I, for one, am getting pretty tired of seeing vast

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3 Editorial Page 3-Editorial Page 4-Customizing Toppers Page 10-TechFest 31 Review Page 12-Quick & Simple Repairs #118 Page 16-Bally Reel Board Error Page 18-Subscription Information I, for one, am getting pretty tired of seeing vast numbers of slot machines on the floor with toppers that read New Game. I get especially perturbed when it s a game that clearly is not new but has been on the floor for months or longer. The term New Game loses its cachet completely when it s overused. This month we welcome back Vic Fortenbach with a nice tutorial on programming the Bally Alpha Pro Slot topper. You can make your own movie or slide show and Vic will talk you through it. Best thing of all, it won t cost you a cent. We have a new contributor this month. Sunil Davidson is the slot manager for a venerated cruise ship line that we are forbidden to reveal on penalty of being buried at sea in an old S2000 cabinet. His first contribution is a short piece entitled Bally Reel Board Error. Thanks, Sunil. Keep em coming if you can. Pat Porath has another in his Quick & Simple Repairs series. Thanks, Pat. Attention anyone in the Caribbean or looking for a Caribbean visit that s a total business write-off: I will be holding a four-day, regional slot tech class on the island of St. Kitts, January It will be held at the Marriott Hotel and Royal Beach Casino. See the website at slot-techs.com for details. There are just 10 openings in the class. Randy Fromm Randy Fromm's Editor Randy Fromm Technical Writers Jason Czito, Vic Fortenbach, Henry Kollar, Chuck Lentine, Kevin Noble, Pat Porath is published monthly by 401 W. Lexington #777 El Cajon, CA tel fax editor@slot-techs.com Visit the website at slot-techs.com SUBSCRIPTIONS Domestic (North America) 1 year - $ years - $ International 1 year - $ years - $ Subscribe online at slot-techs.com Copyright 2015 under the Universal Copyright Convention. All rights reserved. See you at the casino. Publisher-

4 Slot Tech Feature Article Customizing Toppers By Vic Fortenbach Last month my boss called me into his office. Vic, you know the new Bally Alpha Pro slot machines we have been placing on the floor? Yes, I replied. Have you seen the toppers these new machines have? Yes. Is there a way we can put our casino name and information on these toppers instead of just the New Game message? Yes, there is! Having opened my mouth, I now have a project to do. I walked to the casino floor to get a better look at these Bally toppers and how the displayed information could be changed. The video topper displays the game title as well as some animation which loops back to the beginning Page 4 about every 15 seconds. Some of the graphics are pretty cool looking but others just display Hot New Game. Before I dug into the hardware of what makes these toppers tick, I contacted our Bally service representative. He was kind enough to provide me an info sheet. This sheet detailed some of the facts regarding the video topper. The video topper has a 15.6 LCD monitor with a resolution of 1360 x 768. The frame rate of the video controller is 24 frames per second, the same as a movie you would see in a traditional movie theater that uses film. The maximum file storage is 2 gigabytes. A power cable and 15 pin VGA cable connect to the topper and run down the inside of the back of the slot machine. Depending on the theme of the game, the 15 pin VGA cable from the topper connects one of two ways: The first and best way for customization is the use of a video player circuit board. This board is mounted up inside the cabinet, behind the top monitor or, in the case of the V32 cabinet; it s behind the main monitor, up inside and near the top. This video player board

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6 requires no connection to the game s logic board. The connections on this board are just 12 volts power input, a VGA output and a USB thumb drive port. An SD memory card port is also available on board but I have never seen it used. On power up, this board is dumb and just runs programs from the USB thumb drive; no inputs and no other outputs are used. On some occasions, the USB thumb drive is connected to a short extension cable and mounted to a bracket that is closer and easier to reach from the front of the machine. This makes changing the USB thumb drive a lot easier, since you don t have to reach your hand into unknown darkness to reach the thumb drive. Since the data for the topper is contained on the USB thumb drive, it s a good idea to back up the data. Thumb drives do fail and if you don t have a second game with the same theme, you may be out of luck when one does fail. Backing up the data is easy; any personal computer running windows will do the trick. The topper data is just one AVI file that is less than 1 gig in size. Since the AVI file is not named with the games theme, you will have to rename it when saving it on your PC. When replacing the thumb drive, any Page 6 thumb drive will work. We use the old red thumb drives from a revoked IGT install. First, reformat the thumb drive then copy the AVI file to the replacement thumb drive. This erases the old IGT data and copies the saved game theme data to this replacement thumb drive. You can have an inventory of thumb drives ready to go or you can copy the data from the computer to the thumb drive when needed. The second way Bally chose to provide data for the topper is a direct connection to the logic board s video card. With this connection scheme, topper customization is not possible. To determine if you can create custom topper data, just look for the video player circuit board. One of our Bally cabinets had a direct connection to the logic board for the topper AND the video player board mounted inside the cabinet. The video player board just needed a thumb drive and the VGA cable removed from the logic board and connected to the video player board. We copied the data from a second Hot New Game thumb drive to a spare thumb drive. This made the topper function as a customizable topper. Since the displayed topper data is all contained on a thumb drive, changing it is simple; you just replace the thumb drive. However, there is one step to creating custom data for display on

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8 the topper. You have to create the data. The data on the thumb drive is in the format of an AVI file. AVI is an acronym for Audio- Video Interleaved. This type of file acts as a container for both audio and video data. Since the video topper does not have a speaker, there is no need to create any audio for the new topper file. Creating the program for the topper is not effortless but the results can be amazing. First, you will need a program that you can use to assemble the images and pictures that will be displayed on the topper. There are lots of video editing programs available. Some are free and some cost upwards of $ The free one that I have used is Windows Movie Maker. It s a simple program with an easy learning curve and no fancy bells and whistles. The version I have is on my windows XP workbench computer. There are free versions of Windows Movie Maker available for Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. You will have to download them from the Microsoft website since they do not come with the newer versions of Windows. Make sure you download the program directly from Microsoft; some other download sites have the program but they may contain viruses. The Movie Maker version for Page 8 Windows 7 and 8 are part of the Microsoft Essentials program suite. You can download just the Movie Maker program or the complete Essentials program suite. There are several versions of Move Maker available; all of them will work for creating topper data. Just download the version for your computer s operating system. With the Movie Maker program installed and working on my computer it was time for the fun part. Content for your video topper does have some restrictions that you must keep in mind. As mentioned previously, the video topper resolution is 1360 x 768. This means any still pictures or video you are going to use must be that size. Larger pictures will not display and smaller pictures may look blurry or pixelated. If your picture is smaller than 1360 x 768, black bars might display on the left and right sides of the picture displayed on the topper. These black bars are not necessarily a bad thing. This is due to the video controller trying to make the picture fit into the 1360 x 768 size. I decided for my custom video topper movie, I was just going to create a simple slide show. The video controller would display each slide for a few seconds and move or transition on to the next one. You can use any camera to take pictures, even a cell phone camera. Another way to get some pictures is to surf the internet. I found several pictures that were taken by our local newspaper and posted to their website that could be downloaded. Once you have the pictures you want to use, Movie Maker makes it easy to use to assemble the pictures into a slide show video move file. As a bonus, Windows Movie Maker allows cool transitions that can be inserted in-between pictures. These transitions include fading between pictures and several up down and left right wipes. You can also adjust the time the picture remains on the screen as well as adding titles to your movie. I would not recommend using the titles, since they do tend to look cheap and you cannot overlay the titles onto your pictures, they have to be on their own solid colored screen. Once you have your move assembled on the Windows Movie Makers timeline and you re happy with the results, it s time to save your movie. Clicking save will allow you to save your move as a WWM (Windows Movie Maker) file to your hard disk as a Windows Movie Maker project. This will allow you to change any of the pictures or transitions in your original slide show at a later time. To save your

9 video file to a format that the video topper will recognize, you will need to click on save as in the Mover Maker file menu. You will then be prompted to save your movie to a specific video format. The AVI (NTSC) video format with the highest screen resolution and frame rate (24 frames per second) will work the best. If your Windows Movie Maker version lists a digital video option, choose that one. When I saved my slide show to the AVI format, I found that the slide show did not loop. It played once and stopped with a black screen. After some experimentation, I found that an MP4 video format will loop correctly. However the MP4 format is not available in the Movie Maker program. Once I had my slide show in the AVI format, I needed to convert it to the MP4 format. Thank goodness for the internet. On the internet is a file conversion program named ZamZar ( This program is free and will convert AVI files to MP4 file format, as well as a whole bunch of other file formats. Since ZamZar sends you a file conversion complete notice, you will need an e- mail address to use this program. The conversion is free but it will take a few minutes once you have uploaded your AVI file to ZamZar. The free uploaded file size is limited to 100MB which is enough for most video slide shows. After your file has been converted, save it to your hard drive and copy it to a thumb drive. Insert the thumb drive into the USB port on the video controller board inside the Bally cabinet and power up the machine. There will be a delay of about 10 seconds for the video controller to load the program and initialize. Once the controller has started to run the slide show, just sit back and enjoy. - Vic Fortenbach vfortenbach@slot- techs.com Visit the Technical Department at slot-tech.com Schematic Diagrams Service Manuals Educational stuff And much more Page 9

10 Slot Tech Event TechFest 31 Review T echfest 31 was a blast. The Paragon Casino had requested that I bring TechFest to their property in Marksville, Louisiana. Located about three hours drive from New Orleans, the Paragon is a beautiful property with all the amenities located in an extremely rural setting in Central Louisiana. We had an excellent presentation on HAKKO soldering equipment and proper soldering techniques from HAKKO trainer Rick Salberg and Michael Carlson of the IPS Group. After their formal presentation, we opened up the beer bar and had fun using all to gear ourselves to practice SMD rework on a variety of PCBs. Class Picture: Notice James (far right) is wearing his Ceronix barbecue apron. He won it as a door prize. Page 10

11 Left: Brian Looper represented Ceronix (LCD monitors) with their awesome and wellreceived Ceronix Monitor Repair Lab. Brian brought an entire pallette of booby-trapped monitors for a hands-on repair lab and defective LCD panels for disassembly practice. In addition, Dan Petersen of JCM gave a presentation on the JCM bill acceptors and Futurelogic printers. I totally failed to snap his picture. Oops. Thanks, Dan. Next TechFest is TechFest 32 in May at STM Mystic Lake Casino.-STM Right: My hero Russ Wige from Transact Technologies and their Epic 950 printer. Russ was feeling under-the-weather but he still made it all the way out to the Paragon for his presentation. Thanks, Russ. We all really appreciate it very much. Below: In his first time presenting at TechFest, experienced trainer Todd Aase gave a really great class on the MEI (now CPI) SC66 bill validator. Page 11

12 Slot Tech Feature Article Quick & Simple Repairs #118 By Pat Porath Aruze No Sound Ihad an Aruze game in which the previous shift stated there weren t any sound effects at all. The game had been rebooted, USB connections reseated and other connections were checked without success. I did the same ending up with the same result; no sound was coming from the speakers at all. When checking into it further, there was one pink wire and a blue wire going to a speaker. On the brainbox there was a connector plugged into a card with the same color wires on it. Could this be the sound card for the game? It was removed but when looking at it, I couldn t tell for sure if it was indeed for sound or not. In the shop, a co-worker looked up a processor chip on the card to see what it was. The chip came up to be for audio processing. Now I knew for sure it was the sound card. I removed the card from a Page 12 spare brain box and put it in the game s brain box. During boot up I had the infamous Aruze door open beep which indicated the original sound card was in fact bad. Konami Podium Game Wouldn t Clear Paper Jam Error An Epic Transact 950 wouldn t clear a paper jam error in the game. It was replaced with a spare. When the unit was put on the bench, the paper jam error may have been caused by a bad tickettaken sensor. Usually simply cleaning it with a flat dry cotton swab fixes it (I flatten swabs with pliers so it fits into the sensor area easily). This time, the sensor was still failing off and on after a few cleanings. The ticket-taken sensor (Transact part number L) was replaced with a new one which worked perfectly. To test a ticket taken sensor on the bench, power up the printer with a lighted bezel plugged into it. Feed the printer with paper and print a self test ticket. Instead of totally removing the ticket from the printer, slightly remove it so it just passes the sensor, then slightly insert ticket so it obstructs the sensor. When obstructed, the lighted bezel is supposed to flash rapidly. Without obstruction, the bezel should not flash at all. This happens ONLY IF the ticket tray has paper, the unit is fully inserted into printer frame and paper is fed into the print head. If any of these things are incorrect, the

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14 bezel will flash slowly. Once everything is good with the printer and it s in an idle state, the bezel will stay lit and not flash. I ve run into this on a few Bally EVO games as well, where the bezel would flash rapidly. The game wouldn t always appear with an error though. An easy cleaning does the trick most of the time. IGT G20 Bad Boot Chip or Bad Hard Drive? Has anyone seen a Firmware BIOS CRC checking failed error on an IGT? This was the first time I had run into this specific error on a game. My first thought was a bad brain box. This makes sense because there is a BIOS chip in the brain box of the game. I was not really sure what to check for so a phone call was made for assistance. I was told to carefully check the ribbon cable FROM the brain box TO the back plane board. Inspect it for any bad kinks, pinches or any copper wire showing. Also, check both ends for any bent pins. Next, replace the interface board located inside the brain box. This is the board that has two button batteries on it and this is the board that the ribbon cable plugs into (ribbon cable plugs into interface board on the brain box). Another item on this board is a boot chip. The chip HAS to match the boot chip on main board of the brain box otherwise weird things will happen such as the game may boot part way up then totally freeze or maybe not even boot up at all. After replacing the complete brain box, the error still came up. Next, brain boxes were swapped with a game that had the exact same theme. This time, the game totally booted up. What the...? After some good old swaptronics, we found out that the original boot chip on the interface card was bad. Quite unusual, in my opinion. When the exact replacement chip was replaced, the game booted up and worked fine. Ainsworth Coming Up With Door Open Errors I received a complaint that an Ainsworth game kept coming up with main door open errors. When the main slot door was slightly pulled forward, the door optic would read a CLOSED state. When fully closed it would sometimes read a DOOR OPEN condition. Upon further investigation and checking out where the door optics are located, one near the bottom part of the main slot door somehow became slightly loose. It was pointing at about a 45 degree angle. No wonder it had door open issues. After snugging the optic in place, the game was fine. - Pat Porath pporath@slot-techs.com Page 14

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16 Slot Tech Feature Article Bally Reel Board Error By Sunil Davidson Hello Slot Tech read ers. My name is Sunil Davidson and I have been a Slot Manager for the last 15+ years on board cruise lines. I also run which will in the near future be designed to be a great resource for Slot Techs. Inspired by the writings of Patrick Porath and my willingness to share knowledge with my fellow techs brings me to this first contribution of mine via the Slot Tech magazine,thanks to Randy. I still remember reading Randy s material 16 years ago when I started my career as a trainee tech on board cruise line. Although I had an electronics background prior to choosing the career as a tech, I was utterly confused by slot technology in those times. Slot machines, except for Game Kings and a few other games had CRTs. All the rest like the S+ and Bally Pro Slots lacked any kind of video screens or dot matrix displays except for the venerable 7 segment LED displays. Most confusing in those times were the meter readings that we had to take at the end of every Page 16 cruise: Bill meters and jackpot meters specifically. Nowadays it s a breeze with all the LCD screens and VFD displays. We used to have a thick folder full of technical gems collected by previous Slot managers for the benefit of the techs It has Slot Bible scrawled over it and the contents were mainly Randy s material. It sure helped us newbies in our careers. There was also a folder named RANDY FROMM S BIG BLUE BOOK of Really Great Technical Information on board one of the ships with info scanned from the magazines. Thank you Randy. So much for reminiscences of my early days as a Trainee Slot Technician. Now on to my first article in a series that I intend to write. Bally ALPHA ELITE S9E- QUICK HIT STARLIGHT FIRE Upright Reel We will start with a recent fault I had on one Bally ALPHA ELITE S9E-QUICK HIT STARLIGHT FIRE Upright Reel game. The game was found with the first reel spinning non-stop. There was no player on the machine. The error message on the LCD read Mechanical Reels not configured. I tried to open and close the door (the old faithful) and a reboot but still no luck so I powered down and took Reel 1 to the workshop. On further scrutiny, it became apparent that the Reel Motor Driver board was faulty. We did not carry any spare board of this type on board so I had it ordered via our purchasing department. The new board that arrived did not look the same in the appearance of the components on it, compared to the old faulty board. They did not even have the same part numbers! The original board was AS REVA while the new one was PCA REV B. The new board had and extra resistor network RP2 while the old one had SMD resistors in the same area. Most of the parts on the old one were SMD devices while this one looked more old fashioned. Unless Bally had a lot of these old style board lying around and were trying to get rid of it, well only a Bally Tech support can tell us which is which. I was a bit reluctant

17 to try this new board with different components and part number. The only things that matched were the two connectors J1 and J2 and ICs U1 and U2. I took a leap of faith and installed the new board and the Reel assembly in the machine. Powered up and the fault was gone. Lesson learned: like everything else in life, sometimes you just have to trust your intuition and take that step. What ve you got to lose, a burned board ;)? Until next time. - Sunil Davidson sdavidson@slottechs.com Slot Tech Advertisement Advertisement Your ad here Contact Randy Fromm editor@slot-techs.com Page 17

18 Subscriptions & Back Issues Why back issues of are important to own... is strictly technical. As such, the magazine's contents are not time critical. The repair information and technical data contained in past issues is just as valid today as it was the day it was published. Additionally, current and future articles more-or-less assume that readers are already familiar with what has been covered in past issues. This editorial policy assures that Slot Tech Magazine's contributing writers are not limited to "writing down" to the level of a novice technician but are free to continue to produce the most comprehensive technical articles in the gaming industry. Randy Fromm's is published monthly by: 1944 Falmouth Dr. El Cajon, CA tel fax editor@slot-techs.com Subscription rates: Domestic (USA & Canada) 1 year - $ years - $ International 1 year - $ years - $ Back Issues Printed back issues are available for onlysix months from the date of publication. All single issues of Slot Tech Magazine are $10.00/ea. For further details on the contents of each issue, please refer to the website at slot-techs.com. To order, fax a PO or a note listing the issues you need. Complete archive (2001 to present) available online. Visit slot-techs.com for details. Invoice me! PO Number Company Name Contact Address Address City State/Prov. Country Zip/Postal Code Telephone Type of card: [ ] American Express [ ] Discover [ ] MasterCard [ ] 1 year subscription, domestic [ ] Visa [ ] 1 year subscription, international Account Number: [ ] 2 year subscription, domestic [ ] 2 year subscription, international Expiration Date:

19 I can help you bring down the cost of casino electronics repairs Randy Fromm OK. You asked and I listened. My new tech class eliminates obsolete CRT monitor repair and the associated monitor repair lab. In just four or five days, your slot techs can learn to repair Power Supplies, LCD Monitors, Ticket Printers, Bill Validators and more. It s easy and it s fun. - Randy Fromm tel fax

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