A500+

[Tigger]

-D- wrote:
It may be a collector item some day...the 500+
was somewhat rare (at least here in the States
anyway).

They arent that rare, I imported about 5000 of them for the poker machines  :-) .
    -Tig

[Tigger]

In 91 I began working for a company called Video Gaming Technologies.   We were one of two companies (the other being Tabaret out of Australia) who used Amigas extensively for Video Gambling machines.   At its opening a bunch of them were in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, lots of them were in Louisiana and lots hooked into the system in South Carolina as well.  Last I heard, one of the Indian casinos in CA had a bunch of them, I helped get Kermit Woodall get one for his last trade show, so he could show it off.   Pretty cool use of an Amiga 500+.
     -Tig

[Tigger]

Tickly wrote:
@Tigger

Are these machines listed on Amiga-Hardware.com? If not, I'm sure Ian would love to have some historical notes, pictures etc. for the site!

Edit: Ahh.. just popped along there. Riverboat Queen from VGT is listed, but not any poker machines. I'm sure it would be great if an ex-employee could send in some information and history about the company, and details of more of their Amiga-based products.

RQ are the machines, the intention was to change artwork for different locales, RQ was for Louisiana, but the machine was really cool looking so noone complained about RQ for the other locales.   I have promised Kermit Woodall (Nova Design) I will get his running at some point.   There was a daugherboard about as big as the original rock lobster board called Sebastian (Yes like from Little Mermaid) that hooked to the side connector.   Touch screen was ran by the Amigas serial port, DBA and coin acceptors were ran by a second serial port on sebastian, sebastion had card slots so you could easily add and subtract games.   Used the ROM flash stuff from Commodore, for the second set of Boot Roms on Sebastian.   Basically the Amiga OS would look there first by default, and we had 512K for our bootup program.  There were both an interlaced version using one of the flicker fixers that went beneath the denise and a non interlaced version running at 640x200.   I've been digging up some more artwork, code etc for Kermit for his machine, I'll send the site whatever I find that would be useful.
     -Tig