S+ with Printer?

[therockinelvis]

I have this Mother Board diagram and it is Labeled for a printer at J13 and backlit reels at J14? I have never seen either on a S+.

[therockinelvis]

Is this diagram wrong?

[rickhunter]

I don't think it was ever supported with game software.  The S+ never had backlit reels, at least not in the main reels.  I know there were some barcrest S+ games that had reels in the top box, but I don't remember if they were backlit or not (some devil theme, I can't recall the whole name).  Printers I have never seen at all.  I have seen some PE+ with printers at a local indian casino, and they were dot matrix printers at that, not the EZ-Pay variety, it looked like an old school printer receipt with plain paper roll, a dot matrix printhead and good old black ink ribbon.  Whenever you cashed out, it woud print out a ticket receipt which you would take to the cashier.  There was no validation or anything, they would just pay the amoun on the spot.  The paper was even just plain white paper, I never understood what audit measures they had to make sure the printed ticket was from one of their machines.

[cowboygames]

There ised to be an ad on ebay for a printer that would mount on the floor of an S+ cabinet in place of the hopper and spit the ticket out by the coin tray. I think it was an aftermarket deal and not supported by IGT. Adding ports to their boards for future ideas that don't come to fruition during the lifespan of whatever generation of slot machines isn't all that unusual for IGT. Like the memory expasion ports on the S2000 MPU boards or the 3 reel plug ports on the 1270 motherboard

[therockinelvis]

This make more sense now. I have seen S+ machines in Wildwood New Jersey with ticket redemption devises like Skeeball at the Boardwalk or Chuck-E-Cheese

[knagl]

There are some PE+ schematics that reference a touchscreen, but to the best of my knowledge they never implemented any touchscreens in the PE+ machines.  I think it's as cowboygames mentioned, they might plan for stuff for the future but then abandon the plans along the way...

[therockinelvis]

Thanks. It seemed strange to have connections for Future use instead of just using them to begin with. I really thought the diagram was just mismarked.

[rokgpsman]

The engineers at the company I worked for were always thinking down the road about any future growth options, expandability, anything a customer might request. If it was reasonably possible to do something they would allow for it. Remember, at the time the new product is designed it is the latest & greatest the company offers, they hope it will sell like crazy and they want to provide any and all possible options and upgrades. Many of the options are ideas from the marketing people, they want to be able to sell customers on what all the machine could do.

On our drawings they would put a little asterisk with a note saying "future use" or similar. But many of those possible provisions never came about, maybe the options were ahead of their time and the customer need just wasn't there or not enough willingness to spend for the extras.

[jay]

Lots of this kind of thing goes on......

I remember way back when we were buying 386 computers. Compaq had a model that had a CPU card, that filled a special slot. The 486 was just being talked about and the sell was to get people to buy 386's and not wait for the 486. So they were selling us on buying a machine that could simply have a card replaced to make it a 486. As history has proven this was a bad buy. The 486 had a 16bit bus (ISA bus). I am not sure if any of the 486 CPU cards were ever made or sold. I can just imagine how slow a 486 with 8bit Ram would have been. It would have been marginally faster than a 386 but just slightly....

TITO for an S+ is not that hard to imagine. All the ETF (Electronic funds transfer) and SAS protocols are there in the newer chips. Just not implemented.