Thursday, November 18, 2010

Fun at home with a broken down Sigma game


I was looking through craigslist this week when I came across an old Sigma PT-2B game for sale. The ad basically said the machine was shot and they wanted 75.00 dollars for it. So being bored and curious I called the man up he really didn’t have much info and said the game had a line on the monitor. Well being close by I went to check it out and sure enough it looked like the game had a bad monitor. The game itself was in surprising condition so when the man’s wife came out and said did you get rid of that thing I offered the guy 25.00 which he accepted. I knew I could if nothing else, part the game out on EBay and get at least a couple of hundred extra bucks. So I loaded the game up and took it to my small work shop.
I am a slot tech so I don’t usually fix games at home or otherwise except at work so I had only limited equipment and parts. One thing I have been doing is pulling out old monitors, power supplies and other miscellaneous electronics I find at a nearby electronic dumpster which I’m sure many of you have seen in store parking lots and so on. Using these I began to tear them apart and pull all the electrolytic capacitors out and pile them. I know this is cheap and I could have simply ordered the capacitors and so on but is hey it’s free. 


After I took apart the Sigma monitor which is a TOIE TC-V614H I began to replace all the capacitors. Now I have fixed many of these monitors long ago before LCD’s so I did have a good idea what was going on with it. But I did not have all the equipment I would have in a casino slot shop such as a Cap Wizard, Huntron Tracker or even an oscilloscope so I simply decided to swap out all the capacitors. After many hours of looking for all the capacitors from my discarded monitors I finished up and slide the monitor back into the machine. To my surprise it came right up. The horizontal adjustment was a little out but nothing major. 














I then noticed it had a coin out error on the screen so I pressed the door switch to clear the tilt but it came right back. Hoping it was a simple hoper jam I pulled the hopper and everything turned freely. Now I became a bit worried, thinking I had a bad hopper motor or worse a bad hopper control board and possibly a bad MPU. So I jerry rigged a suicide cable to test the hopper motor. For those who haven’t done this it is simply taking an electric cord plugging it into the wall and touching them to the two motor leads. Since the hopper motor works off of 120 volts the motor should turn if good and sure enough it did. The hopper turned and spit out what little coins where in the hopper.
The hopper being good I began looking at the hopper control board and all its connections. I followed the wiring to the MPU and everything looked good. At this point I was sure I had a bad hopper control board or possibly a bad MPU.  Out of desperation I began to look at the manual for dip switch or software setting that could cause this since machines that are not gaming machine anymore are often setup differently from a casino depending on the jurisdiction. 


The MPU is on the left wall while the hopper control board on the right. The power supply is in the middle. (below the hopper control board is the player tracking board.)

After finding nothing in the settings that could cause this I sat down with a meter and the wiring schematics and began following the voltage. Then I found it, someone had moved the wiring around for whatever reason and the 120 volt that went into the hopper control board was off by one pin. After putting the pin it correct location I slide the hopper in and it worked perfectly. I have no idea why the wiring was this way but was very happy it wasn’t something more serious. Especially since finding a hopper control board for a PT-2B Sigma game from 1996 might have been a problem. Another strange thing is the person had the bill valadator turned off, when i turned it on the DBV 145 worked like a charm. 

This is the hopper control board where the white wire was down one spot in the wrong place. The white and black wire supply the 120 volts.

A friend of mine who had stopped by offered me 300.00 dollars for it since his wife has been wanting a poker game at home to play with. Which I would be happy to do if my girlfriend would stop playing with it.

17 comments:

  1. My mother has a slot machine in storage that I think has the same problem where would you order the capacitors if you had to order them?

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  2. There are many places to order capacitors. Casinos often deal with Happs http://www.happcontrols.com and AG&E http://www.americangaminginc.com. But I am sure there are better places to get them. Just stay away from Radio Shack.

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  3. Sigmas are awsome!

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  6. Did you ever find a manual for the PT-2? I am looking for one. My email is info@coinslots.com
    Thanks

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  7. hi I have a sigma pt-2 b I bought for $100.00 I got it to work for home use but the speaker was torn. I by passed the speaker to a 8 ohm sterio speaker I have next to the machine I got sound on wins and coin drops the whole thing.
    nw the problem! I got busy and some one turned on the sterio unit and the
    sigma was on and I think it wipe out the sound chip what do you think .
    I took out the sound chip and can't find a place to buy a replacement. I liked the sound but I could live with out it every thing else works fine. thank you

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  8. @Ivan, I never had to change out a sound chip on one of these. Let me know how it goes though.

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  9. Hi, I bought a pt-2b in 2004. It worked great until I hit the royal flush...realized that I was never given the barrel jackpot reset key. Do you know where I can purchase one? Thank you!!!! - Rebecca

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    Replies
    1. You may be able to find one on eBay, but in a pinch you can always open the door, close the door switch, and connect both sides of the wires on the key with a jumper.

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  10. I have the same machine and my monitor wont go on. Everything else is on. Can you help me?

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  11. So happy i came across your article, do you have a way to contact you in future regarding my sigma pt-2B, im chris....thanks in advance

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  13. I just got PT-2B myself, everything works but the screen. Even have all the keys. Do they make a CRT to LCD conversion, or do you know where I can get a new CRT?

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