jslocke52
Joined: 28 Dec 2008 Posts: 1
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Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2008 12:14 am Post subject: Odyssey Fan from San Jose, CA, Area |
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I became familiar with the Odyssey as a player. My favorite slot game is "Jacks or Better" video poker. I was fascinated with Odyssey's white hands dealing the cards, the pile of chips in front of the player and other enhanced graphics not found on other video poker machines.
I was on the committee for Anritsu Company's Engineering Excellence Forum in 2001. Once every year or two, the company held a one day, off site, event for its engineering staff. We obtained speakers on a wide variety of topics, not tied to Anritsu's core business. I arranged for 3 speakers, one on winemaking, another on garbology, and the third on the Odyssey slot machine.
I was very pleased to have Chuck Berg, then the VP of engineering at Silicon Gaming, accept my company's invitation to give a talk. We set up his demo Odyssey machine in a meeting room, with the video displayed both on a projection screen for the audince and on a touch screen monitor for the speaker. As Chuck mentioned in another post, the projection display was awesome!
Chuck's speech was fantastic, covering the many aspects of slot machine design, including making the games appealing to players, writing "crash-proof" software that recovered from power outages (resuming the game where it left off, with the player's credits intact), designing a "truly" random number generator, meeting techincal requirements set by gaming commissions, etc. Even though a slot machine is quite different from Anritsu's test measurement equipment, we found that the engineers face similar design challenges.
I do not own an Odyssey machine, not even an engineering model. The last machines that I played were at Luxor. They are long gone now. However, I remain a fan of the machines, and am pleased to be a forum member as an enthusiast. |
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