Contemporary Engineering Sciences, Vol. 7, 2014, no.

22, 1171 - 1179

HIKARI Ltd, www.m-hikari.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.12988/ces.2014.49146

Open Source-based G2S (Game to System)

Engine Design and Implementation

Sangmin Kim and Heejune Ahn*

Dept. of Electrical and Information Engineering, SeoulTech

232, Gongneung-Ro, Nowon-Gu, Seoul 139-743, Korea
*Corresponding author

Copyright © 2014 Sangmin Kim and Heejune Ahn. This is an open access article distributed
under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The casino gaming industry has introduced G2S (game to system) standards for
the future management protocol for slot machines. G2S does not simply replace
the 20 year old SAS protocol with Internet technology but also provides various
application and business opportunities to the casino industry. In this paper, we
present our design experience of C/C++ G2S engine for slot machines, based on
publically available open-sources, gSOAP and SQLite libraries. We discuss
design issues by comparing ours with openG2S, another open-source
implementation mainly for G2S hosts. Our engine shows excellence in many
aspects, including smaller footprint, no-JVM interpreter license requirement, and
better command response time.

Keywords: G2S (game to system) standards, slot machine accounting, game IT,
protocol design, open source, embedded system

1 G2S Protocol Standards

The casino industry keeps growing its size every year steadily, reaching to 159
billion dollars in 2014 world market at the increase rate of 9.3%. Among the
casino games, the slot machine plays a key role in recruiting casual non-serious
customers [1], because of its easiness to play and no dealer supports requirement.
However, the slot machines still need system maintenance, and accounting
recording for imposition of tax, jurisdictional purpose and business enhancement.
1172 Sangmin Kim and Heejune Ahn

Since SAS (Slot Accounting System) [2] is introduced by IGT in early 1990’s, it
has been the de facto standards designed to automate slot machine meter reporting
and event logging, player tracking, bonusing, ticketing and cashless gaming. In
spite of 25 years successful operation of SAS systems, they has many limitations,
the necessity of SMIB (slot machine interface board) for connecting to hosts, the
proprietary protocols between SMIB and host systems, slow communication
speed of serial protocol – 19,200 bps, no way to download content to the EGM,
and no room for server-based games. GSA released G2S protocol [3] in 2008, a
new protocol standards armed with Internet and web-based protocols. G2S has
various benefits, making every EGM be able to talk directly to multiple hosts,
leveraging off-the-shelf Internet technologies, host accessibility to incredible data
in each EGM, and allowing new applications to flourish.

Despite these flexibility and chance of business, technical details are almost
hidden in the closed casino IT industry. The paper tries to open up the technical
details for the interested IT industry and engineers so that they can contributes the
industry and suggest better direction of evolutions. The authors believe that the
open source based implementation of G2S protocol engine of EGM side suits for
this purpose, because of the easy accessibility of open source software. The
technical key features are discussed in Section 2, the architecture and key
components of our design and implementation are described in Section 3, and
finally in Section 4 we evaluate the systems in performance and functionality
together with the comparison with OpenG2S [4], another open source
implementation by IGT.

2 Technology in G2S protocol

Fig. 1 and 2 illustrate the topology of G2S systems and layered architecture,
respectively. The G2S standards use Internet-based 3 layer protocol. G2S host and
EGM communicates in peer-to-peer model, i.e. they work both a server and client
simultaneously.

Transport layer functionality and service interface are fully defined by WSDL
(Web-Service Definition Language) documents. A typical transport mechanism is
HTTP and for security purpose HTTPS. Optional multicast mechanism should be
supported for the system providing ‘progressive’ bonus functionality.

G2S message layer provides addressing and delivery mechanism. Remarkably, the
delivery is asynchronous. When a G2S-Body message arrives at host or EGM, its
delivery is acknowledged with a G2S-ACK message, but the acknowledgement
does not guaranteed that the requests or response commands are processed.
Open source-based G2S engine design 1173

Fig. 1 G2S system topology

Fig. 2. G2S protocol layers

Key functionality of G2S application functions are classified into G2S-Classes.

Some classes provide communications services (communications, eventHandlers),
some classes provides game and bonusing service (gameplay, player, bonus,
GAT), some for accounting and performance measure (meters, handpay, WAT,
Vouchers), and some for systems management (cabinet, idReader, coin and bill
accepters) and some for advanced configuration (commsConfig, deviceConfig,
optConfig).
1174 Sangmin Kim and Heejune Ahn

3 Open Source Based G2S Engine

Programming Environment: Our G2S protocol is designed for EGM engine, but
it can be applied to host development with minor modification due to the
symmetric structure of host and EGM functionality. The system is implemented in
C++ (99) and operable for both Linux and Microsoft Windows environments.
Specially, VS 2012 and eclipseCDT are used as development tools for Microsoft
Windows and Linux environments, respectively. Note that some APIs (e.g. select
call) work differently between Linux and Windows, so that we implemented a
wrapper for full portability.

Architecture: The architecture follows the original 3 layers protocol structure and
utilizes open source software libraries as much as possible according to the moto
“Never Re-invent Wheel.”

MsgBuilder
OtherHandlers StateMa
chines
For
CommsHandler Classes

oQ
iQ
gSoap

Message Processor
gSoap

G2SEGMServer Emitter(s)

fastCGI

lighthttpd

HTTP

Fig. 3. G2S system topology

Transport Layer HTTP/HTTPS is accomplished by ‘lighthttpd‘ and gSOAP

WSDL transport service function. ‘Lighthttpd’ is used for multi-host concurrency
support and easy support of HTTPS’s SSL function.

Thread Design: One RX thread and one TX (called an emitter) are used for trans-
Open source-based G2S engine design 1175

port layer and message layer, and single thread is used for applications layer for
not using multi-thread locks. Therefore, the application thread waits for 2 event
queues, one for commands from host, the other is for systems and user events
using multiplexing POSIX select API.

Message Handling: Most application processing is based on event and handler

driven way. Fig 4 illustrates the typical message processing flows on a request
command arrival. SOAP message decoding is done generated stub of WSDL
document by gSOAP. When no message level errors are found in the message, the
‘G2SEGMServer’, playing a role of transport and message layer, responds with
g2sAck message. The message on wake-up takes first xml G2S message string
into a C++ instance, checks the classes inside g2sBody elements (multiple class
elements possible in one message), then dispatches each class or commands to
corresponding class handlers. The handlers interpret the parameters in incoming
commands and then apply appropriate actions, and build one or multiple response
commands for response. The handler’s processing time should be short, for
example less than couple of seconds. This kind of handler requirement is very
common ones, for example Google Android’s ANR error. The emitter thread is
signaled (POSIX select API) for transmitting a message to the corresponding host.

Fig. 4. A typical Message processing flow

XML Engine: Because G2S standards are based on SOAP-protocol, XML

processing mechanism is the key component. After technical comparison [8, 9,
10], gSOAP library [5], open source SOAP engine, was adopted due to its well
1176 Sangmin Kim and Heejune Ahn

acceptance in commercial product. Despite of its wide acceptance and stability,

gSOAP has big room for improvements: unusual class types and members’ name
especially for XML schema’s ‘choice’, middle of C++ and C style, not modular,
single output classes. Even though these limitations, gSOAP fulfill the
requirement for G2S message schema binding and run-time operation. Also we
provide wrapper functions making it easy for handler developers to write code
smoothly and not fully understand the unusual XML binding rules of GSOAP.

Persistent and Device Layer: Most of status of physical and logical devices in
EGM is reflected into database tables, especially when it should be persistent on
system restart due to operator’s commands or failures. Fig. 5 shows the key tables
of G2S EGM persistent information and their relationship. Class devices’
configuration and some status info, host’s subscription and transaction logs,
metering data sets are the key records.

Fig. 5. Database table for G2S EGM side

For embedded database engine, SQLite3.0 [6] is used. SQLite is also open-source
for small embedded environment whereas SQLite has much limitation in
comparison with other commercial or server-based DBA. However, For
independence from specific DB engine and easiness for application programmer,
an DAO (data access object) pattern [7] was applied (Fig. 6). One more benefit
using DAO is that user does not need to consider if a status or parameter of a
device is persistent or not. DAO decide to store or not according to the persistence
property of each parameter.
Open source-based G2S engine design 1177

4. Evaluation and Discussion

To test the implemented G2S engine, we integrated the engine into a simple
functional EGM system based on GTK library, yet another open source graphic
library.

Fig. 6. Device abstraction and DAO pattern

The interoperability test is done with OpenG2S host implementation by IGT. The
feature comparison between OpenG2S and our G2S implementation is listed in
Table 1. OpenG2S is written in Java, based on the J2EE servlet technology with
embedded tomcat server and JAXB for XML processing. The architecture is quite
similar to ours. Due to the limited functionality in OpenG2S, furthermore no
longer maintained by IGT, only subset of commands and related functions are
verified for interoperability: enabling and disabling communication and obtaining
device list in Comms class, and enabling, disabling, locking and door-open in
cabinet class, a few event subscription and reports eventHandler class, some basic
meters and manipulation in gameplay class. However these 5 classes plus handpay
class is the core/minimum functionality and considered enough for verifying the
architectural issue using the adopted technology and open source library.
1178 Sangmin Kim and Heejune Ahn

Table 1. SAS Protocol Application Functions

Feature Our G2S in this paper OpenG2S

Prog. Language C++ Java
Eclipse CDT-gcc (Linux) / Eclipse Java- JDK 1.5+
Devel. Tools
VS2012 (Windows)
SQLite3 JDBC (Oracle, Derby,
DataBase
MySQl)
HTTP Lighthttpd/gSOAP Tomcat embedded
XML processing gSOAP JAXB
SOAP processing gSOAP JAXB
Persistence DAO patterns Not fully integrated
6.8MB for codes Over 30 MB (excluding DB
Memory requirement
(incl. db engines) engine)
Memory management gSOAP and custom JVM GC

Comments Good for EGM engine Good for Host Engine

Table. 1. Comparison of OpenG2S and Our G2S implementation

Acknowledgements. This work is partly supported by the SMA project

technology development support project, SMBA, the Republic of Korea
(S2100260).

References

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Open source-based G2S engine design 1179

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Received: August 24, 2014