The WhiteStar Board System was an arcade system board used for several pinball games designed by Sega Pinball and their successor, Stern Pinball, between 1995 and 2005. It is the successor to Data East Pinball / Sega Pinball's System 11-derived hardware, copied from Williams.
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1995's Apollo 13 was the first game to use the WhiteStar System, and 2005'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 2006's World Poker Tour.
Hardware info
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 (some late Terminator 3 machines were actually shipped using this replacement board), 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.