Penguin-powered pokies spur management project

Gaming machine services and monitor Unitab will undertake a development project to help manage information gathered by some 700 Linux-based appliances.

Attending this year's AUUG conference in Sydney, Darryl Green, gaming technology innovation architect of Queensland-based Unitab, said the company has developed its own custom software to monitor gaming systems and is now looking to give a "higher-level view".

This includes a project to achieve a three-dimensional view of locations where gaming machines are installed as even their positions are government-regulated.

The venue-based monitoring systems consist of an embedded Linux appliance at each location to collect data. The appliances, about 700 of them scattered throughout Queensland and the Northern Territory, are engineered by Cyberguard (formerly Snapgear) and run the Linux operating system.

"We have an exception-reporting system working over a private gaming machine network," he said. "Those devices, one per club, build up a log of exceptions such as machine faults and door openings. Once a day the logging machines dial into the central site and transmit the data."

This data is fed into a "big database" which is required to keep all the information available.

"The boxes are designed to be zero administration and most of the configuration is to do with the gaming machines, not the devices - they've all been stable," he said, adding the devices have been progressively deployed over the past three years. "The original site controller device was a small, embedded box with no operating system at all. The Linux replacement leveraged the networking and other benefits."

Unitab's original business model was to "spend no money and offer no jackpots", but the Linux network devices allow jackpots to be calculated.

After the merger between TAB and Unitab, the poker machine operations became known as Max Gaming across NSW, QLD and the Northern Territory.

There are three separate monitoring systems in the gaming machine area and three jackpot systems. Green said these systems do not have to be integrated "but there is a lot of consolidation to do".

Green said the corporate side of the network has a "whole bunch" of backend systems that interface to a billing system.

"The TAB side is one big legacy system with a bunch of NT boxes pretending to be a mainframe, [but] there is a project to shift that across," he said, adding Unitab is the biggest gaming machine monitoring organization, in terms of machine numbers, in the world covering about 150,000 poker machines. Green conceded most of the project is trying to avoid "unnecessary duplication" of devices and administration resources.

"We are looking at leveraging our experience running gaming systems and using it outside Queensland," Green said.

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