Thursday, September 22, 2011

WMS Bluebird LCD Problem

This specific ordeal was a first for me. I was called to a Bluebird game that had been rebooted a few times and then the screen would freeze up. The game was a Bluebird upright game, with a single LCD for a monitor. Just for the heck of it I rebooted the game again ending up with the same results. All that would appear on the screen was the game theme. It didn’t matter if the screen was touched or if the diagnostic button was pressed or if the jackpot reset switch was turned. An image of the game theme remained on the screen. Maybe the main processor board became a bit loose? I turned off the game once again, reseated the main board and reseated both the OS card and the game card. After the power was turned back on and the game booted up with the same result. 

Now what? When I wiggled the power cable to the LCD, the picture wiggled too. I thought that this was interesting. When the cable was removed from the socket, there was a brown burn mark in the connector. I’ve seen a few power cables go bad before, making it look like a bad LCD when actually the cable was bad. Yes! I found the problem! 

After a new cable was installed (which goes from the LCD directly to the backplane board) the game was turned on yet another time and STILL the failure remained. This time I took a closer look at the LCD connections. Why were there two video cables connected to the input section of the LCD? One was a VGA, the other a DVI. If I was correct, simply unplug the VGA cable and leave the DVI in place to see what happens. As far as I know, a Bluebird game only has one video cable going to the main LCD. I disconnected the VGA on the LCD side and rebooted the game again. This time it booted up all the way and the picture looked normal. I touched the menu button (which I didn’t have displayed before) and the menu screen appeared. This indicated the touch screen was working now. It also indicated that the game was normal and appeared ready for play. I closed the door and it looked great. Next, I removed the VGA cable from the game so someone wouldn’t accidentally plug it in again. Finally, the game was ready to be played. 

No comments:

Post a Comment