What is this?

[Big Ben]

When I was looking through my broken MKII machinen i found a small rectangulat prism type thing in the base of the coin collector. I am assuming that it is some kind of counter b/c it has mechanical digits on it that look like it has somethign to do with the coins. And of course it has teo wires connected to it. Help please.

Thanks,
BB

[Captain_Dingo]

When I was looking through my broken MKII machinen i found a small rectangulat prism type thing in the base of the coin collector. I am assuming that it is some kind of counter b/c it has mechanical digits on it that look like it has somethign to do with the coins. And of course it has teo wires connected to it. Help please.

Thanks,
BB

It's an odometer.  It measures how far your cabinet has moved since it left the factory, by using the GPS receiver mounted behind the marquee.  If you move your cabinet around the house for a while, you'll see the digits incrementing.

Seriously, you hit it on the head.  It counts the number of times the machine is played.

[Big Ben]

Ah thank you. That isn't one of the most useless things in the world. How much do they cost?

[flampoo]

They're referred to as meters and they're fairly inexpensive. A new replacement shouldn't cost more than $7.

http://www.happcontrols.com/cc/meters.htm

[thetered]

Ah thank you. That isn't one of the most useless things in the world. How much do they cost?

They had tons of purposes for arcade owners and such who wanted to track what games were popular and such, and see which ones had to go.  I worked at an arcade a while back and it was easier to read that than to count the quarters which we just tossed in bags with quarters from all the other machines.

[Avery]

Or to be able to tell if someone in the staff was skimming the take.

[Captain_Dingo]

Or to be able to tell if someone in the staff was skimming the take.

Not always...

I knew a guy that worked at an amusement park arcade once summer.  He'd disconnect the meter in the morning, then go back and clean out the cash box around lunchtime and reconnect the meter.  By the end of the day, the meter would match the count in the coinbox, and by the end of the summer, this guy had a ton of quarters...

[Avery]

They say prisons aren't full of criminals, they're full of stupid criminals.