Granted Patent B1

US 7,278,068 · App. 10/794,430 · Granted Oct 2, 2007

Abstract

Claims (22)

1. A system for providing restoration of data in a gaming machine, the system comprising:

a first and a second memory device for storing gaming data, wherein each of the first and second memory devices are equally-divided into two memory banks that have identical copies of stored gaming data in each memory bank, and wherein each memory bank includes variables that identify a processing state, wherein the variables are stored in a recoverable manner; and

a control logic configured to execute a recovery algorithm to recover data due to a power failure, wherein the recovery algorithm uses the variables of each memory bank to identify the condition of a saved data file, wherein the recovery algorithm is variable-dependent.

2. The system of claim 1 , wherein the first memory device and the second memory device are non-volatile memory devices.

3. The system of claim 2 , wherein the second memory device is a battery-backed memory that appears as a normal file system.

4. The system of claim 1 , wherein the variable further comprise sub-variables that further define the data file.

5. A method for providing data recovery in a gaming machine, the method comprising:

providing a memory device having two equally-sized memory banks;

saving data files in stages, wherein a portion of the data file is stored into each memory bank during each stage;

generating a variable that identifies a state of the data file, wherein the variable is stored in a recoverable form so that a recovery algorithm is able to identify the condition of the data file;

storing the variable with the saved data file;

identifying the variable of the saved data file when power is interrupted; and

reconstructing the data file with a variable-dependent recovery algorithm that is based on the variable of the saved data file.

6. The method of claim 5 , wherein the memory device is a non-volatile memory device.

7. The method of claim 5 , wherein reconstructing the data file further comprises:

determining whether each copy of the saved data file is good or bad; and

copying a good, saved data file over a bad, saved data file.

8. The method of claim 5 , wherein reconstructing the data file further comprises:

calculating checksums for each copy of saved data file in the memory banks;

comparing the checksums for each copy of saved data file in the memory banks to a checksum retrieved from a non-volatile memory storage;

determining whether each copy of the saved data file is good or bad; and

copying a good, saved data file over a bad, saved data file.

Assignments (11)