Craig, what’s the difference between taking an off-the-shelf solution as compared to Advantech’s custom solutions? What are the pros and cons? Is there a great deal of difference in terms of time-frames?
For OEMs building slot machines for the regulated gaming industry, Advantech basically has something to suit everyone.
If industry standard motherboards, such as Micro ATX or Mini ITX, are the preferred platforms we have a huge range of options. However with this approach the OEM will need to design and /or source additional hardware to provide the extra functions required for the slot machine. Tey will need separate I/O and security board(s) that are compatible with the main motherboard. While we can facilitate the compatibility the disadvantages of this are the additional resources needed to design and maintain those boards and to ensure both products share a similar life span. Tis is an approach suited to customers who have a strong in-house hardware design team and a tradition of handling this aspect of the slot machine themselves.
For most small and medium size customers, the best approach is taking one of our ‘off-the- shelf’ integrated gaming platform, which offers high performance combined with the extra hardware features needed for regulations, without the need for a separate I/O card. Te advantages here are the saved time and resources, as all parts and components are already compatible and connected and have the required longevity of product life.
For the largest OEMs the popular approach is a complete custom solution, where we either start with an existing product and modify it for tailored performance and functionality, or we build a bespoke solution from the ground up. Tis is a lengthier process and means time to market is much longer, but it offers complete control and protection for our customer and gives them a proprietary platform. Advantech- Innocore’s design team are uniquely experienced in custom platform design for gaming and the quality and performance of our custom products gives Tier 1 gaming OEMs confidence to choose this approach.
Recently we have pioneered another approach, based on our DPX M-Series products. With this approach we take the standard board and supply it with a customised I/O module, which attaches to the main board via a side expansion bus. Tis can allow for a much quicker customised solution since we only design the I/O module. It can also be a very cost effective approach if the applications only calls for a limited set of gaming features on the I/O module.
Is the software support provided by Advantech also customised for specific clients? What examples can you share?
We try to provide whatever level of support is
Craig Stapleton Product Director Advantech-Innocore
“Advantech’s software has been developed over more
than 15 years. Which means it is stable and feature rich. We add features in response to customer requests or
changing requirements in the industry. But we make sure that there is backwards
compatibility. So a customer who has been developing content using our software
from 10 years ago can still run their games on the newest
hardware without rewriting the games.”
needed for each customer. Most customers will have some questions as they start development based on our products and we make sure expert support is available to all customers, large and small.
As far as customising the support or the product, we will do that when a customer needs something different. One good example is our Media Validation toolkit. Tis is a solution ready toolkit that we provide customers that allows them to develop their software boot environment to meet the regulations of the market, but it can be tailored by each customer and we often will help them add extra security into this boot environment.
Another example is the DPX Connector software product. Tis is a single interface event driven protocol library that interfaces to most of the commonly used cash handling peripherals – bill validators, printers, mag stripe readers etc.
But every so often a customer will present us with a device they want to use that isn’t already supported. In those cases we will pass this to our engineering team to work on adding support for that device and protocol into our DPX Connector product.
Being gaming specific, what are the software solutions that Advantech have created to specifically address the issues facing the gaming sector?
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