WhiteStar

The WhiteStar Board System is an arcade system board used for several pinball games designed by Sega Pinball and their successor, Stern Pinball, between 1995 and 2004. It is the successor to Data East Pinball / Sega Pinball's System 11-derived hardware, licensed from Williams. ["At the time when Data East started out in 1987, Williams was the industry leader of pinball. Hence Mr. Stern copied Williams. So closely, that Data East's system of pinball circuit boards resembled Williams' system at that time (System 11)." -- [http://www.pinrepair.com/de/index1.htm#why Repairing Data East 1987 (Laser War) to Sega 1995 (Batman Forever)] . Received on August 11, 2007. ]

1995's "Apollo 13" was the first game to use the WhiteStar System, and 2004's "NASCAR" ("Grand Prix" outside the US) was the final game to use the WhiteStar System.

It is succeeded by Stern's "S.A.M. System", which was first used in 2005's "World Poker Tour".

Hardware revisions

In 2003, when "The Lord of the Rings" was released, the WhiteStar's audio hardware underwent major changes. The Motorola 6809 / BSMT2000 sound system was changed to a 32-bit Atmel AT91SAM CPU with three Xilinx FPGAs. This adds hardware emulation of the 6809-BSMT2000 system for backwards-compatibility with previous WhiteStar-based games, as well as adding 16-bit ADPCM compression for the audio. The 16-bit audio is used from "Lord of the Rings" to "NASCAR / Grand Prix".

This revised board is called the CPU / Sound Board II (or the "CPU / Sound II Board") in the official schematics.

References

External links

* [http://www.sternpinball.com/schematics.shtml Schematics for the WhiteStar System at SternPinball.com]