IGT S+ lights up but LED doesn’t (update: Did set15, DBV mostly works!!)

[Kfrankie]

So another update here (I know I seem giddy like a school girl here).  This is my saga. As I suggested earlier, after I purchased the machine I had to store it at my mother’s house to hide it from my wife. I had a Bally e-series 2209 model in my garage for about a month, which she described as a piece of ****, which I ultimately junked because I was tired of hearing all of the complaints.  She knew I was getting another one for 2 weeks ago for $200, which she reluctantly approved. After initially looking at it with the seller, the front door LED display wouldn’t turn on, so I told him no and came home empty handed. That same day he cut the price to $100, so I took a shot knowing that I was potentially buying another piece of junk. Hence my decision to take it elsewhere to avoid the complaints, to wait on parts delivery and to ultimately get it working. With little luck, and some wonderful advice from the boys here, I ultimately soldered in a new 3.6 v battery to the mpu board, and replaced a broken fuse cap that was preventing the top 6v fuse from holding. I also wasted about $60 ordering a new transformer off eBay that I didn’t need and can’t return. Once the LED lit up, I was able to find an old PSR and re-program the machine to payout instead of ringing that god awful bell after each win. Also was able to get the volume working. All of this over about a 2 week timeframe without telling my wife (who I love dearly btw).  That was through last Sunday.  Yesterday I went to Goodwill and picked up $9 cabinet for a stand, and snuck it onto my basement.

Last night I broke the news to my wife that I had actually purchased that machine, but for half the price, and that the cost to fix it ended up being roughly what the initial $200 purchase price would have been. I also told her that I wanted to bring it home on Friday. Her reaction was not nearly as bad as I expected, (she didn’t kick me in the nuts or anything), and she seems ok this morning.

As you can tell, I’ve endured great hardships in bringing this project to fruition. The greatest remaining task is to get the 250 lb. machine to my house, and then onto the stand in my basement. After that, I may need to adjust the hopper knife because it only pays out about 30 coins before it gives me the 3300 code. I would also like to eventually get the external “side car” bill validator working. I’ve attached a photo of this beast for everyone’s viewing pleasure. I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. Sort of like Odysseus in that movie as he was returning home.

[shortrackskater]

  

[Kfrankie]

 

So got the machine into my basement and up on a stand.  I would like to take a shot at getting the bill validator working. Thought it was a lost cause because some jackass had jammed the cash box back in with the handle facing down.  Said **** it and ripped it out.  It’s a sidecar because is a 1992 S+ right before igt started including internal bill validators. Will I need a set chip even if it was working before the battery replacement?  Not sure if it was working, but possible. Here’s a couple photos:

[Kfrankie]

Inside tag

[jay]

Typically the bill head lights up if it’s ready to accept.
If you have the PSR it should show a test that will indicate if the validator is active.
Typically a battery change deactivates the validator.

Using a $1 does the unit draw in the bill.

$1s has the greatest chance at being accepted.

[Kfrankie]

Using a $1 bill doesn’t work. I think I have the correct (809 based on the code displayed in both the settings and on the eprom) PSR but it’s very confusing to tell what’s happening before you reach the [3] hopper test. The PSR test for the bill validator is in the “group” before that at [9] but again it unclear what’s happening before the hopper test, even following the PSR verbatim.  The only solution here appears to be a Set chip.  But even then, won’t I still need an update?

[sixcardmark]

You need a set15 to activate the BV.

[jay]

The procedure to use the SET chip is in Rick’s FAQs on the bottom right of the home page.

Basically you pull your game chip out, put in the set, choose the denomination, swap back to your game chip.

This will get the validator up and running with the old money and/or will determine if you have other issues. No point in upgrading your head if your transport or other bits are not working.  To clearly answer your question- you will likely need to update the validator. Even if you send it out for an upgrade you will need to use the set chip to activate it.

[Kfrankie]

Ordered a set 15 chip from a member this evening. Can I expect that at least a new $1 or $5 bill will work? That’s all I’m trying for here,

[jay]

When IGT stopped paying JCM for Bill upgrades for the S+ the new $5 had just came out and it was not offically released.
The new $100 was released several months later.  Sooooo depending on who you get to flash your head you can get the new $5 as that update escaped into the wild and several of our vendors have it. The new $100 was never created. The offical releases don't include the new $5 or $100.

IGT dropped this support to put a bullet into the S+ platform and drive sales of the S2000. Even if the US based casino was giving up their S+'s they were being sold into the overseas market (Dominican, Peru, etc) this still impacted sales of the S2000. By limiting the machines ability to take new money they were attempting to close off this market to secondary sales.

Mexico which has a safety problem, so they eliminated cash in their casinos. You go to a safe room at the back of the casino and swap cash for tokens to be used in machines or tables. Even if the bad guys come in full force they can steal all the gaming tokens but they can't covert to cash. You will still find a good number of S+ machines in Mexico city.

Now what you will find interesting is that the same DBV200 or WBA11 that is used for the S+ works with all the new money when used with the S2000 - the difference is that the S2000 uses a different communication protocol than the S+. You can get a protocol converter that will allow a S2000 head to be used in a S+ as it converts the communication protocl. They are quite costly but relatively cheap if you compare this to buying a S2000 and having to do all the labor to take a machine off the gaming floor.

The new $1 is not materially different that the others and pretty much any bill head at any firmware rev will accept it. That is why we suggested starting with a $1 for your trouble shooting and work our way up .....

There is also a series of dip switches on the bottom of the head - these are used to select protocol and identifies what bills are accepted. At one point someone figured out how to take a pencil and make a few marks on a $5 that the head identified as $50. So for a period of time the casinos had disabled acceptance of the $50 and told patrons that $50s were unlucky.

[Kfrankie]

So another update… I took a good look at the PSR, and then went through my machine by pressing the test button and recording everything that happened whenever I turn the key or hit a particular button. Was able to determine that I definitely have the Bill validator activated on the “9-1” setting. Have a SET 15 chip coming from a friendly board member to try to get that straight. Also fixed what though was a hopper issue by just filling it with about $200 in quarters.

Now have a question about the MPU board’s DIP switches. I understand what each switch does from the chart posted on the site. For some reason my DIPs are numbered 0-7, not 1-8.  I assume I just moved the numbers over one and I’ll have my answer to that. What I’m trying to do is enable the progressive jackpot thing. Honestly, don’t even know how this works because it’s not like there’s a separate meter that tells you what the jackpot will be. My first 3 switches are (presumably) ON, while 4-8 are OFF.  My concern is, I don’t want to flip these things the wrong way, and when I tried, I didn’t seem to be able to move any of them. Is there a particular technique I need to use, do the slide up or down, do I push them in? Really concerned about breaking something after I’ve come this far.  Here’s a photo.

[sixcardmark]

Progressives need a progressive meter unit. 

[Stayouttadabunker]

The switches on those are like roller latches.
You simply press down to push them in...depending on which side you press in turns the switch ON or OFF.
I normally run S+'s with dips 1-4 ON and 5-8 OFF.
In your case, 0-3 ON, 4-7 OFF.
Can you post a picture of your dip switches and MPU?
I don't recall seeing "0-7" dips before?
I've been working with S+'s for quite a long time too...getting close to 40 years now.

[jay]

Without having a progressive in the machine - it really doesn't matter what position the dipswitch is in.

For the S+ there are two flavors of progressives.
The first is the IGT progressive. Its a small meter - 5 numbers - comprized of 7 segment LEDs - They are designed to live behind the paytable glass and plugs into one of the harnesses in the top box. It basically replaces the sticker that reads progressive. You program it using the SET chip.
I have these on my three machines as my second level progressive.

The other kind is a Mikon Progressive. These are more common than finding the IGT ones. You would want a ChamII+
The + plus is important as it means its a standalone progressive. You program it with a PC running an old DOS program called PSP.
A couple of things to note is that PSP requires older DOS. So if you have anything newer than Win XP - (The history being Win 7,Win 95,98,ME,XP) you need to run an application called DOS-BOX to emulate the 64bit DOS that came with Win98 - Its a free download.  Most modern laptops also no longer have a real serial port so you will need a USB to 9 pin serial adapter and you need to modify the 9pin serial cable to short out the CTS and RTS pins. Sounds more complicated than it is.

The meter for a MIkohn is a much larger meter which is designed to go behind the payglass - the payglass would normally have the mylar cut out for this. Its pretty much the width of the machine. I hacked my machines a bit and installed this meter in the player tracking bar - I have about 60 game kits and didn't want to modify or buy special glass for each of the kits. Some people have mounted the meter in a small box (usually home built) and put these on top of the machines. When I say hacked (i meant it) I had to cut a slice out of my reel shelf to drop the display down a bit to make it fit.

To wire the Mikohn up there is a 4 pin connector on the mother board - you would use 3 wires from this connector to the ChamII+ - The pins are COIN-IN, Ground and Data. The forth is unused (and in the manual it says unused). When a coin or credit is played the Coin in and ground momentairly short which causes the Mikon to increment its coin count. When a jackpot is hit, the pins are shorted for a few seconds which triggers the display to show a WIN. When the reset key is turned on the machine the jackpot is reset to the base amount.

In my case with 3 S+'s and a PE+ I have have a linked progressive. This means as I play on one machine the jackpot total goes up on all of them. Any one machine can win the jackpot. In my case this is accomplished using a CON1 controller (still programmed by PSP) and then each machine has a CHamI  (also known as a LED5 - Link Extension Device). Each machine has 3 wires (as note above) that are wired back to the CON1  controller, and another 2 wires run from the CON1 to LED5 as that is the serial feed to the LED5 display driver.  I have mounted Ethernet Jacks (RJ45 plates) on the back of each machine and have the 5 wires run up to the jack. Then each machine has a ethernet cable back to the box with the controller in it. Keeps the wiring clean. With the CON1 you can also have larger overhead displays - these are managed by a Cham4 - it takes the same 2 wire input from the CON1 but instead of driving a display that is machine sized it drives a panel that is 16" wide and 4" tall. In my case I have a 1x2 (1 panel high and 2 panels wide) for a 32" display. I also have a 2 x 8 display that runs across the width of my room Its 2 panels high and 8 panels wide 10ft 8. with double height characters. I have a series of messages that go left to right or right to left, up or down in my choice of 3 colors.
With the Link controller in place I can also use the 2 wire data flow into a Mikohn Gateway which allows me to display the jackpot amount on my PE+ video poker. In a typical casino setting you would not mix Video Poker with Slots - you get a much higher win rate with video poker as compared to a slot. Casinos would have progressives for video poker or slots just not mixed. However my basement my rules....lol.

The other flavor of this is a CON2i Supercontroller - again the I' is important as it indicates that its for IGT. This would drive multiple ChamII (non + versions). The ChamII+ can also be programmed to work in a link configuration.  The CON2i also drives what is called a Supreme display which can handle graphics. The supreme is loaded using another Mikohn program called a downloader and you send it the Graphics files (like flames, coins falling etc) with carve outs for the progressive amounts and messages in various spots and fonts of your choosing.

You can't mix the CON2 and CON1 series boards as they are not compaitable.

From a progressive perspective you have a Base Award - typically this is set to be the same as the top award for the slot your paying. From a Nevada gaming perspective if you set it lower than the top award you have negatively changed the %% payback which is not allowed without a ton of paperwork.

You then have an increment amount - Casinos usually have this set as 1/8th of a cent (.00125). I set mine at 4% so for each quarter (or in my case token) that is played my progressive goes up by 1cent. Thats the visual que that my wiring is in tack. Then you have a max progressive. Mine is set to 999999 (unlimited). There is also a setting for a reset amount which is normally the same as the base award but you can set it to be anything.

Let us know if you have any specific questions.



 

[jay]

Here is the link to the game room section.
/nlg/index.php?topic=48173.0

You can see the large progressives - the 1x2 over the two slots and the much larger one over the craps table.

[Kfrankie]

Progressives need a progressive meter unit.

Got one laying around, or know where I can find one?  I’ve googled this and checked eBay, the results are surprising only sparse…

[Kfrankie]

In your case, 0-3 ON, 4-7 OFF.
Can you post a picture of your dip switches and MPU?
I don't recall seeing "0-7" dips before?
I've been working with S+'s for quite a long time too...getting close to 40 years now.

Sorry about the confusion.  The DIP switches are labeled #0-7 on the printed circuit board, but on the plastic piece they’re properly numbered 1-8.  See my above photo, can’t believe I missed that one. 

Now for the Bill validator DIPs I took off the metal faceplate and flipped the head unit over.  Took this photo, which I assume show these tiny little switches all in the OFF position, which allows for all bills to be accepted (ON rejects them). My SET chip should be arriving soon, and I understand I may only be able to use $1 and &5 bills, but just wanted to make sure this is correct so don’t have to pull it back out.

[Kfrankie]

Without having a progressive in the machine - it really doesn't matter what position the dipswitch is in.

For the S+ there are two flavors of progressives.
The first is the IGT progressive. Its a small meter - 5 numbers - comprized of 7 segment LEDs - They are designed to live behind the paytable glass and plugs into one of the harnesses in the top box. It basically replaces the sticker that reads progressive. You program it using the SET chip.
I have these on my three machines as my second level progressive.

. . .

Let us know if you have any specific questions.

Jay- thanks for the detailed explanation.  I’d love to see what one of your progressive meters looks like, because for some reason, I cannot find one anywhere on the Internet. For my machine, I suspect that it was rigged for progressive when it was in the casino because there’s a hole in the top of the machine that almost looks like a second reel crank was installed at one point. But if you look inside the hole, you can see the two plugs you were talking about. One of them goes to the 3 meters are next to the reels. Something was definitely installed on the side of the machine at the top, could that have been a progressive display sticking out of the side? Here’s a couple photos just for your enjoyment. You can also see what looks like a cut out pattern on the other side of the top interior of the machine for installation of something. Do you know where I can get an IGT LED display?

[Kfrankie]

Inside cutout pattern, meters, and Blue 10,000 sticker for jackpot which is cracking because it a sticker and not painted on like the others.

[Kfrankie]

Meters