Friday, March 7, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
The Odyssey got off to a contentious start.
In a hearing marked by a scathing attack on a competitor, Silicon Gaming Inc. won State Gaming Control Board approval of its new, high-technology video game Thursday.
The approval, lauded by investors and Silicon executives, came despite warnings from Casino Data Systems Inc. Chairman Steve Weiss that Odyssey's technology may be vulnerable to hackers hoping to win big jackpots by surreptitiously "gaffing," or rigging, its games.
"One of the biggest changes over the past decade in video gaming is the huge increase in jackpot sizes," said Weiss, whose company operates multi-site progressive games such as Cool Millions.
"There's a big incentive for a computer expert to reverse engineer a game and win such jackpots through cheating."
Silicon President Donald Massaro said Weiss is more concerned with competition than game security, a charge the CDS executive denied.
"His motives are clear," Massaro said of Weiss. "We'll become the clear technological leader and he'll have no hope of regaining that position."
Silicon and CDS are two young companies vying for a share of the booming slot and video-game business, hoping to steal market share from International Game Technology, which supplies 75 percent of the games used in the United States.
The Silicon and CDS executives agree on one thing -- that a new generation of players wants to do more than just dump coins in a machine and pull a handle, hoping symbols on reels align so they can win a jackpot.
Massaro and Weiss think new machines incorporating exciting graphics, stereo sound and a sense of adventure that also let customers make decisions will eventually replace traditional three-reel slots as the dominant form of video gaming.
But the rival game makers disagree on just about everything else, including the security of the technology powering Silicon's Odyssey machine, which recently finished a successful trial run at Bally's Las Vegas.
Weiss said the Odyssey programs are vulnerable to hackers, violate state gaming regulations and threaten the integrity of the industry. Massaro called Weiss' concerns a "Manchurian Candidate scenario," after the movie about a former prisoner of war programmed to assassinate a president.
The dispute centers over a Control Board regulation saying "the program residing in the gaming device must be contained in a storage media which is not alterable through any use of the circuitry or programming of the gaming device itself."
Most slots today are powered by Read Only Memory, or ROM-based programs. Odyssey uses Random Access Memory, or RAM-based programs, to power its Pentium microprocessor, a far more powerful platform than that used by competitors.
"If a program can by altered by the game itself, it doesn't comply with the regulation," Weiss said. "And if a program is in RAM, it can be altered by the game itself and thus be corrupted."
He cited the case of former Control Board game tester Ronald Harris, who secretly programmed slot machines to pay jackpots triggered by a certain betting sequence.
"Anybody who's tried to cheat a game by altering a program has been caught and prosecuted because ROM produces a trail of tampering. There's concrete evidence verifying the game has been altered. With Odyssey, there's no evidence, no validation process."
Massaro said several layers of security, including data encryption systems and other devices, protect against anyone gaffing Odyssey, which he called "the most secure machine in the industry.
"Steve Weiss thinks he knows how our product works, and he doesn't," the Silicon executive said. "He has a vested interest in keeping our product from the market."
Massaro said game software is inserted into the computer's hard drive, then write protected, and encrypted using "the latest technology."
"You've disabled the ability to write to the hard drive?" asked Board Chairman Bill Bible.
"Yes, and the program goes into default if anyone is ever successful in doing so," Massaro said.
"Every game on our machines is in a separate file, which we run through a hashing function that is like shuffling a deck of cards," he said. Additional steps include automatic checks on the "hash value" every 10 seconds.
Members of the Control Board's game laboratory, which tests all new games to ensure they comply with certain standards, said they'd reviewed protests from CDS and other game makers about Silicon's technology.
"We feel this device complies with the regulations and technical standards and has greater security," said one lab technician in response to questions from Board members. Another said he "had no problem" with the Silicon game.
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