Problem with Maygay Italian Job 2 Fruit Machine

[r_keates]

Hi all,

As an electrician/general mr fixit, i've been asked to look at a machine that one of my friends purchased fairly recently. It's a Maygay Italian Job 2 (EPOCH), which was working fine, but has suddenly developed "issues".

I suspect there are 2 separate problems, but would like opinions of those more experienced!

The machine will no longer boot. A lot of the time you get no lamps or reel movements, and the alpha display is blank. Sometimes, after removing and reapplying mains, the machine will attempt to initialise (shows Initialising....06 on the alpha), and the reels will move, cash low lamp will light, and a 4.2 MEM RESET ALM will display. However, it will then "crash" and the display will go blank or the machine will somply freeze.

On further investigation I can confirm the following:

1) The battery on the EPOCH mainboard is flat, and there is considerable corrosion to the board. It doesn't actually look as though the battery has leaked, it appears more as though it's had a drink over it at some point in its lifetime.

2) The power LEDs on the EPOCH mainboard are illuminating as they should do, all are on except the VDISP led, and one is blinking (security IIRC), no matter whether the machine boots or not.

3) At power on, the LED on the sub boards (reel drive, stake/percentage etc) are sometimes solid on, and sometimes totally off. There doesn't seem to be a pattern here, sometimes they light up and sometimes they don't, randomly. That said, they will either be all on, or all off generally - not some boards lit and other not.

As a result of these tests i'm thinking two things - a) the mainboard may be goosed due to the corrosion and b) the power supply may not be running correctly, hence the LEDs on the slave boards not lighting up consistently.

Does anybody have a pinout for a Stadium (yes, I know, crap!) RA8387? That way at least I could check if the PSU is actually outputting what it says it is.... Also i've noticed that if I power up the PSU on the bench without it connected to the machine, the -12v LED does not illuminate, but it does light when connected to the machine... is this normal behaviour, or is something inside the PSU shot?

I'm going to give the mainboard a bit of a cleanup, and replace the backup battery, but realistically I suspect I will be looking for a replacement EPOCH board in the next few days!

Sorry for the essay, but I wanted to give as much info as possible to try and help the diagnosis of my faults!

Thanks for reading!

Rob

[JG]

Welcome to the board Keates. There was a character called Keates in The original Italian Job film. Great post, superb clarity. It sounds likely your problems with the machine will be rectified by a working main board with good battery. Good luck cleaning the existing one, but chances are the damage to the main board is irrepairable. The next most likely hurdle is a dodgy PSU. Both items can be obtained On EBay for reasonable cost or indeed some of our members here have stock of old parts. Aamusements supplied me with a main board/lamp board/boot chip for my machine and the local arcade had a spare Stadium PSU. All still working to this day.