Mechanical meter behavior question

[poppo]

Ok, maybe I'm over thinking this or just stayed up too late last night. I'm a little confused on the something with the mechanical meters. I'm only interested in the coin in and coin out meters.

For the purpose of this discussion, let's just assume both meters are at 0. I put 20 credits on the machine. Nothing happens with the meters (as expected). If I just cashed out at this point, nothing would happen either since I have never played any of them. That's fine too.

So now, I start playing. I press max bet (lets say it's 5 coin machine) and the coin in increments 5. Again, this is expected. The next max bet also increments it by 5 (total 10 in). Now, let's say I hit a win of 5. I now have 15 credits on the machine. 10 I still had left and 5 I just won. If I cash out, the coin out increments by 5 since that is all the machine actually paid out. Again, all is well.

Now here is the part I don't get yet. Let's say I started with 100 credits. I'm playing for a while. All this time only the coin in is incrementing with each bet as expected. Wins are going to the credits. Credits are going up and down as I play. Now at some point the coin out starts incrementing at the same rate as the coin in. In other words every time press max bet, 5 coins in register and 5 coins out.

So my question is - What is causing the coin out to increment at the time I make the bet? Is it because I'm actually winning more than I put in at this point?

In case anyone is wondering why I care about this, I was working on another one of my projects   that uses a small microcontroller to monitor the coin in and coin out meter signals and displays current %. I know, I have too much time on my hands.  However this behavior is throwing a wrench in things because the controller can not monitor both meter outputs at the same time, so having both meters increment at the same time will screw up the readings.  

[Ozzy]

Example $1.00 machine, meters incrementing 1 for 1


Start
Coin In         000000
Coin Out       000000

Insert $100
Coin In         000000
Coin Out       000000

Play 5 credits win 0
Coin In         000005
Coin Out       000000

Play 5 credits win 10
Coin In         000010
Coin Out       000000

Play another 80 credits without winning
Coin In         000100
Coin Out       000000

You are now left with only 10 credits on machine that was your winnings from the 2nd game play

Play 5 credits
Coin In         000105
Coin Out       000005

Coin out increments because you have bet 5 credits from actual winnings so machine has given up that 5 credits as you have spent them and it is coin out even though no physical.


O Z Z Y

[reho33]

Sounds like you need to modify a pachislo "battlecounter" and attach it to the slot to see the stats up close and personal:
http://www.pachistat.com/

I just had a great idea.......
If a way could be found to get the pulse signal to the cable and use this for a Vegas slot, then it would fit very nicely in the player tracking area and the player would have vital stats at their fingertips.
However, since the payback % is factored on millions of pulls, it would only give short-term data which may not matter but only to the player.

[poppo]

Coin out increments because you have bet 5 credits from actual winnings so machine has given up that 5 credits as you have spent them and it is coin out even though no physical.

Now that I am more awake, it is making more sense. When I was fiddling with it last night, it seemed that coin out was incrementing randomly and without any pattern. But I was not really paying attention to what I was doing as far as adding credits and cashing out.

In any case, it looks like my project is hosed unless I can find a simple way to read both meters at the same time. It's possible they are not actually incrementing at the exact same time, but alternating back and forth really fast (I need to put my scope on it). And  I don't know if my controller is fast enough to poll them if they are alternating. Oh well, it looked like it was going to be an easy project as it only took a few dozen lines of code to do it.

[stayouttadabunker]

I love these ideas a lot guys!
Watching with much interest! 

It would be awesome to see this short term % window in the player tracking area
or maybe behind an opening on the reel glass?
Really, really neat stuff!!!!

[poppo]

It would be awesome to see this short term % window in the player tracking area or maybe behind an opening on the reel glass?

I already have a display (in addition to my big home-brew progessive) on each machine in the tracking bar area. It would have been simple enough to just add the extra code to that project and maybe alternate between the progressive and %

But I'm going to have to re-think this one.

[poppo]

Sounds like you need to modify a pachislo "battlecounter" and attach it to the slot to see the stats up close and personal:
http://www.pachistat.com/

I had seen one of those on e-bay and that is what had put this on my project list. I already had the hardware to do it, so I figured I would just use that. That battlecounter could probably be made to work but I would need to see some schematics to see how it polls for events. It might have the same problem working with a real slot over a pachisllo.


<edit> I just read this from their FAQ

The good news is that some machines will not allow you to start your first spin until after all the initial 15 tokens have been accounted for, the bad news is that some machines will allow you to start your first BB round spin while it is still sending the token out signal to the PachiSTAT. If you start your first spin before the signals for the 15 tokens have been sent then the Big Bonus Counter will be off.

This sounds very similar to the problem I am encoutering where it is sending both signals at the same time and it will mess up the counter.