Tips from Jason Czito

This is (I think) fairly well known. Some coin in jams and meter disconnect tilts on IGT machines are caused by faulty IO cards. Apparently these two items are the first on the list of items that the system looks for signals on their respective IO cards. If something is choking the clock signal (or other mischief is afoot), it will hang on the first poll, the coin in optic and the hard meters, respectively.

Use a socket on your key/set/birth/clear chips. They are a whole lot cheaper than a new chip. Get the ones with the round, stiff legs, not the flimsy, sharp legs that may be pulled out of the socket.

A trick that VSR used when we had them come out (well over 500 cash box locks installed in about a half an hour!) was to put a deep socket (7/8") onto a drill with the torque stepped down to something rational. It worked like an impact wrench on lugnuts and made the operation go very quickly.

If a cash box frame is bent, replace it. They are almost (in our experience) impossible to get back to a true square, and this makes the drop crew's job easier. (Translation - it makes our job easier).

Using CDS? Make sure your DPUs are mounted in such a way that you can get to the EPROM and have a spare set of EPROMs. If a new firmware version comes out, burn the spare EPROMs with the new version and replace them manually. It's less painful for the floor if you do this than flash the DPUs. Having your DPUs mounted like this seems elementary, but they were basically inaccessible in our old casino and DPU upgrades sucked.

Using CDS? This is a serious timesaver. Get your hands on a meter card. When you need to record meters for whatever reason, insert and remove the meter card. Done! Your revenue department can look up the meters in the Meter Comparison software, or if they are cute and you want to score some points, you can write your own Crystal report for them. This worked VERY well for both of us - we didn't have to manually write down all the meters and revenue didn't have to wait for inter-office mail to deliver them.

Using CDS? If your display isn't working, this may be the problem. If
somebody selected an incorrect display device and removed their card, the board will communicate incorrectly with the display. Go back into the menu (you'll be blind without the display, but it's the first item on the list) and scroll down through display options until the display comes back to legible text. If your firmware version requires a password, just pretend the display works and repeat this procedure. We've had very few displays actually fail. Also, watch the tiny resistor near the mounting nuts - if you use pliers or a bulky nut driver to remove it you run a serious risk of destroying the resistor. You can tell because it limits the backlight and your display will suddenly be incredibly bright. Also, and this is fairly weird, we had japanese (no joke) letters on our display. We thought it was a language setting that we had never heard of, but it turns out that one of the wires on the cable wasn't connected correctly. This wasn't just jibberish, but actual japanese letters. Only happened once...

Using CDS? Card readers almost never fail. The wires on the switches are bad or the sensor head has been pushed out of the card path (or it's incredibly dirty). I've only seen two card readers genuinely fail. Also, if the Sentinel is brand new or the EEPROM is brand new, in-house cards will not work. You must use the Global Setup card to set the Sentinel up the first time. Once the Sentinel talks to the Poller, you may use your in-house setup cards from then on.

Using CDS? If you are doing a machine conversion and you just need a single machine removed from the system for the purposes of the conversion, don't take the whole bank offline - jump the bank in and bank out cables with paper clip pieces so the daisy chain passes over the machine you need to work on.

Using CDS? If your machine is giving you a "Terminal disabled by SAS" or "Validation not configured" tilts (or something similar) there is no serial communication between the machine and Sentinel board. As long as the machine can talk to the Sentinel, you won't get this tilt (unless the Sentinel is brand new and has never spoken to the Poller). Even if the Sentinel cannot communicate with the DPU, the machine will be happy just talking with the Sentinel.

Using CDS? If you convert a ticketing machine to a non-ticketing machine, or move a Sentinel from a ticketing machine to a non-ticketing machine, you will need to manually remove ticketing meters. The non-ticketing machine will not send any meteers for ticketing information, and the Sentinel will not erase them on it's own. What will happen is your new machine will be reporting ticketing meters to revenue by way of leftover meters on the Sentinel. RAM clears rarely work because the information is redundant between the DPU and Sentinel. You can clear RAM on both the DPU and Sentinel
at the same time or you can connect the Sentinel to a machine that has
ticketing meters at zero (a machine that supports ticketing but is currently not using that feature, for example). Once the ticketing meters on the Sentinel are zeroed by a machine, they will remain at zero unless written to by another machine.

Using CDS? Great feature! One of the meters is the number of player credits. If a game chokes and a guest dispute arises, don't take their word for it that they had a zillion credits that are now gone! Use a mechanic card to view the credit meter - it'll tell you what they really had. Note that you have to do this before the dying machine writes newly zeroed meters to the Sentinel. Keep in mind the different meter calcs when you do this too.

Using CDS? During an upgrade we did a while ago, we received a message saying, "Player Point System Not Configured" on a few Sentinels. RAM clearing the Sentinel fixed this.

Does your IGT S2000 game have a lower candle light that flashes incessantly, play or no? It turns out that the machine's own drop door cable (which is usually jumped since we monitor the drop doors directly through the Sentinel) was not jumped.

Using CDS? Use Diagnostic Monitor to no end... we have it set up to generate work orders for a great many things - excessive hopper fills, ticket stock empty (not paper out), Bart game/denom mismatch (indicates a loss of serial communication or, even worse, a meter calc mismatch), serial communication down, etc. If you want to know when something happens, have Diagnostic Monitor generate a work order for it. You can tie system generated tilts to work orders, and voila! Obviously it's good for typical recurring tilts, but don't let this be the limit.

Get a cordless phone that works anywhere on the floor. Ours pays for itself every single day. During a conversion, you need to talk to I.T. and don't want to leave the work area because you're busy. Sodak calls because something is up with their WAP game and you can stand before their machine and tell them directly what is happening. You need to do something not typically done on the floor which would require a lot of radio traffic to explain to surveillance? Call them on the phone. A vendor needs to call the company to remember how to set their game up - give him the phone. Revenue has a question for you about machines but they don't have radios. Seriously, we use it every single day.