Leaderboard

Now it’s better! But no 7 segments working, so there are only 2 more 74hc4094 on the board U10 and U31. So removed and yep all high outputs!! So replaced!! That was my last 74hc4049 chips used so glad there was no more on the board! Well that cured it!! I guess because they are cmos chips they got spiked out somehow, possibly The board plugged in / or out with the power on, seems something must have happened to take out every one as that is extremely unlikely for them to all fail at exactly the same time otherwise!! Lol

This little bugger reel board gave me the right runaround!!! this would give a meter error 6.0 which is rather strange when it doesn’t even control the meters!!! The meters are done from the next board after this in the chain. So my first thought was it must be stopping communication to the next board so went for the 8A470 as I thought a good place to start, it wasn’t that! So for want of pushing forwards I started removing and checking the chips in my tester one by one!! U6, U5, U7, U8, U9, U10, this took some time! Then tested U14 74hc165 and the tester said FAIL !!! Bingo!! Changed that and it booted up perfectly and initialised perfectly!! that took some time!! Fault fixed!!!

I know Wizard was trying to figure out Special Fx too for us and gave it his best shot, bet he would of figured it out eventually as always liked a good challenge, nothing surprised me with him, he obviously use to fiddle with his emulators like an expert violinist, just kept giving and giving so that we can have fun, need I say more. Thank you for giving it a good bash mate, runner or not appreciate the effort and we will live in hope that one day it will run😊

I am sorry to report that it looks like this will ultimately be a non-runner. This is a machine I had discussed with Wizard before as a possibility to do but unfortunately there are some issues that needed to be fixed. The video is out of sync in some way, everything is green with small black bars. There are no configurable options in MFME M1V to adjust the video output. This is probably something that we could have lived with but the emulator crashes during some of the video sequences (either freezes or gives a Windows crash message). I have seen the same sync issue in real life in a Caesar's Palace that was built into an original Screenplay cabinet. I have no way to confirm but it looks like the screens used were either different between the two machines or calibrated differently. This behaviour has now ultimately presented itself in the emulator also. As Screenplay was the only M1V machine emulated thus far unless another machine turns up in the same configuration it looks like a no go. I had been working recently on a base layout for Wizard so he could test and fix the issues. Of course with the devastating news that Wizard has now passed over there will be no further fixes to MFME and Caesar's Palace will therefore never be functional. I wish I had better news to give you 😢

This 4 reel board was intermittent on one phase to the stepper motor on reel 1 so would error with 2.1 error sometimes! Pressing on the reel board would restore the phase, carefully inspection under the microscope revealed pin 4 on U13 had become dry jointed and detached from its pad! Fluxing and reflowing cured it! All pins were reflowed as none looked that good under the microscope!!!

That would be me 😁