Ask the Slot Expert: Getting data from slots before they talked

Slot machine malfunctions are extraordinarily rare. That rarity, I think, makes them newsworthy when they happen, though perhaps only when there is a disputed jackpot.

I once played a machine that unequivocally malfunctioned.

It was a Quick Hit Blitz machine. I hit the bonus round multiple times. A funny thing happened in those bonus rounds.

More and more reel symbols disappeared as I played more bonus spins.

Let me be more accurate.

The machine seemed to stop rendering some of the symbols that appear on the reels.

Everything else in the bonus round seemed normal. The number of rows increased as I moved up to higher levels in the bonus. I was still getting paid for winning combinations. The combinations were a mystery, though, because the machine stopped rendering the bells, cherries, bars, and other symbols and displayed nothing, a black square, instead.

I pressed the Service button during a bonus round. The floorperson who responded said he had never seen that before. He called over another floorperson who said he had never seen anything like that before.

Like just about any computer problem today, a reboot should solve the problem.

One of them turned the keys and hit the magic buttons to force the machine to reboot. As we stood there (well, they stood, I sat) watching the machine reboot, one of them said, "Oh shit!"

This machine was in a cluster of four, two rows of two machines back to back. The amounts won for hitting sets of Quick Hit symbols were progressives shared by all of the machines.

The machine I was playing was acting as the progressive controller for the cluster. When my machine went offline, the progressive also went offline. The floorperson saw the warning message on the machine next to mine. He checked on the other side to see if anyone was playing those machines (no one was).

The smarts to administer the progressives was built into the slot machine. That was not always the case.

The first lawsuit I worked on as an expert witness was a patent infringement case involving a progressive controller. The controller was a separate computer system that gathered the play on the machines participating in the progressive and increased the progressive amount appropriately. It also drove the display that showed the current value of the progressive.

The machines at that time (about 30 years ago) did not communicate what was happening on them with the outside world. To know how much was played on a spin, the controller piggybacked onto the Coin-In counter. Each coin played on a spin caused a pulse to be sent to the counter, which incremented by 1 with each pulse. The progressive system had hardware that was connected to the counter so it too could receive the pulses.

Early slot club systems used the same hack to get the play data they required.

Because those machines did not talk to other systems, the engineers creating those systems had to be creative to get the data they needed.

If you would like to see more non-smoking areas on slot floors in Las Vegas, please sign my petition on change.org.

Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert™, at slotexpert@slotexpert.com.

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Send your slot and video poker questions to John Robison, Slot Expert™, at slotexpert@slotexpert.com. Because of the volume of mail I receive, I regret that I can't reply to every question.

Copyright © John Robison. Slot Expert and Ask the Slot Expert are trademarks of John Robison.