produce their colorized version – so ordering a ColorDMD ($423) was a no-brainer upgrade for this machine. https://shop.colordmd.com/colordmd-replacement-display-for-star-trek-pinball-machine/

The old LED matrix was recycled into a Run-DMD clock with a kit from Gameroom Mods – https://pinside.com/pinball/market/shops/1167-gameroom-mods/02128-pinball-dmd-acrylic-frame-kit

Headlight Kit from Comet

I added a bit of backlight color with a headlight kite from Comet – https://www.cometpinball.com/products/head-lighting-kit $8

Troubleshooting

Link to Stern Star Trek online manual – https://sternpinball.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Star-Trek-LE-Manual.pdf

Device Malfunction Center Lane Lockup

Problem: Machine going nuts – awarding Warp ramps non-stop and triggering the target up and down. Game did not start right away and an error message on the machine says “Device Malfunction Center Lane Lockup”

Solution: I figured out that the “Center Lane” is not the “Me” on the “Beam Me Up” lines at the top, rather it refers to the target area under the Vengence space ship. There are a lot of opto switches in that area as well as on the Warp ramp.

Optical switch. A pair of infrared leds, one sender, one receiver pointed at each other. The switch is closed when the light passes from one to the other.

Opto switches are not physcial switches but more like those laser sensors you see in jewelry heist movies. They have a transmitter and a receiver. When a ball crosses the path of the beam of light, the switch is tripped. These opto switch can fail, fall out of alignment or be blocked by some kind of crud (dust, old wax, random wire etc.)

They are also vulnerable to electronic interference or noise. Looking under the playfield you’ll find that many of the opti switch wiring goes right by the magnet assembly which of course produces a large EM (electro mechanical) field around it.

On my machine it appears that the opto switches might have been replaced in the past. I recall the guy who sold it to me grumbling about them and since they are buried under a ton of plastic. My guess is he rerouted them closer to the magnet than the original build. So I did three things.

  1. Unplugged and removed the magnet assembly. The top of the magnet core was mushroomed a bit so I filed the edges. (Replacement magnet core can be purchased). I then reinstalled and leveled the magnet on the play field.
  2. Next I paired up the opto wires, rerouted them away from the magnet and TWISTED them together. Twisting wires is a common way to reduce electronic interference. When the wires are twisted together the magnetic field in adjacent half-twists are in opposite directions and tend to cancel. 
  3. Made sure all connections were tight. Pinball machines vibrate a lot and some times connections come loose.

One or all of these things worked because the problem went away!

Relevant Pinside threads:

Attention Operator: Center Lane Lock Up

Problem: The “center lane lock up” error message came back and the drop target was popping up and down as well as mysterious Warp ramp rewards.

Solution: As before I suspected the Opto sensors (replaced by the previous owner). I resetted them and used hot glue to keep them from coming loose. This did not solve the problem this time. I was about to order a replacment Opto Board from PinballLife.com when I read on Pinside a suggestion to reseat the connectors in the backbox.

Connectors have a life span of how many times you can plug and unplug them so first I tried pushing in on each one to make sure they were all making contact. Low and behold! Connector J15 pushed in a bit.

Now does this board having anything to do with the opto switches? I don’t really think so, they are labeled “GI” which usually means General Illuminations – the lightbulbs that are on all the time. But something worked, maybe one of the other connectors was loose by some miniscule amount and just buy push on all of them it fixed the problem.

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