It's a table top model, about 2 1/2 feet tall, made, I think, for the Japanese market, or at least a casino expecting a large Japanese clientele. Most of the directions are in Japanese and English although the payout button is in Japanese only. The reason I believe it was for more than just Japanese customers is that the maintenance directions on the inside of the machine are also in both English and Japanese .
The black toggle on the middle left takes the place of the standard arm of the "one-armed bandit" starting the three loops spinning. The three red buttons to the right of the toggle stop the corresponding loop when pressed one at a time. It takes either coins or tokens and you can bet up to three at once. It came with a pile of tokens.
The tokens also hint at its origins. They're two types, the size of US quarter dollar coins. One type is kind of plain having the word "World" stamped on each side, the "O" in "World" looking like a ringed planet. The other type is more interesting with Japanese characters around the edge and a stamped picture of the King of Hearts (the one with his sword behind his head) on the face and the initials "NDK" on the reverse.
My brother bought it a few years ago for $20 only because it had the necessary keys. It's been in storage until just recently when, during a consolidation binge, he moved it into his room. Unfortunately, he could not get it to work.
Yesterday, I opened it up and discovered two small push switches, one black, the other red, deep in the guts of the thing. I pushed them both et voila!, it works although it does not lose its mind with bells and flashing lights when it pays out the jackpot. I know because I was playing it last night in an attempt to get all the tokens inside when it started spitting them back out at me.
It seems to be limited to paying out a maximum fifteen tokens per play. Since I had hit the big win, it gave me a series of free winning games so that each time I jiggled the toggle I automatically won 15 tokens until the machine was empty at which point the red LED that normally urged me to "Insert Coin" began flashing "Ho . . .Ho . . .Ho" which was not some St. Nick congratulations-on-winning-it-all message but the code to notify the "Ho"use that the machine needed tending. I opened it up and added more tokens to the bin, pressed the red interior reset button again (which caused the machine to spit a stream of coins across the room but there's no way to push the button with the front closed) and continued "playing" until my payout was complete.
Since it also takes quarters, my brother intends to use it as a glorified piggy bank.
No comments:
Post a Comment