J&T 7 Card Stud odd ball video poker machine

[rapidroy]

hi all
j&t can't find anything about it. I'm starting by replacing the battery when it comes in i will see if it boots past whats on the screen now.
Has anyone seen a 7 card stud video poker game?
see pics

[rapidroy]

i installed a new battery now it still boots to check screen but after it reads eprom 1 the screen goes black. i reseated the cards and cleaned up the board.

[Chris-socal]

I don’t know anything about these machines but did you go into bios and set the date and boot sequence?
Date probably doesn’t matter but boot sequence certainly might. I assume there is a PS2 port for a keyboard on the board.

Try re-seating the eeproms (carefully). Be sure you put them back in the same slot in the same direction. They will fry if installed backwards. 
That one IC looks like one of those Dallas chips that has an internal battery. The battery cannot be replaced and I don’t know if the machine will boot if its dead. Sorry I have zero experience with them.

Chris

[rapidroy]

I did not go into the bios i will have to find a old keyboard with the bigger plug, the eproms are in a cardco card and i really  dont understand how it even boots up without a os
Roy

[Chris-socal]

It might be on one of those eeproms.
Phoenix is the BIOS, once that is loaded the machine needs an OS, then the game files need  to load, many slot machines designed like this stored all of the needed information on a CD rom but they were in the early 2000s with advanced graphics.

Have you seen the machine operate?

I suspect one of your eeproms is an OS and the other is the game. Or the game is the OS.

Amazon sells a DIN keyboard adapter.
https://a.co/d/4KLjshF

[rapidroy]

I found a keyboard but cant get into the bios, the pause button seems like the only button that does anything. im thinking one of the eproms is bad. i dont know a thing about eproms.

[Chris-socal]

BIOS is before game loads

For Phoenix bios I think you press Esc or F2 repeatedly during fresh boot then an option should show to press F10 to get into setup.
Are you sure the keyboard is working? The light should illuminate when you press numeric keypad lock.

You are using a DIN keyboard?

It could be a bad eeprom but you didn’t answer if you have ever seen tne game run. It might have been bad all along and it might need a Dallas RAM clear…if that third chip really is a battery chip,

Chris

[rapidroy]

I’ve never seen it work I got it like this. I have (I think) a ATX keyboard from an old 386 or 486 machine. I taped esc key repeatedly then turned it off and tried all function key one at a time turning off each time. The nums lock light came on after it booted to the eprom line the pause button seem to pause the boot loading

[Chris-socal]

That’s strange, there has to be a way to get into bios. Your keyboard sounds good.

I just read that early versions of Phoenix can be difficult to get into. They said try repeated reboots while tapping F2 repeatedly.

But if its reading the first eeprom ok then you very well might have a problem with #2.

[rapidroy]

I going to keep trying to get in to the bios. but  i pulled the eprom card out then booted up and nothing changed on the screen it showed it was reading 0eprom then stopped at 1eprom without the card in. strange

after tapping the backspace key many times, once its booted without the eprom card i got a overflow error

[Chris-socal]

If the two empty sockets are U1 and U2, what are the names of the two eeproms? I can’t see the printing on the board at this angle.

And what is the empty socket up by the green battery? Isn’t that a critical component for the motherboard? Is that the cpu missing?

[rapidroy]

The 2 empty sockets are bank 2 bank3 the filled one are bank0 bank1
This is a AMD 386 board the empty socket is for a (i think) math coprocessor back in the day you could add it later. It has a label on the bios 386. I found out control alt del resets the power on

[Chris-socal]

Oh, its a co-processor. Gotcha.
Yes, ctrl alt del is the standard reboot sequence….but how do you get into bios?
Maybe pull the bios battery again and try tappinf f2 and f10 as it boots.

[rapidroy]

What do you think if I move all the boards to a different 386 MB see what happens?

[Chris-socal]

I highly suspect that bios has a setting specifically for booting to a device other than a hard drive or floppy disk.
I don’t think it would hurt to try.

[rapidroy]

apparently this version of bios does not have a setup utility you need a setup floppy disk thats why the keystrokes did not work. im still looking for a 386 MB

[rapidroy]

Ok I found a new MB it had a AMI bios and you are right i cant get it to boot to the cards its looking for a floppy or hard drive. so i swaped the bios with the phoenix and it booted to the same screen as above. you are right i think the bios is the key. i dont know anyone who can dump it and maybe fix it. do you?

[Stayouttadabunker]

I have a Dallas NVRam chip that has the battery in it.
I got it a few years ago for a project.
I have no idea if the onboard battery is any good but I've read that it has over 10 years of data retention in the absence of power.
You'd have to go into a specs sheet to see which pins it would power up on.

[rapidroy]

I'm not that computer smart. where would the Dallas chip go or replace?
i thought i saw "LOADING GAME" on the last line on the boot screen but i can seem to reproduce it for now.

[Chris-socal]

I might have started that rumor. When I first looked at your pictures I thought one of the ICs looked really tall, that is usually a battery-inclusive IC.
Looking again it almost looks to me like the IC is double socketed….which is fine.

Sorry I don’t have any other suggestions. I have personally never known a BIOS that didn’t need you to set it up if the board battery goes dead but maybe Phoenix built one especially for games that only has one setting and hence never needs to be set.

Chris