The IGSA develops Standards that increase efficiencies, decrease barriers to entry, and provide enhanced data access and transparency. These Standards benefit the entire Gaming Industry including suppliers, operators and regulators.
Suppliers benefit through Standardized interfaces that seek to eliminate one-off proprietary interfaces, driving interoperability, reducing interface time and cost, and increasing access to their products.
The Intel® PICMG backplanes in this section are Single Board Computers (SBCs) and Single Host Board (SHB) companions that feature expansion slots such as ISA, PCI, PCI-X or PCI Express interface. In addition, these SBC backplanes also features several power.
Operators benefit by getting access to more gaming content and faster, by getting greater access to data which may reduce regulatory risk while increasing revenues and decreasing costs.
Regulators benefit by getting access to all available data directly from the gaming source, from gaming systems or from regulatory owned monitoring systems. This level of data transparency enables better regulatory oversight for the detection of money laundering, protection of vulnerable players and ensuring gaming is occurring fairly.
These and many other benefits are delivered via IGSA Standards such as the Game to System (G2S) Standard for land-based operations, the Third-party Interface (TPI) for online operations and the Regulatory Reporting Interface (RRI) that supports all types of gaming activity.
For land-based operations, Standards such as the Game to system (G2S) protocol can pull information from the slot machine’s secondary communication or network port without any interference to the existing, regulatory required, system of record.
IGSA Standards are now mandated by Regulatory requirement or Legislative law, in Countries, Provinces and States around the world, which means suppliers that sell products in those places have implemented those Standards. Even if they are not mandated by the jurisdiction, the Standards are available to you if you ask for them.
Want to learn more? Check out the “Did you know?” tab and learn what else you can do with IGSA Standards!
- Practically every slot machine has multiple communication ports allowing multiple systems to be connected and gather information.
- You can develop or buy an existing simple communication application to gather data elements that your CMS today does not capture. This will allow you to send that data to off-the-shelf Business Intelligence, Visualization and other data analytical applications.
- You can choose to subscribe to specific meters and events needed by your marketing system, making it much more efficient then just getting everything?
- You can transmit this marketing data from your newer slot machines without needing to re-cable your slot floor?
- Using IGSA standards, your IT team can manage, maintain the security and integrity of the slot network using the same tools that they use to manage their existing back-of-house local and wide-area networks?
- Regulators are asking for IGSA standards to ensure that slot machines are running valid, approved software.The most reliable of these are online slot machines with bitcoin (BTC) payment method, they undergo a special certification procedure.
- You can use the same simple communication application to understand; in real-time what each of your slot machines is comprised of, both hardware and software, including such details as vendor, product model, release version, and serial numbers.
- Your EGMs can provide you with full information on the personality and configuration of every connected EGM, making identifying incorrect configurations or revoked software much more efficient and accurate?
All of this functionality is already available and in use. Where? Casinos in the US (Las Vegas), Canada (New Brunswick, Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia), Australia (New South Wales) Europe (Austria, Finland, Greece, Poland), are all getting access to this functionality on slot machines provided by the major manufacturers. You too can have this!
The International Gaming Standards Associations (IGSA) Game to System (G2S) Standard makes this possible.
The International Gaming Standards Association (IGSA) has worked with several of our members that have implemented G2S on their casino floors to provide case studies of problems that have come up and how those problems have been solved.
- The Canadian Experience - an overview of how Canadian operators took steps to solve their joint problems thru combined effort as members of IGSA.
- The Intralot Implementation - IGSA member Intralot deploys the G2S protocol in Ohio and Australia.
- The Loto-Quebec Implementation - IGSA member Loto-Quebec uses G2S to offer new multimedia player experience.
IGSA offers a variety of membership levels to fit every budget. For a full review of the various benefits and levels of membership, please look here.
Slot Machine Interface Board Module
IGSA offers implementation assistance, in addition to personalized and in-depth training to operators upon request. IGSA staff is happy to answer questions during implementation and/or face-to-face training at your premises, for training for any of our standards. For more information, contact IGSA.
IGSA has done an in-depth comparison of the services that Operators could provide their customers with the installation of open standard G2S based slot machines vs. proprietary SAS based slot machines. Download the article here.
Ticket-in, ticket-out (TITO) is a technology used in more modern slot machines. It was originally developed circa 1992 by MGM Corporation who purchased technology from a Las Vegas firm Five Star Solutions as well as barcode ticket printing technology from Jon Yarbrough before his VGT success. They also worked with Pat Greene an inventor in Boston of Triad Company who held a patent on a Bill Validator which could read bar coded tickets as well as accept cash. MGM created a consortium of game manufacturers and developed a protocol for its custom Universal Interface Board 'UIB' based on a derivative of Bally Gaming's SDS System. They contracted local firm Applied Computer Technology, Inc. to develop the UIB, its firmware, and also facilitate the organization of the consortium. Later IGT acquired the rights to the TITO patents from MGM and began to modify their own protocol called SAS to implement TITO. It is incorrectly maintained that IGT developed TITO and Bally's Easy Pay which came out many years later.[1]
Slot Machine Interface Board Wiring
Overview[edit]
Ticket-in, ticket out (TITO) machines are used in casino slot machines to print out a slip of paper with a barcode indicating the amount of money represented. These can in turn be redeemed for cash at an automated kiosk.[2] The machines utilize a barcode scanner built into the bill acceptor, a thermal ticket printer in place of a coin hopper (some rare machines are set up to pay with coins if the payout is less than the payout limit, and to print a ticket in situations where a handpay would normally be required) and a network interface to communicate with a central system that tracks tickets.
Consortium of Manufacturers[edit]
MGM was in the middle of construction of its major hotel in Las Vegas and invited several gaming machine manufacturers to join a consortium for its Cashless Casino experiment. In the group were Bally Gaming, IGT, Sigma Games, Universal and several others. They were all presented with the MGM UIB Protocol documents and were aided in the realization of the protocol on their gaming platforms. The first trial of the system was actually at the Desert Inn property. MGM Had situated several trailers in the parking lot where the manufacturers could bring their gaming devices for test before being installed on the Field Trial at the Desert Inn.
Advantages and disadvantages[edit]
Like any system, TITO has its share of advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages[edit]
- Hopper fills for TITO machines are virtually eliminated.
- Casino patrons no longer have to wait for an attendant to perform a hand pay for large payouts.
- Makes multi-denomination gaming machines possible.
- Streamlines accounting procedures due to reduced cash handling[3]
- Enables ticketed bonusing, coupons and drawings.
Disadvantages[edit]
- May cause some people to disassociate gambling using tickets from gambling using cash, in much the same way 'credits' are indicated on some machines rather than a cash value.
- Tickets can be easier to misplace than a large bucket of coins.
- The lack of the sound of a big coin pay out is a turnoff for some players. Due to this, manufacturers added multimedia sound to the machines to reproduce the sound of coins falling when a prize hits.
References[edit]
- ^'Slot machine maker taking a chance with cashless slots system'. 27 January 2001. Retrieved April 4, 2018.
- ^Saylor, Michael (2012). The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything. Perseus Books/Vanguard Press. pp. 104–105. ISBN978-1593157203.
- ^'Ticket-in, Ticket-out Technology'. Retrieved January 22, 2014.