New Life Games Tech Forums

so I made a mistake a bought a CEi hot slot. The machine was in cosmetically good condition and came with a manual and some spares.  It had a battery code so I was gambling that it would be an easy fix.  I easily solved the battery code only to get a series of various other codes.  I worked through the remaining codes and fixed the remaining problems. 

now the trouble it turns out it has a 7 bar Eprom installed but has 7's and bars for reels. If anyone is aware of how cei works they don't have stepper motors just little dc motors and then optical sensors that read little silver strips on the reel.  It does a self test and determines it has the wrong reels for the eprom and barks at me.  I got a few extra parts for it including 7 bar reels (don't match glass but ok) I install the reels but the silver strips are damaged an can't be read properly.  So does anyone happen to have a 7's and bars eprom?  I would guess unlikely.  I do have the correct e prom for the good reels and glass but it won't boot.  Has anyone ever pulled the code off a bad eprom and flashed to new chip and had it work?  The other thing I am considering is to fix the silver strips on the 7bar reels, does anyone know if this would be some special material?  I was considering using foil tape like on a heat duct.  Anyone have any good ideas that might prevent this from being a 200 pound night light?

Just to close out this thread in case someone comes along looking for help.  First machine should be called PIA not CIE. I do have the manual and all codes so if anyone needs that info let me know.  I suffered reel errors, game prom reel mismatch errors after I fixed all the errors from dirty connections.  The reel errors are caused by the crazy system that this machine uses to detect the reel strip location.  The reel must be clean and that optics must be clean.  I cleaned both with simple green.  The optics I wet a tooth pick with simple green and scrubbed the lens.  If the silver tabs are damaged on the reel make new  ones with that silver tape used to seal ducts.  Not duct tap but foil tape.  Make them exact.  Now I have a coin comp problem that i think people on the board can help with.  I will start a new post for that.

Now that the machine is working I have played with it some more and read the manual on some of the programmable  features.  It has a programmable tournament mode where you can set up timed games for cash, credit or free play.  I set it up that way and it works pretty cool.   It seems like the machine is pretty advanced for its time.

Any chance of a picture of your machine?  :211-  I'm not sure that I've ever seen a CEI slot on the casino floor. 

Also, I think you've quickly become the resident  :nlg- CEI expert.  :89-

Here is a tour of the CEI Hot Slot.  

First a full view.  Sort of an Austin Powers retro look.

Next my jackpot after 4 days of life.

With door open.  You car see reels stay closed.

Then the hopper

reels in machine


next is one reel removed from the cage.  You can sort of see the motor set up.  Small DC motors not steppers and they are driven from the outside.  An optical sensor on the outside determines reel location.

Next you can see the reflective tapes that the optical sensors pick up.  and finally the ID tag.  1988  I think there styling department was stuck in the 70's though

This is the motor and optic.  As you can see it is a very small motor compared to the steppers.

That is a different slot.

A little 1988 history;   :214-

In 1988 the stepper slots with virtual stops were three years old. IGT had filed a complaint to the Nevada Gaming Commission that Universal was using an illegal program called the "near-miss-feature". A program that the NGC had approved years earlier. Universal had no new games in 1988 as the NGC had put them on hold pending investigation. IGT also bought the Telnaus RNG patent in 1988 requiring competitive manufactures to pay them a royalty for using the RNG. And I believe, help me out IGT folks, that the S+ was introduced around this time. Universal also upgraded their slot by creating the 8800 board.

This CEI machine appears to be years behind the competition of the day.

The area that I thought it seemed advanced was in the high degree of user programming that it accepts.  You can configure tournaments with cash, credit, free play.  Adjust hopper payouts in increments of 25 and numerous other areas all with programming and not dips.   It runs off 2 mitsubishi  740 microcontrollers at 7.3728 mhz.  It uses 3 prom chips for operation and oddly stores last game and credit information in a micro chip in the battery.  This "feature"  is what was the original trouble.  Machine had a code e12 low battery error so I was thinking easy fix.  To resolve this you need cut the battery apart and solder a battery holder to 2 of the micro chip legs.  I have no idea why you would store this info in the battery.  Maybe you could take the battery out of a failed machine and read the players winnings in case of a system failure.

In reading more of the manual I discovered that it does determine the outcome as soon as you push spin and then moves the reels to that position. It is now off the original crazy hot streak and will suck up money as fast as any other.  I wonder if it was also a victim of IGTs patent forcing them out of business?

The manual praises the small motor design on the ability to change between games quickly and cheaply.  The reels pull right out and the motors stay in place, the main board comes out as easy as an ultra.  If you wanted to change game kit you could do it in just a couple minutes.

Sitting next to my IGT you would think the CEI is 10 years older by appearance but it is actually 1 year newer.

K+ for the pictures.  I agree with you about the machine looking old -- maybe that helped to hasten the company's demise, too (having outdated looking products).

Does anyone know where to obtain the TRW OPB5897 Opto-sensors used in this CEI Hot Slot machine?  I have a need for three working sensors.

I don't think they are available.   I would think something could be made to work but I don't know what.  Why do you think 3 identical parts failed simultaneously?  To me that is a very rare situation.  I would clean the lens and pins. 

I have had failures of these sensors previously.  I do not believe that all three failed, but if I am going to the trouble to buy one, I thought that I might as well stock up now.

I have tried cleaning the pins, but I will also try cleaning the lenses.  Thanks for your suggestion.

The machine has been in storage for twenty years in my basement.  I just opened it up this week.  I was not expecting it to work, and the error code is for the wheels.

When I got mine running the sensors were dirty and causing some errors. 

I just wanted to post a little info in case it can help someone in the future.  My CEI Hot Slot quit working about 6 months ago and I decided that come hell or high water I would get it running again.  The machine worked fine for a long time and it started to error with a norc e49 which is a reel controller error.  Finally it quit with the hard code.   

I tested the 24 volt circuit and found BR2 bridge rectifier and the LM350 that regulates the 24 volts to be dead.   I replaced them and the LM350 would get hot enough to fry an egg.   With the new VR and BR I was getting no ripple but 39 volts input to the LM350 which is way to high.   I shot gunned the little caps in that area of the board and nothing changed.  Output voltage was only 3 volts.  If I measured across c85 which is a large filter cap I would get the same 39 volts.  Here is what I don't understand.  I checked the ac into the BR and got 28 volts.  Oddly if I disconnected one leg of the filter cap the input voltage would drop to something close to 24 volts.  I decided maybe something was over loading the 24 volt line.  It is used for the reels, Coin comparitor and solenoids so I disconnected all.   Then I noticed that U52 was running very hot.  I removed U52 and my input voltage dropped and my output voltage came up to exactly 24 volts.   What is interesting about that is before the machine quit I only had around 21 volts on the 24 volt line so I think the amplifier chip has been dying.  this is also likely a common failure as it is not only heat sinked but my later version board has it socketed and my earlier spare parts boards it is unsocketed. 

So the moral of the story is check the voltage on the LM350 and if it is off remove U52 and see what happens.   Hopefully this helps save another hot slot some day. 

If you full-wave rectify AC and put a capacitor on the output, the no-load voltage rises to the peak voltage of the AC, which is root-2 (1.414) times the average. So if the AC voltage is 28, 1.4 times that is 39V, exactly what you were seeing. When you disconnected the filter cap, your meter showed you the average again, with a slight inaccuracy possibly because of the ripple. The DC voltage on the capacitor only falls somewhere near the average when it's supplying something close to its designed maximum current.

Congratulations on getting it running, by the way. Too many machines end up scrapped for the failure of a 50 cent part.

OP-Bell,  thanks for the explanation of that.  So would I have seen the 39 volts with both my overloaded situation and if the circuit was unloaded?  I would like to know for future reference.   

I looked up the LM350 data sheet and see it has overload protection, so in the event of an output short, it senses itself heating up and cuts the current back to a level that keeps it hot but not fatally so. That means in your overloaded situation, the current taken from the unregulated side was fairly modest, and the voltage would have been up near the unloaded value.

I'm intrigued by this machine with its hubless edge-driven reels.

The hubless reels are an interesting concept.  It was intended to make it cheaper and easier to change themes.