Las Vegas meets tech world in gambling exhibition

THERE ISN'T THAT much manufacturing of any kind going on here in the UK these days, so when we were approached to meet up with an English company which says that it produces mainboards, we were interested enough to take it up on its offer.

We met the firm at the Earls Court Exhibition Centre, which also gave us the opportunity to wander around a couple of trade shows that hadn't really been on our radar before.

The UK based company, Densitron, wanted us to have a look at the mainboards it designs and manufactures for the gaming industry.

Not the gaming industry most commonly associated with IT, but the kind of games that, apparently, really make big money - those in the 'coin-op' industry.

Densitron and its clients were exhibiting at Amusement Trades Exhibitions International and the International Casino Exhibition (ATEI and ICE), perhaps an example of some interesting convergence of IT and the gambling industry to INQ readers.

This was the case with Densitron's offerings... Densitron Technologies PLC says it has been supplying the coin-op and gambling trades with custom mainboards and other kit since 1997, with its first product, the 'DPX-80' based upon a 300MHz Cyrix MII.

The DPX-80 is still going strong and Alex Taylor, one of these PC Gaming Boards Designers, was keen to prove the point.

These pics show the Cyrix MII powered Densitron guts in one of the functional slot-machines on the Densitron stand - still going strong, unlike Cyrix which ultimately got swallowed up by Via.

Densitron is, apparently, still in a position to supply brand new Cyrix MII DPX-80 systems, and seems to source these legacy processors from a contact in South East Asia.

Of course it would much prefer potential customers to buy the shiny new Transmeta Crusoe powered DPX-114 with its ATi RADEON M9 (mobile RADEON 9000 64MB) AGP graphics, or better still its Pentium 4 based DPX-115 - this Intel Prescott ready baby additionally features ATi M10 (mobile RADEON 9600 128MB) AGP graphics - though we're not sure what 3.2GHz+ of horsepower and DirectX 9 support is going to be exploited by a machine which only needs to display spinning fruits. I suppose the next time we wander around Las Vegas, we might see Half-Life 2 action on a one-armed bandit, perhaps as a means of gambling addiction related stress management?

Here's a snap of the Densitron DPX-114 with its ALi Core Logic.

My ignorance of their market, and that throwaway comment, shouldn't detract from some innovative engineering that goes into these boards, which amongst other trick things apparently record every 'transaction' (say 'game' or 'spin of the wheel' that they run) in the SRAM modules that are positioned, in the picture, to the left of the SODIMM socket. This along with other functions is, in the event of a big-payout, used to validate that the system had not been tampered with.

Here's a close-up of the ATi RADEON Mobility M10 with its' cross-shaped 'heat-spreader' and the four memory modules.

Alex spent a fair amount of time going through Densitron's products which include the design and production of 'touchscreen' LCD and Plasma displays and even very compact all-in-one turnkey PCs in aluminium chassis, some of which have been approved by the US Navy for shipboard use.

Of course, there is a mainstream opportunity for these compact all-in-one turnkey PCs, but the challenge for companies like Densitron which produces industrial standard kit is, in the face of a plethora of cheap nonsense from say the Far East, how to make them commercially viable to a market that increasingly ignores that a properly engineered quality product comes at a price.

Densitron seems happy to be charging the whack it does to its clients in the gambling industry.

Clients who fully realise that any system downtime is a big revenue loss they don't want. µ