AU778786B2 - Improved electronic gaming apparatus - Google Patents

Description

AUSTRALIA

Patents Act 1990 COMPLETE SPECIFICATION STANDARD PATENT A p p l i c a n t s d .1 6 siICONe epm4INe, I0C Invention Title: IMPROVED ELECTRONIC GAMING APPARATUS Trhe following statement is a full descriptionl Of i invention, including the best method of performing it known to me/us: 1

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2 IMPROVED ELECTRONIC GAMING APPARATUS BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION Field of the Invention The present~n rcr+- e%"3~~+tr electronic gaming apparatus and more particularly to an improved gaming machine for improving the play and display of gaming graphics utilising a vertically oriented video screen having touch screen input as a player interface to the device.

Brief Description of the Prior Art Electronic gaming devices have long been provided for playing gambling games such as roulette, poker, bingo, keno, lotto and other various games, and have historically eooo been constructed in a slot machine format typically 15 including a pay board wherein the winning pay-out combinations are displayed, and a third art in which a player interface is provided by means of an assortment of buttons, switches, etc. More modern gaming machines have included a video display screen (CRT tube) that is driven 20 by an image generator coupled to a microprocessor that serves as the game controller. In such video implementations, standard television-style cathode ray tubes have normally been used, and electronically generated reels, cards and other objects have been 25 depicted thereon for implementing play of the game. In some embodiments, the pay board is also included as pay of the video display, but because of this limits the active display area available for a gaming presentation, a different screen or type of screen, separate and apart from the video display is often utilised. Touch screen interfaces have also been used in gaming machines, but are often limited to their application because of the limited space available on the video screen. Another limitation of the prior art devices using video display screens is that the display has been quite sterile in its presentation, often comprising nothing more than an attempt to electronically present a two-dimensional image If 'S B'Ip l p C. p493,- P-435 :s p2 2 3 replicating the functional display elements of the prior art mechanical gaming apparatus.

There is thus a need for an improved gaming station or mach n that ue- mcdrn video and sound technology to provide a complete user interface that in at least one aspect conveniently integrates pay board, play screen, and player input interface in a single unique designed and oriented video screen format.

Summary of the Invention It is therefore a principal objective of a preferred embodiment of the present invention to provide a gaming machine having no improved video display format and user interface which uses state-of-the-art video technology to provide animated television-quality video and graphic displays.

Another objective of a preferred embodiment of the present invention is to provide an electronic gaming machine having an electronic interface which is substantially larger than the standard television-type video screen typically used in present casino-type games.

Still another objective of a preferred embodiment oooo S: of the present invention is to provide an improved user oooo interface for slot machine-type games that readily :accommodates in well-known three-part format, but on a 25 single screen, the pay board, play screen and user interface commonly used in gaming stations.

Yet another objective of a preferred embodiment of the present invention is to provide an enlarged video display screen which provides a complete display of all 30 gaming essentials, yet generally conforms to the familiar ooo and more or less standard "slot machine" footprint and S•height-to-width ratio common in casinos throughout the world.

A further objective of a preferred embodiment of •go the present invention is to provide a gaming machine having both lifelike graphics and realistic high-quality sound generators.

4 According to one aspect of the present invention there is provided a gaming machine, comprising: a cabinet having a front face that is configured to hav. display se~n ti -ith a UGig Ad a widLh, said height of said display section being larger than said width of said display section; a video display unit associated with said cabinet, said video display unit having a video display screen having a height and a width, said height of said video display screen being larger than said width of said video display screen, said video display being disposed in a fixed position so that said height of said video display screen is parallel to said height of said display section of said front face of said cabinet and so that said width of said video display screen is parallel to said width of said display section of said front face of said cabinet, said height of said video display screen divided by said width of said video display screen forming a ratio having a magnitude of 4/3 or greater; a value-receiving mechanism associated with said cabinet; eoo :a processor disposed in said cabinet and ooo operatively coupled to said value-receiving mechanism and said video display unit; 25 a nonvolatile memory capable of storing critical system data; critical data storage software that causes critical system data to be stored in said nonvolatile memory; o o S30 program memory disposed in said cabinet and o operatively coupled to said processor; and o o• S"system software stored in said program memory, :said system software comprising software representing a coo• game that may be played by a player wherein said gaming machine is operable in an attract mode and a play mode and wherein said display screen is electronically subdivided into a plurality of different display regions when said 5 slot machine is in said play mode, one of said display regions displaying a plurality of reels, said slot machine additionally comprising a touch screen associated with said disply rbJ Aio_ a ig sad plurality Uf uSC input buttons.

An important advantage of one embodiment of the present invention is that since it uses a video screen that is substantially taller than it is wide, all familiar aspects of a standard slot machine can be dynamically and graphically presented on the video screen in their usual positional format.

Another advantage of a preferred embodiment of the present invention is that a multitude of different types of games can be selectively displayed on a single gaming station.

Still another advantage of one embodiment of the present invention is that unusual attract modes can be selectively displayed on the video screen to attract the attention of potential players.

A still further advantage of one embodiment of the present invention is that unusual video displays can be presented to communicate and perhaps hold the attention °of players as well as observers.

S: Yet another advantage of a preferred embodiment oo• 25 the present invention is that since a large part of the S.*i frontal surface area is occupied by the display screen, a plurality of adjacent machines can be electronically linked together and driven in concert with complimentary video to create a segmented "picture wall" effect when not 30 in use by players. And even when in use, an integrated background display can be used to change environmental fee: "mood" or "setting" of the gaming room.

Preferred embodiments of the present invention will now be described by way of example only with reference to the accompany drawings.

In the Drawing Figure 1 is a perspective view illustrating a 5a gaming machine with the present invention; Figure 2 depicts a typical screen display in accordance with the present invention; F imri i- I-f..in1a block diag illustrating the principal functional components used in the gaming machine of the present invention; and Figures 4, 5 and 6 are diagrams generally illustrating software architecture and features of the preferred embodiment.

Detailed Description of the Preferred Embodiments A preferred embodiment of the present invention is depicted at 10 in Figure 1 and includes a more or less rectangularly configured cabinet 12 forming an enclosure for the various functional mechanical, electrical and electronic components. The front face 14 of cabinet 12 is uniquely configured to includes as the principal component thereof a video display screen 16 disposed in portrait format with its vertical dimension being substantially larger'than its horizontal dimensions. As is apparent from the illustration, the screen 16 occupies a substantial part of the front face of the device Positioned to the right of screen 16 is a currency input Ssection 18 including a coin receiving slot 20, a paper S: money-receiving slot 22, and a credit/debit card slot. A 25 pair of buttons 23 and 25 may be provided for allowing the •e player to select a "cash" or "credit" mode for payout of winnings.

Disposed beneath screen 16 and at the bottom of the front face is a coin drop receptacle 26. Immediately 30 above the coin drop receptacle are a pair of high-quality audio speakers 28 and 30. Above screen 16 is an ooooo annunciator 32 including a third high-quality audiospeaker or signal generator 34 and a multi-coloured, multi-light display apparatus 36. Disposed immediately display apparatus 36. Disposed immediately 6 beneath screen 16 on a lightly protruding shelf 38 are a plurality of user interface buttons 40 that are of conventional configuration. Formed integral with the frr~t ft r-if Aic-nl r creen 19 ic transarnt t~iw screen that is dynamically configurable to allow manual user inputs at screen positions determined by the software associated with the particular game or attract mode being presented.

Of the right side of cabinet 12 is a conventional pull handle 39 that may be optionally used as part of the user interface to the gaming apparatus.

The cabinet 12 was designed to coincide with the overall dimensions of traditional slot machines so that r o the device can be placed in existing casino carousels 15 without requiring reconfiguration of the stands or machine layouts. The right side of the cabinet forms a compartment for containing currency input devices such as coin and bill acceptors, a card reader, keypad, and S. perhaps a display for a player tracking network interface.

A locked service door 41 forms the right side wall of the cabinet and allows access to the currency components in this section. The front 43 of the lower section of the enclosure contains a coin hopper (a cache of coins that is used to pay out the player's winnings when playing in cash 25 mode). The back of the lower section of the cabinet (behind the hopper) contains a CPU box with all of the associated electronics and power supplies. A locked service door allows access to the hopper in this section.

Player tracking network electronics are located in the top of the system and are accessed by removing a top cover (not shown).

The cabinet layout, which is more or less traditional for video-type slot machines, leaves a tall and narrow section at the upper left for the CRT that forms the display screen 16. To maximise the screen are in the available space, a 26" wide screen CRT display device rotated 900 into a "portrait mode" is used with the il S-,B ep'specap45356.spec doc 22 03 02 7 screen origin in the bottom left corner, and the image scanned from left to right. For purposes of this disclosure "portrait mode" is defined as a display crnfimvratin in whicrh a displav screen has a heirht dimension that is substantially larger than its width dimension. The wide screen CRT has a 16X9 (height to width) aspect ratio and a 0.69mm dot pitch allowing for an 856X480 visible display area. Portrait mode configured display screens or CRT's having other aspect ratios may also be used. For example, although less desirable, a standard 4X3 CRT monitor rotated into a portrait mode could be used.

In accordance with one aspect of the present oooe invention, when operating in a game play mode, the display screen may be electronically subdivided into three arbitrarily sized regions: an upper region 15 in which a S: pay board will be displayed, setting forth the jackpot payouts as a function of the coin input: a mid region 17 in which a game board, play reels, card hands, or other .20 game play indicia is displayed: and a lower region 19 in which touch screen "buttons" are displayed for facilitating player selection of various input functions such as "hold", "bet "draw", etc. One example of a "3-way" screen configuration is illustrated in Fig 2.

25 Depending on the particular game being played, the dimensions of these regions may change. Furthermore, the configuration of the touch screen responsive areas within each region may likewise change to correspond to associated graphics displayed in one or more of the regions. Moreover, in "attract mode" the screen may be subdivided into a geometrical grid of regions e.g. a 2X4 or 2x6 (etc) grid in which passive or active game logos may be simultaneously displayed for selection by a player.

In such mode the touch screen would typically be configured to call up the game corresponding to the logo touched by the player.

An integrated touch screen overlaying the display H S-B *e I lpec 1, 45 3,6 0 3 0:! 8 screen, along with the series of "hard" buttons 40 arrayed along the bottom edge of the display, provide the main player interface to the system.

Tn Fim-re 3 of the drawing a generalised block diagram depicts the principal functional components of the system and includes a central processing unit (CPU) the CRT 16, a user interface 42 that includes the touch screen buttons 40 and pull handle 39, a video storage subsystem 44, an audio storage subsystem 46, a disk storage subsystem 48, a peripheral memory subsystem 50, an annunciator and sound system 52, a network I/O 54, a card reader 56, a coin handler 58, and a bill reader 60. In .**the preferred embodiment, CPU 45 is a 133MHz Pentium processor using a combination of the DUCK Video Codec for 15 motion video, A-RL (Alpha-Run Length) decoding of static graphics, and software compositing for the individual elements.

Although not shown in detail herein, the system includes a motherboard, a PCI base video board and SCSI 20 controller, a peripheral memory board, a GPIO board, a power transformer, a disk drive, and a CPU power supply.

The peripheral memory board is installed on the motherboard PCI bus and is used to replace the BIOS ROMs S: of the standard PC architecture. Whereas on standard 25 motherboards the PCI-ISA bridge (PIB) chip provides the interface to the system BIOS ROMs by subtractive decoding of PCI accesses in the normal PCI BIOS range and its highmemory aliases, the peripheral memory board in the preferred embodiment responds to accesses to the BIOS address range using positive decoding, responding to the requested cycles before the PIB chip responds. This allows the ROM-based BIOS and OS to reside at these locations without modifying the motherboard.

In addition the peripheral memory board provides a removable subsystem containing all of the machine states, thereby allowing secure system auditing The peripheral memory board contains 1MB of EPROM to hold the H .S-BeB'H.Yp ecii\p4',35 6 11.-c d.,c 22 03 02 9 BIOS and OS (including the secure loader described below), 64KB of nonvolatile RAM to implement a SafeStore system, and 128KB of electrically erasable PROM (EEPROM) to store LJe Sys LbLL CorlfiguratiLJ A peripheral memory controller performs byteassembly and disassembly on memory reads/writes and parity generation on the PCI reads.

The preferred embodiment exhibits total immunity to Electric-Status Discharge (EDS) to a level of 27KBV.

The requirement for this level of ESD immunity is an artefact of low humidity and prevalence of synthetic materials (carpeting etc.) in Nevada casinos. All standard motherboards support an IEEE 1284 compatible parallel port, and such port provides the interface to the 15 general purpose input/output (GPIO) board. The GIPO board provides an electrically isolated interface to the external device ports and maps them to registers accessible through the motherboard parallel port.

The system software is designed to address the 20 unique requirements of casino gaming machines, including high reliability and security, fault detection and recovery, and responsive performance. The system software architecture is illustrated in Figure 4.

A pSOS real-time operating system serves as the 25 basis for the software platform of the preferred embodiment. This pSOS system consists of multi-tasking kernel, the pREPC, ANSI-C, run-time library functions, and a driver support library to access physical devices through a set of device drivers. The run-time Application Programmers Interface (API) is a layer of system software providing a set of standard functions that application programmers develop to. Because the API provides a layer of abstraction between the applications and the hardware, the applications are not affected if the hardware or lower level system software are modified. The API is divided into a series of managers, each of which provides either access to some physical device or provides some set of H1" 3 '16 5 3 il- C 03 02 10 services for the programmer. Examples of these managers are shown in the table illustrated in Figure The system applications include a Navigator, Play Stoppage,asui te of "mes and the Machine Manafem-nt System. The Navigator presents the player with an animated icon of each game. The animation describes the key features of the game; users enter a game by touching its icon. Each game is a custom application offering a specific set of propositions to the player. Each game is accompanied by on-line help that describes the rules of play, general disclaimers for the game and so on. Play Stoppage is an application that runs short animations or video segments that entertain the player if a system fault occurs, while communicating information about why a game 15 was interrupted and when it will be returned to play. The Machine Management System (MMS) provides a graphical :I .interface to all technical support functions of the slot machine. This includes player conflict resolution, •accounting, product configuration and machine diagnostics.

As described in detail in the above-referenced US Patent Application Serial No. 08/497662 before software can be loaded from the hard disk, it must be verified as being an authentic proprietary product. A secure loader is the system software component that loads executable 25 files from the disk subsystem into RAM, verifies that the contents are correct, and then executes the image. The secure loader is based on the use of two-key cryptographic authentication from RSA Data Security Inc. of Redwood City, California.

When a software release is ready for shipment, a HASH function designed for cryptographic use generates a unique fixed-length string of 128 bits for the loadable code image. This string, called a message digest, is then encrypted using RSA software and the proprietor's private key to produce a digital signature for the image. The signature is then written to disk with the loadable code image. When the code image is loaded from the disk and is if t 1,1~y4535 6 SP-C dbC 01 02 11 ready to be executed during the system boot sequence, the secure loader decrypts the digital signature using the public key stored in ROM. The secure loader verifies that t imnr i th~~i1 by ro"ring the. m~"c 'rc '-'rrt computed from the loadable code image with the message digest decrypted from disk. The software can be authenticated at any time since the console diagnostics include tools that allow the operator to query all loadable applications and run RSA verification algorithm on them on demand. The authentication process is not limited to just software images. Graphic files or any binary data set can be authenticated. Because the graphics images are so large, they are not verified every time a game is loaded. If needed, critical graphic images 15 such as the faces of cards can be verified before initial use in a game.

S: A SafeStore application provides fault-totolerant storage for critical system data called safe objects stored in system nonvolatile SRAM. To facilitate 20 recovery of information after a crash or system failure, state information about each safe object along with the object data is saved in an internal format known as a binary large object (BLOB). To protect against hardware or software faults corrupting SafeStore, all safe objects are mirrored across two independent nonvolatile SRAMs. If corruption occurs by hard or soft failures to indicate locations in SRAM, or if complete SRAM failures occur, SafeStore will detect this corruption and recover the data.

Figure 6 depicts a BLOB in SafeStore will all of the important BLOB header fields. The data check sum fields 0 and 1 contain the check sums of the data in data areas 0 and 1 respectively. The active data are pointer field indicates that data area 0 contains the latest data written to SafeStore. The BLOB header check sum field contains a check sum of the BLOB header, including the data area check sums and the data area pointer. During a I \SueB\Keap\sle-, P5 pSc (1oc 22 03,02 12 SafeStore update, the BLOB header is read into main memory where the header check sum is computed and checked against the value of the header check sum field. If the check sum does not match, the system will tilt. Assuminq it matches, the new data is copied into the inactive data area. The copy of the BLOB header in main memory is updated with the check sum of the new data, the active data area pointer is updated to point to the data area 1; and the new header check sum is computed and written to Safestore.

Although the present invention has been described above in terms of specific embodiments, it is anticipated that alterations and modifications therefore will no doubt become apparent to those skilled in the art. For example, o• it is contemplated that video screens formed by other apparatus such as liquid crystal displays, field emission displays, interference element displays, projection TV and perhaps holographic and other display technology may be used in place of the CRT device presently used in the 20 preferred embodiments. Furthermore, other cabinet configurations and designs may be used to support a large portrait-mode display screen, and whereas the preferred embodiment utilises a single means to form the display screen, it is contemplated that a similar result may be achieved by using a plurality of contiguous display devices driven to display different portions of a common image. It is therefore intended that the following claims be interpreted as covering all such alterations and modifications as fall within the true spirit and scope of the invention.

I .S-B1Kp1.P-P.535 4 p c doc 2-2 03 02

Claims (1)

13- THE CLAIMS DEFINING THE INVENTION ARE AS FOLLOWS: 1. A gaming machine, comprising: a cabinet having a front face that is configured to have A -i4r1 4- ar U and a wl Li, said -h LU height of said display section being larger than said width of said display section; a video display unit associated with said cabinet, said video display unit having a video display screen having a height and a width, said height of said video display screen being larger than said width of said video display screen, said video display being disposed in a fixed position so that said height of said video display screen is parallel to said height of said display section of said front face of said cabinet and so that said width of said video display screen is parallel to said width of said display section of said front face of said cabinet, said height of said video display screen divided by said width of said video display screen forming a ratio having a magnitude of 4/3 or greater; a value-receiving mechanism associated with said cabinet; ooeo :a processor disposed in said cabinet and oo S: operatively coupled to said value-receiving mechanism and said video display unit; 25 a nonvolatile memory capable of storing critical system data; critical data storage software that causes critical system data to be stored in said nonvolatile o •e memory; 30 program memory disposed in said cabinet and operatively coupled to said processor; and S• system software stored in said program memory, :said system software comprising software representing a game that may be played by a player wherein said gaming machine is operable in an attract mode and a play mode and wherein said display screen is electronically subdivided into a plurality of different display regions when said 14 slot machine is in said play mode, one of said display regions displaying a plurality of reels, said slot machine additionally comprising a touch screen associated with said display ritgion displaying said plurality or user input buttons. 2. A gaming machine as defined in claim 1 wherein said value receiving mechanism comprises a coin- receiving slot. 3. A gaming machine as defined in claim 1 wherein said value-receiving mechanism comprises a paper money receiving slot. 4. A gaming machine as defined in claim 1 wherein said value-receiving mechanism comprises a credit/debit card slot. 5. A gaming machine as defined in claim 1 wherein said height of said video display screen divided by said width of said video display screen forms an aspect ratio having a magnitude of 16/9. Dated this 6th day of October 2004 IGT By their Patent Attorneys GRIFFITH HACK Fellows Institute of Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys of Australia b 00 e *OSO S* *00 *S 6 o *o* o te*