Some day gamblers will be able to stride up to a slot machine, insert their slot club cards and be offered a list of their favorite games at the exact denominations they like to play. And if it's the player's birthday, the machine may automatically print out a voucher for a free meal at one of the casino's restaurants. Welcome to the world of server-based casino games. Experts say they have the potential of being the next big advancement in industry technology, an innovation that could increase the appeal of slot machines the way ticket in, ticket out technology has. Industry professionals got their first look at the technology at the 2005 Global Gaming Expo in September. Regulators are slowly advancing the rules and technical standards to equipment manufacturers and casino operators so that field trials can begin. The top Nevada players in server-based games - Reno-based slot machine behemoth International Game Technology and Las Vegas rival Alliance Gaming Inc. - are excited to bring the technology to the market, but aren't talking much about how it will change a slot player's experience. They don't want to tip their competitive hands.

In the early stages, the focus will be on how the technology can make a slot floor more profitable for operators. ''Today, if I have a slot floor with 2,000 machines and I want to make changes, I'd have to go to each and every one of them, open them up and change out the components,'' IGT spokesman Ed Rogich said. ''Not only does that take a lot of time, but the machines are down for that period of time.'' Rogich said that type of transformation is particularly cumbersome for software changes involving currency modifications because every machine has to be altered to recognize the new bills produced by the U.S. Treasury. But with server-based games, every machine is electronically linked to a central computer file server and changes can be made in the time it takes for a software download. With the large bandwidth most slot systems use, changes can be made almost instantaneously. Bob Luciano, Alliance Gaming's chief technology officer, demonstrated the capability of one of its systems by changing games and denominations on 10 slots linked in a showroom. The modification involved a few computer mouse clicks and took just seconds. Luciano said some downloadable technology has been a part of the gaming industry since the 1980s, but it has only been in the past four years that manufacturers have begun solving applications problems and security issues.