GSA at-a-glance
A brief guide to some of the Association’s work in promoting unified standards
S2S (System to System) was developed in response to requests from the Native American gaming industry in the United States. It allows operators to communicate with many system servers via one simple programming language.
G2S (Game to System) provides a common game to system communication protocol. Manufacturers are seeing G2S as the vehicle to enable the new features that will make games more interactive and fun for players. The first G2S applications were seen in California, Florida and Nevada in the US as casino operators looking for a competitive edge started using some of the powerful features available in G2S on their gaming floors.
GDS (Gaming Device Standards) is the Association’s USB-based serial protocol. It is used to connect gaming peripheral devices such as printers, note acceptors and card readers together in a gaming device. The GDS protocol provides the powerful ‘plug and play’ capabilities of USB 2.0 along with the ability to download new firmware to peripheral devices. GDS is fully USB compliant and is based on USB’s HID (Human Interface Device) class definition. Along with USB support comes UTF-16 support. This character-encoding scheme allows symbols from major languages (including the important Chinese, Japanese, and Korean character sets) to be represented and sent from a gaming device to a peripheral device, such as a printer, in just two bytes of data.
