CabiNet - Home/Hobbyist Host

[AJ]

🎰 CabiNet — turn your home slot collection into a live casino like floor

https://github.com/ajs1616/CabiNet · open source (GPL-3.0) · runs on a cheap Linux box

I've been building CabiNet to solve the thing every slot collector eventually wants: not just machines sitting in a row, but a floor — where credits move between cabinets, friends have player cards, tickets print on one machine and redeem in another, and the whole room feels like a casino night you're running. It links your machines over their real casino protocols (G2S and SAS) and runs the whole show off one cheap computer. No cloud, no accounts, all fun-money.

Here's what it does today, live on my own floor:

🎰 Live Floor View — every machine a tile in your browser: real credits, what game's up, online/offline at a glance.

💵 Fun-Money Wallets — a central House Bank you set to whatever you like. Make player accounts for friends and push credits to any machine from your phone.

💳 RFID Player Cards — tap a fob on a cabinet reader and the machine knows who's playing.

🎫 Real Cross-Machine TITO — print a ticket on one machine, walk it across the room, feed it into another.

🖥️ Player menu on the machine's own glass (IGT media-window cabinets) or a small companion screen (SAS machines) — no extra hardware where the slot can show it itself.

🎁 On-glass bonusing & handpay clearing — hit a handpay, tap your attendant fob, clear it back to credits without a jackpot key.

🏆 Tournament Night — the big one. Arm the floor and every machine becomes a seat: it clears the glass back to the House, funds each machine with tournament credits, and locks. One countdown on the big screen, the whole floor unlocks at once, and it's a race. Only wins count — not losses — so it's about who hits. Time's up, machines lock, a winner ceremony fires, and the leftovers sweep home. Friends who don't card in get a random funny name off a roster you can edit.

📺 The Gameroom Board — point any TV at the host and get a spectator screen: your room's name in lights, an attract rotation, and fireworks on the big hits. During a tournament it becomes the countdown, the live leaderboard, and the ceremony.

🏷️ Your game room's name in lights — set it once, it shows on the machines and the board.

What you need:
- A machine that speaks G2S or SAS (SAS is most vintage/hobbyist cabinets)
- For SAS: a Raspberry Pi (3B+ or newer) + a MAX3232 board as the bridge; add a small HDMI screen if you want the player menu on it
- For player cards: a PN532 reader per machine
- The host: any Linux box with a spare Ethernet port — I use a Pi 5, an old laptop works fine. Dependency-free Python 3, no cloud
- A cheap dumb Ethernet switch to keep your slot floor on its own segment

Flash, plug in, run one script. It's all documented in the repo (deploy/DEPLOY.md, and deploy/TOURNAMENT.md for tournament night).

Status & who I need: The goal is to be universal — to support every SAS and G2S cabinet. The whole thing is built to the standard specs, and on the G2S side CabiNet speaks the IGT flavor — which matters because most G2S cabinets let you select the flavor, so you set yours to IGT and it speaks the dialect CabiNet drives (that's exactly how my WMS Bluebird runs G2S). I run it daily on an IGT AVP and a WMS Bluebird 2, so those are proven — but the goal is all of them, and I only own two. If you run anything on SAS or G2S — Bally, IGT, Konami, Aristocrat, WMS, whatever you've got — I want it on your cabinet. It'll either just work or turn up something I'll fix — either way, drop a GitHub issue and send me the log bundle via email.  (if you prefer to put it in a GitHub issue that is fine but the diagnostic data includes player names and wallet balances) and we'll get your machine on the supported list. That list grows with every collector who tries it.

⚠️ CabiNet is a non-commercial hobby project for home game rooms. It's entirely fun-money, handles no real currency, is not certified, and must never be used for real-money or regulated gaming.

Ask me anything — and if you throw a tournament, I want to hear how it went.

--AJ

[AJ]

Hi All,

Given how small the slot community is i decided to just open up the early release to everyone!  You can find the Early Release at https://github.com/ajs1616/CabiNet

Thanks,
AJ

[Bgdhl]

Very interesting project, will definitly try this out and report back!

[shortrackskater]

This sounds like fun! 

I'm going to put your post link in the Senior members section. 

[jay]

So S+ / PE+  are capable of SAS but do not accept TITO (nor do they have a printer). Curious of how much of this would work with the platform.

[AJ]

So S+ / PE+  are capable of SAS but do not accept TITO (nor do they have a printer). Curious of how much of this would work with the platform.

If i had to speculate you would get the machines credit reading and be able to legacy bonus (as long as SAS version is 5.x  or later on the machine otherwise maybe just monitoring) . I'm guessing if it doesn't support TITO that AFT for wallets would also be out  I unfortunately have only personally dealt with the WMS and the IGT machines.  Planning a move soon and then hopefully ill be able to beef up my collection a little more!   

Happy to help if anyone has questions or needs more info setting this up!

[sixcardmark]

S+ and PE+ are both IGT

[AJ]

I should have been more specific.  I meant MY IGT and my WMS Machines.  I have 2 BB1's a BB2 and a Slimline AVP.  I haven't dealt with anything older than that.

[jay]

I believe there are some obscure references to AFT in the SP1271 PSR

Where are you based ?

[AJ]

Here's a shot of the admin menu when an admin fob taps on a machine that supports digital glass. A similar menu with the same buttons comes up on the external screens. 

[coolwavepic]

This is fantastic! Last year I updated my slots to run something EXACTLY like this. I can control all my machines from touch screens I added to the player card panels. I have a players card system I added but using the meters to determine Points was a little wonky. I love the players card screen on the slot machine screeen itself. I always hated this in the casino, but its great thats an option. I will give your project a go soon! Keep up that great work!

Can someone now figure out a class 2/Bingo system... lol 

[Bgdhl]

Is there any best practice when using this in regards of powering down the Raspberry Pi Host and all the SAS bridges? I am one of those who power down the machines after every session and I would prefer to power down the RPis too but have heard that doing it just cutting power may corrupt the sdcard.

Another question since tickets are validated with ”enhanced”. Is it possible to unlock old tickets for them to be used a second time or is all tickets single use only?

[jay]

While this is not your exact scenerio here is my experience with a Rasberry PI

I was using a Rasberry-PI (3 series) in an arcade cabinet to run Mame on Linux.
The arcade platform as are all of my other slots, cabinets etc, are tied to home automation and are hard on/off with no clean shut down.
My PI SD card bit the big one and lost its data partition. I tried a couple of partition tools and recovery aids to no avail. In all fairness this was after about 7 years of sporatic use and the card might have just reached its useful life time (there are a max number of reads and writes to any flash device).
I reformatted the SD card and rebuilt (PITA... or more like BPITFA) and the card appears is physically (electrically ??) sound. I now have a cloned image in the form of a spare SD card scotch taped to the plexi case of the PII.

I have a buddy that is pretty good on Linux, and he suggested that I put the PII on its own switching module separate from the cabinet.
While we would still have it tied to the CASINO ON sequence, along with the base cabinet with monitors, lights etc. The PII would run a CRON job (automated timed sequence) that would auto-issue a Linux shutdown command 2.5hrs after startup. The CASINO OFF command would have a DELAY statement in the macro (alexa routine) that would shut down the power module 2.45hrs after the rest of the casino is shut down. Theoretically the PII would already be off but this gives me a way to auto-start (next time) it without opening the cabinet. The risk I run with this scheme is that my machines are in the middle of a game and the PII shuts down as I have been playing for more than 2.5hrs..... of course these are just suggested lengths of time and you could easily extend to 6 or more hours. Its just a way to get around the potential of SD card corruption by having the PII cleanly shut itself down.