Calypso Playboy Ident - Bally?

[jj-taylor]

Gday all, Im hoping some one can help me ID this machine I recently purchased with the hope of restoration. It seems to be getting power to the lights and coin mech but thats all it does.
If I can id it I should be able to find more info,
Thanks in advance for any help.

[wolftalk]

not bally.

looks like an early 1960's machine with payout fingers.  There a hopper in the bottom? ... if yes, it'd be later as manufacturers tried to compete with bally.  May help to post pic of the entire guts installed with the front door open.

maybe mills, seeburg or jennings?  I'll move your post over to the other reel games area where there's lots of people who've seen these types of machines.

[jj-taylor]

Thanks very much Wolftalk,  someone on another forum advised me it was a Bally, as I really have no idea :-)
I have attached a picture of the unit in its assembled form for reference.
Thanks Heaps.

[wolftalk]

can you add pictures of open relays showing the labels (if there are any)  ... especially the ones at the bottom-right of the reel mech that are interacting with the brown contact plate

the label numbers and symbol can help identify the manufacturer of the coil. 

the sealed/ice-cube relays that plug into sockets are usually not helpful as those are not made by the company that made the slot.

it's possible the game was made by an aftermarket company that took mechanisms from old slots and made "modern" machines out of them.  If that's the case, you typically need to figure out how it works by reverse-engineering it.

[shortrackskater]

jj-taylor - Please post upright photos. If they're upright in your phone, rotate them once and then back and that should change the orientation meta data. Or send them to your computer and rotate. It should only take seconds.
Thank you
~moderator

[jj-taylor]

Thanks Wolftalk, there doesn't seem to be any open relays to speak of only a couple of large capacitors.
One thing I have noticed in the contactor on part of the ods thing (I think) isnt making contact is moves around the board but doesnt touch it, the contactor is abit sloppy in general.

[wolftalk]

see the relays circled in red below.  There may be writing on the yellow wrappers.  If not, you'd have to remove a coil to see if there's anything stamped into the fiberboard coil base that the wire lugs are attached to.

I would guess the thing with the relays circled in red is counting coins ejected by the hopper and therefore stopping the payout ... so yeah, a wiper finger lifted off the board would be a problem.  I'll just call that thing the payout counter.

I dunno what "electro-automatic" on the top glass is ... if that's the company name that made the thing, I don't know whether knowing that would help.

in general, the slots have to do these functions:

1] accept a coin and release the handle so you can spin

2] detect a winning reel combination and turn on the hopper to spit out coins

3] stop the hopper when the appropriate number of coins are ejected

I assume the machine is a 1 coin game ... no putting in multiple coins to increase/enable pays.  If so, you've got a good chance for working out what all the bits are doing.   

the only complication is how the game pays higher wins.  The payout counter looks like it has around 50 rivets/positions, so higher pays would require the wipers to go around multiple times - or like bally sometimes did it the payout counter is reset and pay continues until the right total is reached.  The counter thing to the left of the reels could be involved with higher pays.

the typical way the games worked is a circuit completes thru the reels - in your case the switches on the top/right of the reel mech.

the payout counter wipers would reset onto a couple rivets that are for a 2 pay and a wire from those two rivets go to a switch on the reel win detect fingers.  If that switch is closed (because the payout finger poked into a hole in the metal discs), the payout relay is powered to turn on the hopper.

after a couple coins eject, the payout counter wipers step off the 2 pay rivets onto 5 pay, and again if that circuit completes thru a reel switch the payout relay stays powered and coins keep spitting out.

the trick is how they wired the payout counter/reel finger switches and made holes in the metal discs to cause higher pays to also close the lower pay switches.   The hopper needs the 2 pay circuit to close to start the pay.  e.g. if you have a 23 win, the circuits to pay 2, 5, 10, 18 all need to close.

if you can get a 2 pay to work, then any non-working pay is probably just poor wiper connection to rivets on the payout counter or an issue with the reel switches assuming the fingers detecting the wins are sliding into the disc holes easily.

it is possible diodes are involved with the payouts and the voltage running the payout relay is DC.  That simplifies making the higher pays energize lower pay circuits without a lower pay circuit energizing a higher pay one - the diodes act as a one-way gate.

make sense?

[jj-taylor]

Thanks again for your help, your knowledge is outstanding,
I have attached another pic with the writing on the coils you pointed out, the coil at the rear seems to activate on every spin, this lifts a dog to allow the other coil to move the another contactor thing around?? If you get my drift, im hoping it all relies back to disc in the rear corner.

It appears to be a single coin machine however it will let you put in as many as you like with no noticable difference, doesnt give you an extra go or anything, just takes your money :-)

I will get some more details regarding the contacts on the discs ect, and see what I can figure out... If your happy to share your wealth of knowledge of course...
Just by the by something that did suprise me is that the payout discs on the side of the reel assy are made from a circuit board like material??? though still with the holes ect to allow the fingers to make contact ect..??

[wolftalk]

lorimier-guardian coil ... no idea.

guardian is a company that makes relays ... the "ice cube" relays in the plastic cases are commonly made by guardian. 

using phenolic board for the reel index discs is odd.  Wouldn't think that material would hold up to slam-stopping the reel spin for long.

the index discs themselves aren't electrical, the holes in them allow the arms/pins next to the index discs to move left after the spin.  Which arms move and how far determines what switches above the arms are closed.

in the mechanical slot era, the pins/arms directly controlled a stack of payout slides with coins in them.   If the holes on the index discs lined up, slides would move and the coins within them would be dropped out to the player.

in the EM machines, the slides were replaced with the coin hopper and some circuitry needs to start/stop the hopper to eject the correct number of coins.

wrt the gadget with the two coils, one way those things worked was one coil was reset and the other was step-up.  Activating the step-up coil causes the wiper to rotate to the next rivet position on the disc.  Activating the reset lifted pawls off the ratchet/gear and a spring would spin the wipers back to the reset position.  See what manually pushing down the armature plates onto the coil tops makes the unit do.

if you want to send video or pics too big to post on the NLG site, email them to slotpics@cdyn.com

the usual thing with coin input handling is a "lockout" mechanism behind the coin acceptor on the door will cause coins to be rejected back to the player if the game isn't ready to take a coin.  e.g. dropping in a coin releases the handle so you can spin, and additional coins are rejected back until you spin and pay completes.

you'd want to look at the acceptor and behind it to see if there's something electrically controlled that causes coins to reject ... but that's not too important.  Getting the three things in post #6 working (in that order) is what you typically want to do before dealing with other things.