New Life Games LLC
**Video Poker, Keno, Slots, 21** Gaming machines => Konami Games => Topic started by: Mortal_One on July 10, 2019, 05:16:46 AM
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I'm interested in upgrading the Konami Selexion Podium Uprights I have to improve the performance of the games that run on this. There is unacceptable lag on some games even after having upgraded and maxed out the RAM and memory speeds on these high end KP3 boards.
The research I've done appears to reveal the OEM CF cards have Silicon Motion NAND controllers and doing speed tests on this seem to yield 25-27Mbs but newer SanDisk cards with the lastest NAND flash technology can do far better removing any lag that remains in the games. In my opinion the K2V games were void of lag with lower quality hardware than that which is found on the KP3 the main difference is the KP3 uses a combination of DFI COM Express Modules (System Controller) that augments the ATI graphics card on these yet even with the setup which is impressive by spec on paper the games themselves are performing poorly compared to their K2V counterparts.
The issue I'm having is the CF cards available on the market don't have the necessary NAND controllers to enable them to boot as these systems K2v aka KP2 on Podium KP3/KP3.5 and KP3+ found on concertos use Windows XP embedded OS which stores the Silicon Motion controller driver on the CF card itself. When the system boots up it checks a series of things and then attempts to boot but when it does not find this driver fails to boot and issues the same LED error seqeunces as one would see if the system were booted with zero cf card inserted into CF3 slot.
This is the case if one were to use any non-Konami CF card to boot because those CF cards don't have the correct NAND flash controller within them so when one images the game theme onto these and boot is attempted it fails since the driver within the platform partition does not find the controller presently in the system. All of this makes perfect sense as to why the system won't boot. The only other reason it would not boot is if Windows had written the last accessed attribute to it if someone accidentally or unknowingly trys to browse the content of a mounted volume as is automatic with Windows via Auto Play feature. So long as no one browses these and is using Windows 7 original or Windows XP SP3 Build 5.4 Build 2600 the SHA1 digest is not tampered with and therefore will boot.
Any modification to the file system structure on these cards breaks the SHA1 digest and the MPU boards run CRC checks during initialization and boot to determine this, making it very hard to modify anything on them. This is a security feature to prevent hacking and tampering as rightly so given the nature of the purpose in these machines. but SHA1 is not a high security solution compared to other methods employed today but is sufficent to meet the regulatory requirements of the gaming industry.
(RANT Warning) However, given these systems still employ the primative Windows XP OS even on the latest machines could be compromised by a casino employee who knew this information making it very easy for them to access via a network card hack over the closed casino LAN setup they employ to just access the volume making the machines unbootable. Not a very good situation for security within. Granted those casinos techs are not as likely to do such things as they would never work in the industry again and lose their gaming license to boot but its all still possible. I've been in IT for over 30 years and these machines to me are just glorfied modded PC's with fancy sensors and switches to prevent unauthorized access but I would not want to be the manufacture who is known for security compromises with such a poor design having defects like this only because they refuse to employ the advanced features Windows 10 embedded tech offers but that is just the rant on my mind as it relates to this.
My question to any out here is who if any knows which industrial or commerical COTS based CF cards have the Silicon Motion NAND controller inside as only these would allow the Konami based slot machines to boot once the image was flashed onto it. Anyone? Because I've read here in the archieves others had found SanDisk was working with other slot machine manufactures in larger capacities than the originals for example OEM might have been 128Mb or 512Mb running on SanDisk Ultra 4Gb cards. This says maybe they must have the Silicon Motions NAND controllers in them. Can anyone confirm this? The speeds of the 16Gb are double the size but it appears we're limited in what speeds we can upgrade to on these because of the hard coded KP3 firmware seeking this exact controller as well as the XP embedded OS suppling only the driver for that manufacture.
I've taken apart many different OEM cf cards and can confirm all of them regardless of who was the listed maker, like Transcend, Wintex, Innodisk, Silicon Power, all have not only the same part number on the outside shell (backs of cf cards) but all of them use the same Silicon Motions controller chip inside the part numbers differ by capacity in that 490490 is the 1Gb and 490492 are the 4Gb capacities but both use the same NAND controller chips regardless of who the CF card maker for Konami was.
Let me know if anyone has anything to share on this front as I would imagine any slot machine's performance could benefit from higher speed CF cards much like most today see in the massive boot speed and use improvements Windows PC users see today when they upgrade to SSD drives of the large variety.
Thanks everyone for any tips and help you can offer. I'm doing active research on this which should help everyone not just Konami fans/owners.
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Hello dear, I am in the same search I found memories transcend with the same chip but the capacity is lower I cannot mount an image so that the backup works, have you been able to solve this problem?
my english is from google sorry
regards