The Coin Door (Wiring)

One of the last things I have left to do on this cabinet other than configure the software is to get the coin door working. I bought a Happs "Small Single Coin Door" which comes with two $0.25 coin mechs to accept quarters (or tokens).


The setup is pretty basic - a microswitch is tripped when a quarter is inserted into the coin slot which sends a signal just like any other button press on the cabinet would do. I decided to wire both the player 1 and player 2 coin slots to the same input on my U360 joystick wiring harness so no matter which slot the coin is put in it will register as a "credit" for player 1. This doesn't pose a problem because most of the alternating 2 player games don't care which coin slot the quarter is inserted into. If two coins are entered into the same slot you press the "Player 2 Start" button for a 2 player game. Also, since the cabinet does not have 2 player simultaneous controls all of those games will be available in 1 player mode only.


Anyway, wiring up the microswitches was a snap - I wired the NO (normally open) pin on each switch to the last wire on the U360 wiring harness (which has been set to "insert coin") and the bottom ground pin on each switch to another ground wire on the control panel completing the loop. I should note that the microswitches on my coin door had the NO and NC (normally closed) pins reversed compared to the standard white pushbutton microswitch. It took me a minute to figure out when nothing was happening when I inserted the coin. Simple!

Everything works like it should but I realized after about 10 minutes of playing on the cabinet that fumbling for quarters/tokens every single time I wanted to play something was a huge pain. I think I'm going to try and rig the coin return buttons to act as "insert coin" buttons when pressed which should eliminate the need to have quarters/tokens on hand all the time.

I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to do this but I don't think it will be too hard. Stay tuned.