WMS Bluebird 2 Rebooting Itself

We recently installed a bank of new BB2 games and all went pretty well. The games tested OK on the floor then they were released for the public to play. Within the hour, I heard a complaint that one of the games was rebooting itself. Common things were checked such as reseating the CPU board, reseating the CF cards and making sure the jurisdiction and BIOS chips were snug in place. 

Everything appeared good so I allowed a customer to play the game once again. Not long after it rebooted again. Now I knew we had an issue. Here are the items that were replaced: the CPU board (used original hard drive), the main game power supply, the jurisdiction and BIOS chip. I tried replacing the 80GIG hard drive with a 40GIG because we didn’t have an 80 on hand at the moment. The game did not like that either, also a few RAM clears were tried too which didn’t help so I made a phone call. The individual stated that the game may have a bad reel controller board. What the . . .? I have never heard of a BB2 game rebooting itself because of a bad reel controller board. I was also told if the reel lights are out (by the way it’s a “transmissive reel” game) the board may need to be replaced. I swapped the reel control board (which is located directly under the reels. It’s the board that the reels plug into) and both games were rebooting themselves. This told me there was a very good chance that the original board was in fact bad, AND more than likely the original problem game had more than only a bad reel control board because the game that it was swapped with was working just fine. 

I had the next two days off work but I was curious and had to ask when I returned. When I arrived the game was turned on and running. What was replaced to get it running? I was told that the reel control board and the CPU were replaced. But I would be willing to bet the CPU had a new hard drive in it and the original wasn’t used. So, something to keep in mind, if a BB2 (that has physical reels) is rebooting itself and everything else appears to be OK, a bad reel control board may be to blame. Also if the reels aren’t illuminated, it may be a bad reel control board.