WPC Reset Boards

As I've told other people I know in the past, as neat as this PCB is it's a band-aid fix and just recently had a service call on a game that had one of these installed.

The IJ that was at the CPC apparently developed a reset issue at the tourney, so someone installed one of these KAHR reset PCB's into the game. When the owner got the game home it was basically unplayable. It would power up for a minute or two, and then the whole game would crash with a garbled display, all inserts would go out and the GI would pulse slowly. Turn the game off, and back on and it would be fine, but it would crash again quicker and quicker each time you cycled the power.

First thing I did was remove this KAHR pcb, and that solved the issue! Game has been rock solid ever since, and no resets at the owners home even with a large number of other pins in his collection. What I suspect happened is the source power at the CPC was pretty low, and this KAHR pcb had to work overtime to try and keep the voltage in the game stable and stressed some of it's components past their limits which damaged them and the board is no longer stable.

Moral of this story is source power is VERY important when you have a reasonable number of games, and while this KAHR pcb is interesting it is not the end all be all solution to reset issues. If you have lots of games on the same circuit, or other heavy load items, best practice is fix the source by running less games on each circuit and make sure your game's power supply section is working correctly!

My PSA for this week.

D

For those of you having reset issues when you have all your games on and running, how many games are you guys running on a single circuit would be my first question? And are you 100% sure the circuit your games are running on is free and clear of any other loads? With you guys having issues when all your games are on and running, that to me points to a source voltage issue. Either too many games or too many other loads WITH the games on each circuit. (or a lower than optimal source power voltage)

As for games like Adam's Creech, this isn't the first time I've heard of that game having the issue you state. If the game has any mod's, the stock power supply sometimes can't keep up and the KAHR board is the only effefctive solution and in that case the PCB shouldn't really be overcoming the stock power supply shortfall by very much and would likely be fine. But if the game has a serious power supply problem, and / or bad source power issues, the KAHR pcb is going to have to work overtime to try and keep things stable which is not a good thing and in my case I've seen that PCB fail as a result.

D

I would start taking voltage measurements at the A/C outlets in your game area once "shit starts going wrong" just to see where your source voltage is measuring at. (hell I'd be checking the outlets in the whole house to be honest) If your whole house voltage is dropping low when the games are on, that's crazy...

If it's dropping that low across the board, these KAHR pcb's will do the trick but you could end up with the same issue as my IJ client if they are working overtime to keep things stable.

D