JPS63242291A - Game machine data collection system - Google Patents

Abstract

(57) [Summary] This bulletin contains application data before electronic filing, so abstract data is not recorded.

Description

[Detailed Description of the Invention] [Industrial Application Field] The present invention relates to a game machine data collection system, for example,
This is an attempt to collect data from multiple slot machines.

[Prior Art] For example, in a slot machine, data such as how many coins are stored inside the machine are conventionally known by an attendant by visually checking the value of a coin counter installed in the machine, and by a manager. Reported to other managers. Therefore, although the administrator can grasp the data of each individual machine, he cannot immediately grasp the total number of coins for all slot machines. Also,
Because staff members visit the locations where machines are installed to obtain data, there is a time lag between the report and the time the data is obtained, making it impossible to collect accurate data.

Therefore, a system has been proposed in which a plurality of slot machines are connected to a common control station and the control station collects data in real time. However, such a system has the disadvantage that each slot machine and the control station must be connected separately, making the wiring complicated.

In reality, there are systems with as many as 1,500 slot machines to collect, and the complexity of wiring is a significant problem. In addition, the installation location of the slot machine is frequently changed, and there is a drawback that it is not easy to deal with such cases.

[Problems to be Solved by the Invention] As a system for solving this drawback, a plurality of slot machines are connected to a common transmission path, and a control station uses the common transmission path to perform polling to obtain information about each slot machine. One idea is to collect data.

By the way, public amusement parks in the United States are open 24 hours a day, so the control stations that collect data are configured with a backup power source. However, a backup power source is not provided on the side of the transmission/reception interface unit that sends out data from the slot machine. Therefore, if a momentary power outage occurs while waiting for polling, the data stored in the interface unit will be lost and reset, and the transferred data will be the newly stored data after the momentary power outage. Become something.

In such a case, the control station cannot recognize whether erroneous data has arrived, and data processing such as aggregation is performed using erroneous data.

The present invention has been made in consideration of the above points, and it is possible to transmit information on whether or not a power outage condition has occurred on the collection target unit side to the control station side, and to make the control station recognize that the data is incorrect. This is an attempt to provide a game machine data collection system that can.

[Means for Solving the Problem] In order to solve the problem, in the present invention, a plurality of game machines are connected to a common data transmission path through a transmitting/receiving interface means, and a control station performs polling for each game. In a game machine data collection system for collecting machine data, when a power outage occurs on the collection target side consisting of a game machine and a transmitting/receiving interface means, the transmitting/receiving interface means transmits the occurrence of the power outage to a control station.

Effect] If a power outage occurs while waiting for polling, data will be lost. Therefore, the information that a power outage has occurred should be transmitted to the control station along with the data to prevent collection, aggregation, etc. of incorrect data.

[Example] Hereinafter, an example of the present invention will be described in detail with reference to the drawings.

In FIG. 1, each slot machine 1a, 1b,...
10 are interface units 2a and 2b, respectively.
, -'2n to a common data transmission path 3 of, for example, R3-485 specifications. This transmission line 3 is R3
-485 specification data and R3-232C specification data mutually, the R3-2
It is connected to the control computer 6 via a 32C specification transmission line.

In the control computer 6, the CPU (Cen
tral processing unit) 7 reads the ROM (rOad
According to the collection program shown in FIG. 2 stored in RAM (rando only memory) 8,
Data is collected from the interface units 2a to 2n by polling using the m access memory 9 as necessary.

Here, the interface units 2a to 2n include a distributor 11 that takes in the signal from the transmission line 3 and passes it therethrough, and a signal converter 12 that converts the level of the signal from the distributor 11 and the output signal from inside. and a communication control unit 13 that mutually converts serial data for the transmission line 3 and parallel data for internal processing. Furthermore, C
It is equipped with a processing section consisting of a PUI 4, a ROM 15, and a RAM 16, and outputs slot machine data given via an interface circuit 17 to a transmission line 3 when designation by polling is detected.

The transmitted data includes, for example, the number of coins inserted, the number of coins paid, the number of coins stored in the coin storage box and not eligible for payment, and the number of coins that are not eligible for payment.
Occurrence of s), occurrence of one-land pay) where the staff is called due to lack of coins to pay for winnings, number of game starts, occurrence of malfunctions (Tilts), occurrence of machine door being open, and coin storage box door being open. occurrence of
This includes the occurrence of a power outage in the interface units 2a to 2n.

The CPU 7 displays the data collected in this way on the display device 18, totals the data on a daily basis, starts the floppy disk drive 19, and stores the data on the floppy disk. Further, in response to an operation on the operation unit 10, interrupt processing is executed to start the printer device 13 and print out.

This embodiment also includes monitoring computers 21a and 21b. In the case of a slot machine, as mentioned above, when a jackpot occurs or there is a shortage of coins to be paid, the staff member must go to the location where the slot machine is installed. For the sake of
It is desirable to display the current situation not only in the place where the manager is located, but also in the place where the staff who directly deals with customers is located.
1a and 21-b are provided, and the data sent via the transmission path 3 is given to the monitoring computers 21a and 21b via signal converters 22a and 22b for display.

Furthermore, in the case of this embodiment, a relay device 23 whose details are shown in FIG. 3 is provided. In practice, when interface units of 100 or more slot machines are connected to the transmission line 3, the waveform of the transmission signal from the interface unit far from the control computer 6 will be distorted when it reaches the control computer 6, and the waveform will be inaccurate. There may also be cases where data is not transmitted.

Therefore, when there are many target slot machines, a relay device 23 is provided for each predetermined number of slot machines to shape the waveform and retransmit it. Note that the end of the transmission line 3 is connected to a terminating resistor 2.
Connected to 4.

In Figure 3, transmission line (uplink or downlink) 3
The transmission signal that has arrived from is converted by the signal conversion circuit 25 into a signal at a level that can be processed within the relay device 16 , and then given to the communication control device 26 where it is converted into data that can be processed by the CPU 27 . For example, a parallel/serial conversion operation is performed.

The CPU 27 follows the program stored in the ROM 28 and uses the RAM 29 to detect errors in incoming data, and corrects the errors if they occur. C.P.
The U 27 supplies the error-corrected data to the communication control device 30 for serial/parallel conversion, causes the signal conversion circuit 31 to form an output signal whose level has been increased, and sends it to the transmission line 3.

In addition to the above configuration, in this embodiment, each slot machine 1a has a
It has a configuration that allocates two addresses to 1n for processing. That is, a fixed fixed address and a variable address that can be changed are associated with each slot machine 1a to 10 in the RAM 9, and when data is collected, one or both of these addresses is associated with data. It is designed to be processed.

For example, when aggregating data from slot machines in the same area, it is necessary to assign addresses consecutively to make the aggregation easier. , it is convenient to change the address each time, and no matter where the slot machine is installed, if you want to accumulate data for that slot machine, you will need an address that corresponds to the slot machine plain wood. This was done with this in mind.

In the above configuration, the collection process is performed according to the program shown in FIG. Note that the description will be made assuming that there is no output command to the printer device 20.

First, when the program is started, it is determined in step SPI whether or not the predetermined time of the day has arrived. If it is not the predetermined time, the program proceeds to step SP2 and specifies an initial slot machine to be called. In step SP3, the program is started. Slot machine data is collected and temporarily stored in RAM 8 based on variable addresses.

Here, the interface units 2a to 2n designated by polling based on step SP2 or step SP7, which will be described later, execute the program shown in FIG. 5 to perform a transfer operation. That is, when the power is turned on, the program is started in step 5P12, initialized in the next step 5P13, and then the power-on flag P is set in step 5P14.
Set FLG. Thereafter, the process proceeds to step 5P15, and it is determined by polling whether or not it has been specified. If it is determined that it has been specified, a data transmission operation is executed in step 5PI6.

Thereafter, in step 5P17, the power-on flag PFLG is reset. After that, proceed to step 5P18 to determine whether it has been specified by polling,
If it is determined that the data has been designated, the data transmission operation is executed in step 5P19, and the process returns to step 5P18 described above, and the transmission operation according to the polling is thereafter repeated.

Specifically, the interface units 2a to 2n, along with the various data mentioned above, are in the set state only in the transmission operation immediately after the power is restored after the power is turned off, and are in the reset state in the subsequent transmission operation. Flag PFLG is sent.

The data collected in this manner is stored in step SP3 as described above, and then display data such as the total value for each area and today's cumulative value of the slot machine is calculated in step SP4. At SP5, the data in the RAM 8 is updated and displayed on the display device 18.

Next, in step SP6, it is confirmed that the slot machine from which the data was read is not the last slot machine, and in step SP7, the next slot machine is designated, and the process returns to step SP3 to execute the collection operation.

In this way, by repeating the loop from step SP2 to step SP7, the collection and display operation for the final slot machine is eventually completed, and an affirmative result is obtained in step SP6. In this case, the process returns to step SPI described above. If the predetermined time has not arrived even after this series of collection operations is completed, an initial slot machine is specified in step SP2, and J
l[The collection operation is performed by the next poll. In this way, the collection operation is performed repeatedly during the day until a predetermined time is reached.

Eventually, at a predetermined time, the CPU 7 performs step S I
) Proceed to step 8. In this step SP8, the RAM
At the same time, based on the correspondence table of variable addresses and fixed addresses in RAM 9, not only variable addresses but also fixed addresses are assigned to the data and read out. , in step SP9, one floppy disk drive is activated and stored. After that, in step 5PIO, the cumulative data for the day is cleared and the above-mentioned step SP1
Return to

In the case of this embodiment, management data such as the cumulative total of slot machines from the past to the present and the cumulative total of data of slot machines in the area are stored in an offline computer (not shown in the figure) according to the contents stored on the floppy disk. ).

In this way, daily data is collected, totaled and displayed on a daily basis, and at a predetermined time, the data is stored on a floppy disk. In this way, a fixed address is also assigned to the data and stored, and based on this fixed address, the cumulative value of data regarding the same slot machine itself from the past to the present can be obtained. The cumulative value of slot machines in the pond area and the cumulative value of slot machines with the same amount of coins are cumulative based on the variable address.

Therefore, according to the above embodiment, since the collected data is processed by associating not only variable addresses but also fixed addresses with respect to slot machines, even if the position of the slot machine is changed, the corresponding The past history of the slot machine can also be included in the collected management data, making it possible to grasp the data from a variety of viewpoints, such as the number of areas, the amount of coins, and the history. In this way, if a power outage occurs in the interface unit and the data is unreliable, this information is transmitted to the control computer, so the data can be processed by interpolation, etc., and the data can be aggregated or processed. It is possible to further improve the quality of the data r:=Vrj.

In the above-described embodiments, the game machine of the present invention is applied to a slot machine, but the present invention is not limited to this, and can be applied to other game machines as necessary.

Further, in the above-described embodiments, the management data creation process is performed by an offline computer, but it may also be performed by an online computer. In short, any device that can perform data aggregation processing using either a fixed address or a variable address depending on the processing content is sufficient.

[Effects of the Invention] As described above, according to the present invention, when a power outage occurs in the data collection unit and the transmitted data becomes inaccurate, the occurrence of the power outage is transmitted to the control station. Therefore, it is possible to obtain a game machine data collection system in which data can be processed in consideration of a power outage at the control station, and the values of processed data can be made valid even when a power outage occurs.

[Brief explanation of the drawing]

FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing an embodiment of the game machine data collection system according to the present invention, FIG. 2 is a flowchart showing the collection processing procedure, FIG. 3 is a block diagram showing the detailed configuration of the interface unit, and FIG. 4 5 is a block diagram showing the detailed configuration of the relay device, and FIG. 5 is a flowchart showing the procedure for transmitting power outage data. 1a to 1n...Slot machine, 2a to 2n...Interface unit, 3...Transmission E'4.6...
・Control computer.

Claims (1)

[Scope of Claims] A game machine data collection system in which a plurality of game machines are connected to a common data transmission path through corresponding transmission/reception interface means, and a control station collects data from each of the game machines by polling, comprising: A game machine data collection system, characterized in that when a power outage occurs on the side of a collection target unit comprising a game machine and a transmission/reception interface means, the transmission/reception interface means transmits the occurrence of the power outage to the control station.