Installing it

What to run it on, how to install it, and what the tills, the kitchen screen and the customer display are.

What do I need to run CoinOp?

One computer in the venue running Linux or Windows, and any device with a browser as a till — a counter PC, a tablet, a phone. The tills, the kitchen screen and the customer display are all the same server seen from different screens, so there is one machine to install and back up.

What it runs on

CoinOp is one small server in your building and browsers everywhere else. The server holds the database, talks to the printers and the lights, and serves the screens. Nothing about your customers or your takings leaves the venue.

A mini PC is plenty — a machine with 4 GB of memory and any SSD will run a busy venue without noticing. It wants to be on all the time and on a wired connection if you can manage one, because every till in the building depends on it and nothing depends on the internet.

Installing

The downloads and the exact commands are on the download page, and they are short: on Linux it is two lines and the installer does the rest — it brings its own Node, creates the service, sets up a nightly backup and prints the address to open on the tills.

Reaching it by name

Settings → Devices → Where to open the till

An address written on a sticky note is wrong the morning the router hands out a different one. A name is not. This page lists every address this machine answers on, the ones carrying a name first, because those are the ones worth writing down.

Name the machine coinop — on Windows, Settings → System → About → Rename this PC — and the till is http://coinop:8100 from other Windows machines and http://coinop.local:8100 from iPhones, iPads and Macs.

The switch on that page drops the :8100, by having CoinOp answer on port 80 as well — the port a browser assumes. It is off unless you ask, because other programs want port 80 too, and it is as well as 8100 and never instead, so anything already pointing at 8100 keeps working.

Either way, giving the server a fixed address in your router is still worth doing while you are in there. Some Android browsers will not resolve a .local name, and those tablets use the address.

Opening it on a till

Open the address in a browser and you get the lock screen. That is the whole installation on a till: no software, no updates to chase, nothing to reinstall when a tablet is replaced.

On Windows the installer puts CoinOp on the desktop and in the Start menu, and it opens both screens: the till filling the main monitor with no address bar, and the customer display fullscreen on the second one if there is a second one. One monitor and it opens the till alone.

For a customer screen that must come back by itself after a power cut, Settings → Screen generates a shortcut to put in Windows’ Startup folder — that one runs before anybody signs in. The desktop shortcut is for a person pressing it.

The screens around it

1. The kitchen screen is the same address with the kitchen signed in, or a device enrolled as a kitchen screen. See Kitchen and printing.
2. The customer display is /display on the same address, on the monitor facing the customer. It shows the bill as it is rung up and the venue’s name when the till is idle.
3. Printers are ESC/POS receipt printers on the network. See Kitchen and printing.

When the internet goes down

The till carries on. Everything that matters during service — sessions, orders, printing, payments you record, the drawer — is between the machines in your building. What stops is what is genuinely outside: bookings arriving from your website, WhatsApp messages to the waiting list, and passes reaching gaming accounts, which queue up and go when the line comes back.