The NLG Welcome Wagon

[a69mopar]

Welcome to the site Heath.  I will leave most of the questions to others.
   IGT S-Plus machines have been many peoples firsts. they are robust and parts are easily obtainable.

   When buying machines, people sometimes forget to ask for Clear/set/key chips . Not everyone can jump right into using key chips, so they aren't always included.
    Don't forget to get attendant keys also. 

Thanks,
Wayne

[HJSloan73]

Thanks for responding and good first buy advice Wayne, I will definitely be requesting!

-Heath

[shortrackskater]

Hello All, 
----------------
-Heath

 

Glad to have you here. I'll hold off on all the answers since most of our senior members will have better ones for you. 

But I can say, for your first machines I'd start with an IGT S plus and S2000. And for the "cartoon" game, you can get an IGT Game King which will have some fun older video slot games on it... like Fortune Cookie - my favorite.
"Thank you for calling Mr. Lucky's - can I take your order please." 
With the GK, you'll get poker games, blackjack, and keno as well.

[jay]

I will echo Waynes comments the IGT S+ machines are tanks and are a good first slot. Lots of parts on the open market and a wide variety of people to get support if you ever need it.
The Set/Clear chips are for these. The Key Chips are for the S2000.

The S+ basically uses 2 chips. A game chip and a reel chip. Think of the game chip as the OS and the Reel chip as the theme.
With a new set of chips, glass and reel strips your S+ can go from a 2 coin Black Tie to a 5 line, 5 coin Triple diamond.
There are tournament chips, so you can play against time or a set number of coins.
The S+ uses "coins" 1 coin in, matched with the sample in the coin comparator gives one credit.
The SET chip is used to activate the bill validator and set a denomination, when you enter in a dollar into the validator if it is SET for quarters then you get 4 credits for the $
You use the SET chip anytime you swap the game chip.
The history of the machine is held in CMOS and backed up by a 3.5v soldered on battery - generally 10years or better life on those. When they battery goes the CMOS gets scrambled.
The Clear chip which is not used very often is what restores the integrity of the machine and basically brings it back to factory.
Now that I have finished singing its praises the downside to this platform is the bill validator. When IGT stopped supporting this machine they stopped paying JCM (Japanese Cash Machine) for updates to the bill validator so the "newest" bills are not recognised by the validator. There are protocol adapters on the market that will allow you to use a bill validator from a new platform and convert it to what the S+ wants but the sum of the parts might be more than what you paid for the slot. I upgraded mine to the latest version and just left it at that. My machines use quarter sized tokens, I roll my tokens into rolls like quarters and practically never use bills. I have used the SET chip to a 1c denomination so I can feed in a dollar bill and get 100 credits on the machine fast. I am also in Canada so US bills are not as common here.

The S2000 platform replaced the S+. It features dual stereo speakers that stick out like ears mid slot. All of the S+ games work on the S2000 either with their own reel chips or with the matching dimm. The glass and reel strips are the same size so you can use them as well. There are some Games like the Munsters and Pink Panther that did not exist on the S+ and have sound SIMMS that play theme songs.  You use a key chip to change settings and denominations. The S2000 can be coinless via vi TITO (ticket in ticket out). In the home environment this translates to bills in, tickets out. Natively you can't put the ticket back in as the master computer that runs the casino is obviously not there. Bettor Slots however has created an after market TITO board that will read back the tickets back in. You would need one of these for each machine you purchase if you plant to use ticket in. With that said a number of the S2000s you buy are coinless. So if you want to use coins you will need to acquire a coin head, coin comparator, coin optics and a hopper.
Again these parts are readily available in the market but they are higher $$ than the S+ version. These machines are still used in the casinos and the bill validators are easily brought up to date.

Now with regards to the legality of slot machines and the 30year rule. 
Unlicensed Gambling is illegal in all its forms.
This means no home poker games for money, No betting on the football game with your buddies.
You however can buy dice, and cards both could be used for gambling.... or monopoly, crib, bridge etc.

Unless someone complains that your running an illegal gaming operation your not going to run afoul of the law.....
It is very unlikely Elliot Ness is going to be breaking down any doors.  In particular I run my slots on tokens so no one is complaining to the authorities that they lost their lunch money.
To that point if I load up my machines with 100 credits, I find that people play a couple of spins and walk away.
This is why I roll my tokens. I give them a coin cup, with a roll of tokens, they crack the roll, play until they run out and then come back shaking the cup like an attic looking for another coin roll.
No sense of loss = No sense of gain. The only other way I can drive engagement is to put the machines into tournament mode.
I would go cashless and run whatever machine your wife wants.

I acquired my machines when I was living in PA and since they lit up and didn't use real money - I deemed them animated lamps. I bought them in Ohio where they were legal.
There is no inter-state border control so if you throw one or two in the back of your SUV and bring them home the only person to complain will be your buddy who helps you carry them into the basement.
Beer and Pizza will solve that issue.

[HJSloan73]

Hello shortrackskater, happy to be here and have found this site! Thanks for the response and yes I have been eyeballing GKs as well, but was concerned about age which jay had some advise on....


Hey jay, thanks for the comprehensive response. Thanks for clarifying the differences in the S+ and S2000 and the pros and cons. I see you said you run your S+ machines with coins, do you find maintenance to be a chore with coins? I assumed that having them coin operated would entail a lot more hardware failures leading to more corrective and preventive maintenance...or is it in your experience not that large of an increase?

I ask because I would like to have one that uses coins for that throwback feel and like you said there is something more to it when you insert coins and receive them back upon a win and not just digital 1s & 0s, but didnt want to get overwhelmed in the beginning with any extra maintenance tied to it.

I appreciate your frankness and honestly about the legal issues, I feel the same as you but figured I would tip-toe into this and the fact that the 'tank' cabinets happen to fall into the timeframe I assumed it would be a good place to start. Not to mention looking at the handful of sellers I found online I could get a few S+/S2000s for the price of one of the type machines my wife really likes 

When looking around I am by far finding more shops in Ohio than anywhere else on the east coast. Been searching my local/regional craigslist and all I am finding in my area are the Japanese token slot machines...anyone have any experience or opinion on these?

[shortrackskater]

Been searching my local/regional craigslist and all I am finding in my area are the Japanese token slot machines...anyone have any experience or opinion on these?

Those are Japanese "Pachislo" or "skill stop" machines. We don't consider them "real" slot machines in any way, at least I don't. I had two at one time, and bought two more to give away as gifts. I think the most I paid for one was $175, and less for the rest. I think importers here buy them used by the pallet load and probably pay as low as $30 - $50 maybe per unit. My friends have been to Japan and have seen multiple parlors with hundreds of them in operation. I think they're turned over quickly to make room for newer themes.
Those were never placed  in Las Vegas although some these machines may have a famous casino name or "LAS VEGAS" on the belly glass. Sellers try to market these as "real Las Vegas slot machines," which is BS. Bally and I think Sega DID make some traditional electromechanical and mechanic machines that had a stop function for the reels but they didn't have all the fancy MPU's in them.
With that said... they actually can be fun to play. You insert tokens, push down a small toggle lever and the reels spin until you press the stop buttons below each reel. Supposedly old Japanese men are great at stopping them on the symbol they want (Thus the name "skill stop").
The best ones have a video screen on top above the reels that will sort of play out an anime "story" so to speak, especially when a bonus round is coming. And you will know that because during play, a LOT of lights will start signaling that "it's coming." These machines are crazy loud and when the bonus hits, it's MUCH louder. During the bonus rounds, tokens come out each play as the game software takes over, making each play a winning outcome. The only thing I ever had to replace in the one I gave to my sister, was a power supply which was something like $30 at the time and was basically plug and play.
Now if your wife likes "cartoon" type slot machines, she might like one of these. Look around for themes and watch them play on YouTube. Then you can buy her one and justify getting 3,4,5, genuine slot machines for yourself! 

STILL... these are NOT "real" slot machines. I prefer IGT, Bally, Williams, and all the old mechanical machines such as Milll, Jennings, etc., with American words and voices.
I don't want my IGT Top Dollar to blurt out: "Kimi wa shōshada yo!" (君は勝者だよ) when it finishes a bonus round. 

[jay]

I lived in Japan for a while and there are Pachinko and Pashilo - conventially called "Pachi"  parlors everywhere. The Pashilo is the slot equivelent.
Japan has rules against gambling so the machines are not nearly as regulated.

The major difference is that the Japanese machines are skill-stop machines - meaning you press a button when you want the reel to stop. These make them a game of skill (like a pinball machine) vs an insturment of gambling. Typically they have a switch that controls the level of difficulty as opposed to a fully audited RNG (Random Number Generator). The win %% on a North American 3 reel machine is the result of 3 random numbers, against probable odds based on the number of symbols.
Just because a machine might be proclaimed to pay out 87.5% that is the result of probablities over 10million spins vs any forced %%.

Fundementally they use tokens - they are very close to a US quarter in size but substantially less in weight and the metal quality is not consistent.
You buy xx number of tokens for zz amount of Yen. The value of a token can vary widely between parlors and the value can change during slow times kind of like a happy hour for gamblers.  These are what I use in my machines at home. Due to the wide variety of tokens if you need some buy a bunch from the same source. In the typical north american machine they use coin comparitors so if the token is not metalically identical they are rejected. I have just over 10,000.

Gaming tokens cannot be refunded or exchanged for cash. SO they use a chucky cheeze system where a person takes their winnings and exchanges it for prizes. The prizes are usually in sealed bags with a serial number on them. The patron walks out of the Pashilo parlor with their giant stuffed bear, and goes two doors down to a "prize" redemption center where they just happen to want to buy a giant stuffed bear in a sealed bag. These prize redemption centers are in no way affiliated with the pachi-parlors.  (ya right).

The rules are that you can not "win" more than 3x your bet. You bet 5 "metals" and your maxium win is 15. To get around this the machines have "fever" rounds where if you hit certain symbols the machine goes into an auto-mode where it will do 30 (or some number) self spins with each resulting in a win of 15 metals. You will also see promotions for the "golden token". This is where the parlor owner has a special colored token (usually multi colored) with a number on it that they put inside a couple of the machines. If your lucky and win - this might be worth 5000 tokens and you can get a bigger prize. In the case of a Pashilo there are predictable "fever" cycles. These are far from random.

Japan has a huge comic book following - "Manga". Some are ongoing forever, (think archie comics) while others are short lived but have a flash in the pan moment (think season 1 squid games). The machines are created and cycled out just as fast. So you will see thousands of these sold to other markets usually with less than a years usage on them. There is no domestic market for these due to the tiny homes that people live in, and the neighbors would complain about the noise, so they are sold off to other parlors or in pallets overseas.

If you go to the Pachi-talk forum you will find a bunch of aftermarket products - Spring loaded Slot handles to trigger the spin. If your installing one of these you better have the machine bolted down as they are very light weight and a pull might bring the machine down on top of you. People have various techniques to adjust the coin mech to accept quarters - the challenge is that whlle the coins are accepted - the hoppers often jam when doing this. Auto-stop devices that connect to the underside of the reel stop buttons so they appear to randomally stop like a north american machine.
In my opinion if you get one of these machines - I would celebrate it for its differences rather than to try and make it over to be a NorthAmerican machine. They are fun to play but if they stop working then you are not going to find parts to repair.

[jay]

Coins typically are no more maintaince than tito both have their pluses and minuses.

The only issue with coins is having enough. Having a hopper with 400 coins .... thats $100 if your running quarters plus slush to play.
Multiply that by 4x machines. Having two teenagers in the house and their friends and you might start to have an inventory problem.
Another case for using tokens. I also like to roll my tokens so I have a coin rolling machine.

In the early days in a casino setting there were no such thing as bill validators, so you had change carts and that was a Pita (pain in the A**) for the casino.
You had coin cups - which are quite collectable these days. These got used as ashtrays, and sometimes for urnine collection when someone did not want to walk away from a hot machine. Coins are dirty (due to dirty people) so you had the small packages of wet wipes all over the place.  Lots of consumeables for the casino to contend with.

Hoppers typically hold around 500-600 coins and pay a maximum of 300-400 coins, and while big wins were paid by giant cheques, the problem was overfilled hoppers more so than empty hoppers. Various techniques were created such as drop doors that dumped excess coins to the slot stand below. The challenge however was keeping track of all that cash for the gaming comission. They wanted to know excactly how much coin in / coin out came from each machine. So you had gaurd number 1 emptying the hopper into a big cart (think hot dog cart) while guard number 2 was taking readings off the meters. All sorts of chances that a bouncy coin went some place it should not, and human error in reading a meter in a dimly lit environment. Not to mention this work was being done by minimum wage employees with shoe sizes larger than their IQs. You then had to count the coins in the back room (usually done by weight) and balance this against the meters and any discrepency had to be investigated and accounted for. So if you were empting 80 machines into your cart which machine caused the discrepency is not all that clear so they had to devise creative ways to take from a group of machines at a time and narrow it down. Of course sometimes you would find extra coins, and then there were other extra coins like dimes and stuff that got into the quarter machine. A good number of people would pour drinks into a machine to loosen it up. This caused a huge mess in the machine. Theft in terms of monatary value was not really an issue - You get 10 rolls of quarters - they way a ton. However someone taking out a couple bucks at a time caused a huge accounting issue with the gaming regulators.

In terms of wear and tear - The hopper knife will wear out. These are a nylon based bolt on that goes on the top of the hopper. This is what the coin rolls across the top to get to the tray. In a home environment you will never wear out a knife you just don't get that level of usage but when you acquire a 30+ year old machine, that knife comes with a lot of wear. Typically under a $10 replacement part.

With TITO - you have paper supplies, the paper is typically thermal - if you don't get much use on your machine its possible for the paper to degrade and turn black. The thermal wires on the printer do burn out from time to time. The belts on a bill validator (also your TITO in) need to be managed and replaced over time. Again in a home environment you won't drive the wear but you are not dealing with a new machine.

[HJSloan73]

@shortrackskater, too funny...To scratch the itch while I search for my first Casino style slot (been looking at S+, S200, & older Bally's based on feedback here and some PMs), I picked up two of these Pashilo machines about an hour from me a couple days ago.

Wife and I have been playing them after work and you're right they are pretty fun after learning some things about them since I don't read Japanese  . I got two that have video screens and both run through stories and have a surprising amount of different type 'bonus' games for the age of these. Both of them about 25 yrs old and well kept up maintenance-wise. Today I am going to wire in some 10W, 500ohm potentiometers to the speakers since this friggin things are super loud even at lowest volume setting. Maybe I will start to learn some Japanese 

@jay Thanks for some color here on these units. I'm guessing visiting a Pachi parlor in Japan must be like an American casino floor x10 when it comes to sound and lights after just a couple of evenings of running hundreds of tokens through these two machines!!!  After playing some with the coins I can appreciate why you run some machines with the tokens. I have like another 1000 on the way since I can tell even the large amount that was sold with the two machines are not going to be enough...

Thanks for the feedback on maintenance concerns, that makes total sense that these were designed with the thought of somewhat constant play 24/7/365 so my home usage isnt going to come anywhere near that, so a well refurbished unit for the first buy should last pretty long before needing any work. Been talking with my wife about possibly switching them over to quarters eventually and from what I have seen online it looks like a pretty straighforward modification.

I have been eyeballing a Blazing 7’s Double Jackpot 5 line that is on Scott's Coin Op Games , added that site to my searches after one of the members here recommended his site from positive feedbacks as well as being members here too!!   

Overall it has been fun to play these units and I have been tinkering on the inside and trying to mark things inside with English translations to make it easier for future repairs/maintenance. Totally need to get a full sized cabinet now  !!!

[shortrackskater]

@shortrackskater, too funny...

 
We'll wait for your first post when you get a USA slot machine. 
Glad you two are able to have fun with those skill stops. 

[Steven]

Hi ,
New here.

[jay]

Welcome Stephen,

What brought you here ? Do you have slots with problems, looking to modify,  looking to buy ?

[Steven]

Good Morning Jay,

Inherited a IGT S2000 model and have sent it off for repair. Purchased a pair of S2000s to hold me over while my Cats and Dogs machine is out. Working now on cleaning these machines up. Need to replace some bulbs, sockets, a wire connector in the bottom I broke (yay me!). Building a game room at home planning for 5 slots when it's done. Also, need help on a feature that drives me insane. Every time the service button is pressed, it loads the machines up with credits. Would love to turn that off.


Also, this forum looks like forums I used to be on 20 years ago. If it's been around forever, how is the username Steven even availbale? (asking for a friend)

[Chris-socal]

We have been waiting for you to come around!
Welcome to your destiny! 

[pinballgod]

New here just bought my first slot machine
So much great info here
Thanks
Phil

[Rob in AK]

Every time the service button is pressed, it loads the machines up with credits. Would love to turn that off.

Sounds like there is a tito device installed. It allows free credits with the service button. And also allows machine to accept tickets. I know there are different ones but the most common is tito@home. It has two switches on the board. If you turn them both off it disables the free credit feature. Hope this helps.

[shortrackskater]

Welcome member Steven (great name!) 

For future issues on your devices, please post in the appropriate forums.

IGT S2000
/nlg/index.php?board=81.0

TITO
/nlg/index.php?board=112.0

[tsudbury]

Hi all!

Just purchased my first couple of slot machines, so I figured I'd join in... I have a BB2 that's working perfectly, no changes needed.  I have a BB1 that also works (just no room for it at the moment), but I'm hoping to chat with someone who knows a lot more about these machines. I've searched everywhere online, but info on these things are very hard to find.  My long term goal is to either find a very specific BB1 machine I'm looking for, or try to find the software I need and convert this one over.  The latter option seems more realistic at this point, though it will require a lot of custom printing and swapping out parts.

If anyone has some knowledge or advice on these types of machines, I'd love to hear from you!

Trevor

[shortrackskater]

Hi all!

Just purchased my first couple of slot machines, so I figured I'd join in... I have a BB2 that's working perfectly, no changes needed.  I have a BB1 that also works (just no room for it at the moment), but I'm hoping to chat with someone who knows a lot more about these machines. I've searched everywhere online, but info on these things are very hard to find.  My long term goal is to either find a very specific BB1 machine I'm looking for, or try to find the software I need and convert this one over.  The latter option seems more realistic at this point, though it will require a lot of custom printing and swapping out parts.

If anyone has some knowledge or advice on these types of machines, I'd love to hear from you!

Trevor

 

For general or specific questions, please post in WMS forums for video or reel slots.

WMS REEL -  /nlg/index.php?board=86.0
WMS VIDEO - /nlg/index.php?board=72.0

[shortrackskater]

Hi all!

Just purchased my first couple of slot machines, so I figured I'd join in... I have a BB2 that's working perfectly, no changes needed.  I have a BB1 that also works (just no room for it at the moment), but I'm hoping to chat with someone who knows a lot more about these machines. I've searched everywhere online, but info on these things are very hard to find.  My long term goal is to either find a very specific BB1 machine I'm looking for, or try to find the software I need and convert this one over.  The latter option seems more realistic at this point, though it will require a lot of custom printing and swapping out parts.

If anyone has some knowledge or advice on these types of machines, I'd love to hear from you!

Trevor

 

For general or specific questions, please post in WMS forums for video or reel slots.

WMS REEL -  /nlg/index.php?board=86.0
WMS VIDEO - /nlg/index.php?board=72.0