1. Field of the Described Embodiments
The present disclosure relates generally to gaming machines, such as video poker and slot machines. The present disclosure particularly relates to synchronizing audio in a bank of gaming machines.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many of today's gaming casinos and other entertainment locations feature different single and multi-player gaming systems such as slot machines and video poker machines. The gaming machines may include a number of hardware and software components to provide a wide variety of game types and game playing capabilities. Exemplary hardware components may include bill validators, coin acceptors, card readers, keypads, buttons, levers, touch screens, coin hoppers, ticket printers, player tracking units and the like. Software components may include, for example, boot and initialization routines, various game play programs and subroutines, credit and payout routines, image and audio generation programs, various component modules and a random or pseudo-random number generator, among others.
Gaming machines are highly regulated to ensure fairness. In many cases, gaming machines may be operable to dispense monetary awards of a large amount of money. Accordingly, access to gaming machines is often carefully controlled. For example, in some jurisdictions, routine maintenance requires that extra personnel (e.g., gaming control personnel) be notified in advance and be in attendance during such maintenance. Additionally, gaming machines may have hardware and software architectures that differ significantly from those of general-purpose computers (PCs), even though both gaming machines and PCs employ microprocessors to control a variety of devices. For example, gaming machines may have more stringent security requirements and fault tolerance requirements. Additionally, gaming machines generally operate in harsher environments as compared with PCs.
In many casinos and other entertainment locations, two or more gaming machines may be deployed as part of the same bank of gaming machines. For example, video slot machines offering the same game may be placed next to one another in a casino. Deploying banks of gaming machines may increase the exposure of the game to players. A player may also be able to locate his or her favorite game more easily in a gaming environment, if the machines offering the game are located together.
In some cases, gaming machines that are located near one another and offer the same game may cause a cacophony to occur. In other words, the mixture of sounds from the game may clash when played by the various gaming machines. For example, a first gaming machine may play a portion of the background music for the game while an adjacent gaming machine plays a different portion of the background music. Players of the gaming machines may find this distracting. In another example, the status of the game at the first gaming machine may change (e.g., by entering a bonus round, while waiting for a player to interact with the game, etc.). In response to the status change, the first gaming machine may switch the audio track being played. Such a change may conflict with the audio from the other gaming machines in the bank.
Some gaming machines have been designed to reduce or eliminate clashing music by directing a game's audio only towards the game's player. For example, some gaming machines use chair speakers to direct a game's audio towards the player seated in front of the gaming machine. While this approach may reduce cacophony between gaming machines in a bank, the individual player may also feel isolated from the players of the other gaming machines. Moreover, this approach requires specialized hardware to prevent a player of one gaming machine from hearing the audio produced by any neighboring gaming machines.