Talk:Fascination (game)

New Fascination machines can be had from Randy Seena athe wildwood location. Also the last time I talked to him he was going to implament an automatic tickiting system like the ones mentioned in the artical

I (Timothy Stockman) back in the mid-1990s set up a computerized control system for the Fascination parlor shown in the picture (Indiana Beach). The system there had been updated from relays to discrete TTL logic a few years before by Bob Burkhardt, who made logic PCBs on mounted on the back of each table which were paralleled on a 25 conductor ribbon cable buss which ran behind the tables. I replaced his master controller with a Compaq 286 system running MSDOS and a custom program I wrote, and an interface to drive the table busses from the printer port. The Compaq had a video card with composite out, which drove the video monitor you can see at the operator's station. The two large numerals on the upper left of the display are the number of the winning table. IIRC, I made that super-size font in MS Paint, and wrote a little C program which took the BMP files and converted them to values which the program could write directly to the video memory. Those were the days!

This new computerized system had two immediate advantages for the operator: 1. It allowed them to automatically calculate the payout by some specific, but changable rules. 2. It kept a log file of all games, which gave them an audit tool to track game wins vs. prizes awarded.