Dotmation display has line...

[Randy0777]

When I had the Jckpot party game running I had a line running vertical through the display. I never really noticed it when I installed the game and figured the display was messed up  . Just switched it over to a new game and the display line was gone  . This was a few hours ago and now I noticed its BACK  Any thought as to why its doing this? If I leave it off for a few hours and turn it back on ,it will still be there.

[StatFreak]

The connection to that column is bad or a component in the circuit driving the column is failing. This is a common problem. Maybe cfh has a fix, but I don't know of one.

[cfh]

usually this problem has nothing to do with components.
There is a thin "ribbon" cable that connects the glass
to the DMD circuit board. With time the ribbon cable
(better described as xmas wrapping paper!) starts to
delmainate from the circuit board.

So how do you fix this? well i don't have a great answer
unfortunately. but i have had some success using a wood
dowl to put pressure between the cable and the DMD
board.  A low tech solution, but it works pretty well.
heck a #2 pencil sometimes works well for this!

I see you have money to burn... what version XU2/XU3
are you running?  I would be interested to know as M2b
has a bug in it (at the least the version i have does!)

[Randy0777]

I tried the pencil trick...they must be bigger up north  I used something else to wedge it under it,but still the same

[Billythekid]

I had two lines out on my screen, as stated above the ribbon connection to my screen was the problem. When I pushed on the cable the two lines came back... BUT that cable is brittle and now I have MANY rows out. So I'm going to attempt to solder a ribbon cable from a computer hard drive cable in place of the fragile cable used by the screen manufacturer. I suspect the orginal cables lasted throughout the supported lifetime of the machine on the casino floor but after 15 years of heat these ribbon cables start to fail. Be careful transporting these machines as the bouncing around could stress this cable and fail.... Might be a good idea to take out the screen and buble wrap it real good and ship or carry seperate away from the vibration of the machine being hauled.

I'll repost if my harddrive ribbon cable mod was successful.