Video Poker Forum

I asked a while back about this but I don't think I got any answers so I'm gonna try again. This is something I haven't seen happen in all my years of vp play until lately. I was playing DDB and all the sudden I couldn't continue play until the machine finished running a memory check. The screen just went black and It said running memory check. Just the other day it happened again on the machine beside the one I was playing. There was nobody playing the machine at the time and this particular time it took about 5 minutes to complete whatever it was doing. I just curious about this because its new to me.

I can't remember if this has happened.

pokeherguy, the way it was explained to me was when , for whatever reason, the game loses power it then goes through a start up procedure. The power loss can be a momentary interruption just like when you realize the clock on the microwave is flashing at you. In your case there might be a bad connection somewhere on the line that is feeding the bank you were on.

I suspect the programming encountered an error somewhere. As a result it fired off a diagnostic program to find the problem. One of these diagnostics is probably a memory check program. This type of program examines all the memory in the machine to see if it is working correctly. 5 minutes seems like a long time for this kind of diagnostic but it could be running many different kinds of analysis techniques.
 
Many years ago when a PC was booted you would see it checking memory on the display. I also worked on other systems that did memory checks during initial power on.
 
Not sure if this helps (or if it's even accurate). Just an educated guess.

I neglected to mention my personal experience. Casino Windsor used to have 8 rows of .50 slant tops on their second floor. One night playing there, because of a thunder storm, the power went out in the Casino. When their back up power kicked in, all the machines started running a memory check. Quite a sight to see. When the machine I was playing put cards back up, they were exactly the hand I had when the power went out. That is when I asked the my Slot Supervisor buddy about it and got the explanation.  It will also happen if the machine has to have the cabinet door opened. It will briefly do a check then .

Will those lsd mushrooms cause a person to have a memory check run unexpectedly? Did I already ask that question?

One night playing there, because of a thunder storm, the power went out in the Casino. When their back up power kicked in, all the machines started running a memory check. Quite a sight to see. When the machine I was playing put cards back up, they were exactly the hand I had when the power went out.
 
You stole my thunder again, faygo - I was going to run that by pokeherguy.  The machine's battery backup stores the current game info so that it's not lost during an outage.   The batteries are supposed to be good enough to keep game info for a couple of months (pretty long outage --)
 
Our regs here in CO say that a self-test sufficient to catch 99% of machine failures has to be run EVERY HAND (!).  There's only a couple of specific failures other than power loss where the machine's allowed to reset itself - open door, lost data connection.  Most of the listed failures here require an attendant to clear.
 

 

Ah the mysteries of life.

Ah the mysteries of life.
 
I had a long career in telco that required regular reading of state regs.  State regs of any kind make interesting reading ("not").  You should be able to find the regs online for wherever you play - keep them handy for late night perusal if you have insomnia.     In that respect I'm glad that I don't live in NV, as those regs have about 5 times more crap than ours.

I wonder what the basic hardware requirements are for a VP machine.  Has anyone seen that data online? Processor, RAM, etc... what's inside?