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The number of games and manufacturers of coin-operated machines are
almost end less. Choose from slot, gumball, cigar, music, clocks, cash
registers, pinball, gun, and weigh machines, horse gaming and golf,
to name a few. Slot authoritarian, Marshall Fey, author of "Slot
Machines:
A Pictoral History of the First 100 Years," said the slot machine
mushroomed into a premier collectible after 1976, the year that California
legalized antique slot machine collecting. Many states have since followed
suit.
Robert Levy of Pennsauken, N.J., who has more than 250 antique slots,
said he collects because "they increase in value every year. They
are a good investment, very entertaining, they make wonderful banks,
and they will never be made again." His oldest is dated 1893. Levy,
who is for two price guides in the U.S. and one in England, said he
has bought and sold slot machines for 14 years. For some collectors,
"seek and find" offers the most enjoyment. The rare ones are
difficult to locate because many of them were taken to the city dump
and are lost forever. Some collectors like the "thrill" of
owning an illegal item.
Not every state condones ownership of a slot machine, and some states
require that it be a certain age before it can be sold. Levy said the
Attorney General's office of each state regulates the sale of slot machines,
and it is best to check with that office before buying. Cosmetic changes
over the years are not the only consequences of the modern world of
gaming. "With the old machines, you played one coin at a time and
it paid on the center line.
You could have fun playing and watching and waiting for the symbols
to come up. Today's electronic slots play up to 60 lines at one time;
they will take $100 dollar bills and will, geometrically, take money
unbelieveably quicker. You can sit down and in a matter of seconds,
your money is gone, and so is the fun of the game.
The ones that play up to 60 lines let the casino take in less on each
pull, but it (the casino) makes more money in the long run," Levy
said.
Click below pictures to see some vintage machine pictures we collected,
.
Golden Goose Crazy Chameleons is a 5 reel, 20 payline, 200 coin slot machine with a
wild/multiplier symbol, a scatter symbol, and four Golden Goose bonus games.
This is a coin-based game, meaning your credits are converted to coins. To
qualify for the Golden Goose bonus games, you must place an additional bet of 5
coins and play all paylines. If you wager the Golden Goose bet, the Golden Goose
may appear ramdomly at the end of any spin to award you 1 of 4 bonus games.
The Golden Egg bonus game.
The Golden Goose awards an egg that is worth up to 2,000 coins.
The Golden Reels bonus game.
Eggs are displayed on all five reels. Select one egg from each reel to win up to a total of 5,000 coins.
The Money or the Egg bonus games.
Select the cash to win up to 10,000 coins.
Or the Egg and win up to 50 free spins with up to 3X multiplier.
Most modern slot
machines are designed to look and feel like the old mechanical models,
but they work on a complete different principle. The outcome of each
pull is actually controlled by a central computer inside the machine,
not by the motion of the reels.
The computer uses step
motors to turn each reel and stop it at the predetermined point. Step
motors are driven by short digital pulses of electricity controlled by
the computer, rather than the fluctuating electrical current that drives
an ordinary electric motor. These pulses move the motor a set increment,
or step, with great precision.
But even though the
computer tells the reels where to stop, the games are not pre-programmed
to pay out at a certain time. A random number generator at the heart of
the computer ensures that each pull has an equal shot at hitting the
jackpot.
Whenever the slot
machine is turned on, the random number generator is spitting out whole
numbers (typically between 1 and several billion) hundreds of times a
second. The instant you pull the arm back or press the button, the
computer records the next few numbers from the random number generator.
Then it feeds these numbers through a simple program to determine where
the reels should stop.
.
You pull the handle or
press the button, and the computer records the next three numbers from
the random number generator. The first number is used to determine the
position of the first reel, the second number is used for the second
reel and the third number is used for the third reel. For this example,
let's say the first number is 123,456,789.
To determine the
position of the first reel, the computer divides the first random number
by a set value. Typically, slot machines divide by 32, 64,128, 256 or
512. In this example, we'll say the computer divides by 64.
When the computer
divides the random number by the set value, it records the remainder of
the quotient. In our example, it finds that 64 goes into 123,456,789 a
total of 1,929,012 times with a remainder of 21.
Obviously, the
remainder can't be more than 64 or less than 0, so there are only 64
possible end results of this calculation. The 64 possible values act as
stops on a large virtual reel.
Each of the 64 stops
on the virtual reel corresponds to one of the 22 stops on the actual
reel. The computer consults a table that tells it how far to move the
actual reel for a particular value on the virtual reel. Since there are
far more virtual stops than actual stops, some of the actual stops will
be linked to more than one virtual stop.
Computer systems have made slot machines a lot more adaptable, players
can simply press a button to play a game, rather than pull the handle.
For the manufacturers
and slot proprietors, one of the main advantages of the computer system
is that they can easily configure how often the machine pays out (how
loose or tight it is)
.
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