J400 mystery

[mr-monoxide]

ramegoom - wow, that sure is a lot of j400's you've got there. Care to part with a mpu? Haha. But seriously, when you do get into those machines i'm sure you will have many people interested in them. They are comparatively much smaller than other machines and lightweight too. I can carry mine around by myself with no problems. Those facts alone should make the machine appealing to people..

rokgpsman - I have searched for another mpu to no avail. If I ever do find another I will surely buy it. Until then I'll just keep my ear out and hopefully I'll find someone that may be willing to part with one someday. Unfortunately I think most people just junk the whole machine and never offer the parts for sale.

[ramegoom]

I am going to seriously look at a few of these. At least they're easy to move compared to those E series Bally machines.

[ramegoom]

One thing to remember when in search for a spare logic board: They are different in that the number of coins and number of lines played are variations in the boards. Most of the boards have several jumper wires and cut traces on them. I believe Jennings made only one logic board (well, several revisions within the production years anyway), and the technicians added jumpers and cut traces to match the game play. This makes it difficult to have a spare board that works the same as the original board. It would have made so much more sense to use DIP switches on a single production board rather than have a birds nest of wires hanging off of both sides. I'm pretty sure the company got caught up in diminishing returns, which led to its demise early in the game.

Seems Jennings was over their heads trying to market a suitable machine that could adapt to the casino's needs. I feel the machine mechanics had some good design (motorized reels) but severely lacked in electronic engineering. It would have been a good move on their part to spirit a few digital engineers away from Bally when they designed their stuff.

[mr-monoxide]

At this point I would settle for any functional logic board I could get my hands on. It wouldn't matter to me if it had different paylines or number of coins played. I would simply change the reel glass to accommodate whatever board I had. In fact that's what the situation was when I got it. The machine is a single payline 5 coin but the logic board is 5 line 5 coin. I can work with whatever I can get. I figure that a working game is better than no game.

[mr-monoxide]

J400 logic board for sale? Anyone? Anyone?....