New Life Games Tech Forums

Hi Guys, I turned on my Cleopatra today and everything was fine for about 6 spins. Then it came up with a meters disconnected error and the player panel locked up. I opened the door and reset it with the Jackpot key, closed the door and pretty soon it came up with a coin-in jam error. I opened the door again and this time I smelled something hot. I get to pocking around and find my meter board is fried. About a year ago I had replaced all the meters on the board with 270 ohm resistors and something must have shorted because they all like like :98- I took the meter board out and put the jumper in the plug to bypass the board. Changed power supply in case it got damaged and now all I get when I turn it on is the coin-in jam error, player panel lights all lit and one light behind reel 1 first pay line is lit. Any ideas?

Got an OEM (non modded) meter board that you can throw in?  Just curious...what was the reason for the resistors?

Jason

Before I read about the jumper thing to bypass the meter board the resistor thing was the way to fool the machine into thinking the meters were still there. Thanks for the offer of the meter board, but I just as soon not have it in there. Too noisy. I'm wondering what kind of short could cause it to burn up and what else went with it :103- By the way, I had an LED light in one of the sockets on my BV bezel, it's been in there almost a year too.

This is all guess work, but in a good machine if you remove the IO next to the MPU you will get a meter disconnected error. If you fried the meter board, just maybe you also toasted the IO. The backlit also plugs into this same IO.  ????????????????

I swapped the cabinet I/O with a known working one. Same problem and the origional board works in another machine

I didn't think that the meter loopback required a resistor?

If you don't use the normal jumper to bypass you can remove the meters from the board and put a 270 ohm resistor in their place

Yeah, I just use a piece of wire as a jumper to kill the meter.  Wonder if a different MPU would change anything?  Kind of a reach.

Jason

I have had "coin in errors" and the only way I could get rid of them was do a full clear

I guess I'll try that. The biggest thing that concerns me is that something shorted enough to burn up that meter board

I would power off, then re-seat the door I//O card.
it the  connections to the door I/O is lost while the machine is on that is the normal error that shows up.

I might have a bad Door I/O card I suppose. The machine has 2 on the door, they are both the same part number and it hasn't helped to swap them, but if one was bad it swapping them probably wouldn't matter

does anyone else have any ideas? I tried a full clear and it worked all the way through programming sounds and machine type etc, then it reset to "ten key I/O card not found". I pulled the I/O card and it looked as if some of the plug socket pin solder connections were ringed so I resoldered all 60 whatever connections for the plugs on each end of the board. Didn't help :8- Could I have a bad motherboard or something? Still getting the coin-in jam error. And there was still a short somewhere that burned the meterboard

For the heck of it...go to I/O within the menus and rescan the nettplex devices.  I think there is a CRC reset as well. 

Jason

Door and cabinet I/O are not Netplex devices.
They are actually SENET, so scanning for Netplex devices will not solve the issue.
The machine actually does it every time you power up the machine anyways

I would actually locate the senet connections at the motherboard and double check that they are connected properly
Door SENET harness goes into the one labeled door SENET, etc.
They are the 3 closest to the cover at the top of the motherboard.
Also be sure the PS behind the reels is fully seated if you have not done so already.
IF that does not help it, and if you are up to it pull and examine the motherboard (back plane)

When I first got my S2000 (it was a vision ready) I had the same issue.
I did the following
Verified the checksums on the Game, Base, Version, and SS chips (all ok)
Testing the RAM on MPU and Data EEPROM on motherboard (basically clearing it)
reconnecting every connector on the motherboard and making sure they are going to the proper device.
Netplex does not matter but SENET requires them to go to the proper connector on the motherboard.
It was frustrating so I stopped messing with it and decided to look at it again later that day or the next day it came up with some error cleared it with key and it started up fine.
about a year or 2 later when I added a spectrum to it I found out what may have been the reason why my machine was having issues when i first got it.
the motherboard had damaged traces (too much current through netplex connections) That is why they added fuses to the motherboard for the 1270 MPU

Thanks for the tips Foster. I've been avoiding pulling the motherboard because it's a pain in the ass, but I did check the fuses and they're good. I've got a 504B/960 set I can put in in place of the 1270 set. I'll probably do that for a test while I check the other boards over

PROBLEM SOLVED-Ended up being one or both door I/O cards had gone bad. I swapped the pair out of my Denver Duck and game works. I didn't want to swap one at a time and risk damaging a good one if I picked wrong. Easier and possibly cheaper just to get 2 new ones. Thanks everyone who offered suggestions :89-

It will not cause any problems changing one board at a time to determine which board is bad.

I'll try that then. Any ideas o what might have caused a short bad enough to burn up my meter board?

Anyone that can give you the ans. to that question must have a crystal BALL. My experience is if you have a short you should see some smoke damage and where the Positive wire touch ground you should see some damage to metal caused by the arc.  ( this could be two wires, a pos and neg.)  I'm not going to commit on your resistor mod. simply because I have no idea what you did.

If I read all this thread correctly, you have repaired you resistor mod, changed a IO board and replaced the power supply, now the machine is OK. One would think one of those three was the dirty dog.

Now I'm going to ask a question I don't know the ans. to. I'm thinking the meters would be low voltage, is it possible for a power supply to fail and send a charge of high voltage electricity into the low voltage circuit ??  If this is possible I think I would test the power supply you removed before installing in another machine.

http://newlifegames.net/nlg/index.php?topic=1988.msg14955#msg14955 (http://newlifegames.net/nlg/index.php?topic=1988.msg14955#msg14955)

You could be right on the power supply, I'll check it before I use it again. Sending AC voltage through a resistor would cook it fast. There's been talk in the past about how putting LEDs in the BV bezel can cause damage too, but I can't find the thread to see what the potential damage was.

I don't need the thread, I can personally tell you what happens, LED in BV bezel will burn traces on BV bezel board. LED in coin denomination display will burn traces on display board. I F/U two of each !!!!!!!!!!!! 

We were talking about this a couple of weeks ago.  I'll try to explane, if the LED your using has two wire contacts that wrap from one side of the wedge to the other, your asking for TROUBLE. If you take a wire cutter and cut each of those contact wires in half ( so they will not make contact with both sides of the holder ) you will be OK.

Thanks for the info Buzz. I just looked at the socket I pulled out yesterday and removed the LED lamp from it. No cross connection with the leads on the lamp so it must have been something differant that caused my problem. The only change I made to the electronics of the game before this happened was to replace 2 missing screws on the LED line stepper display board on the left side of the reel glass. It uses 2 circuit boards piggybacked together and held with 3 screws. Two were missing so I put replacements in. Other than that nothing was changed before the incident. Of course, sometimes stuff just goes to sh!t. There doesn't have to be a good reason for it

Tell me about it.Yesterday I sold a working 4X Diamonds machine that was set up for dollar tokens, the buyer wants quarters. All I did was change coin head, comparator bracket with optics, hopper and the comparator The damn machine hasn't worked since. I know I've changed every part again at least 3 times, even pulled a MPU out of another machine with the same game ( this one is a 16" the other machine is a 9")  I'm thinking a double barrel with double 00 shot might be the fix for it.

Besides the double 00 error you're wanting to put on the screen is it showing any error codes or messages on it's own?

I don't understand what is accomplished by replacing the meters with 270 ohm resistors?? to correct the meter disconnect tilt. the only thing that has anything to do with that circuit is pin 9 and 10. pin 10 is bground, it goes thru a trace on the meter board and that trace is connected to pin 9, so when the board is plugged in ,the ground goes to pin 9 and onto the cabinet I/O basically telling the I/O board that the board is plugged in, when you unplug the board,the ground is removed  from the circuit and the I/O informs the CPU the the board is disconnected.

That board is powered by +25vdc on pin 7.  there are 1N4002 diodes that went across the meter coils, perhaps one of these shorted and put +25vdc to the meter circuits that also go back to the lower cabinet I/O????

I would think that if any voltage in the power supply is bad it would be the +25vdc.   this power supply only supplies two voltages to operate this machine, 13vdc and 25 vdc,   no AC voltages come out of the supply.

Jim

That's true and a good point. I haven't checked the diodes on the meter board to see if there bad, It would take a lot more than 25v dc to burn up a 1 watt resistor though I would think, but if I had a shorted rectifier diode in the power supply couldn't that send an AC ripple through the circuit and cause the damage? Cabinet IO is fine. It's just the door IO(s) and meter board that are bad

That is a Switching Power Supply so the AC ripple would be higher frequency than 60Hz.
More likely in the mid to treble audio frequency range.