No one set out to be an external expansion slot machine kingpin : it just sort of happens . Our friends over at Wired tooka look at Rodolfo Rodriguez Cabrera , who perish from a Cuban engineering student to the oral sex of a multi - million dollar bootlegging scheme .
It begin with a female child , of class . He vanish in love with a Latvian char while analyze in the Soviet Union in the tardy 80 and move to her homecountry . He know and worked there amend telephones , radios , and eventually bartop videogames . His favourite were made in Nevada by a caller called International Game Technology :
Like any good hacker , Cabrera decided to evince his esteem for IGT ’s technology by trying to beat it . Using blueprints meant to assist casino religious service personnel , he figured out a agency to solder a half - dozen pinny wires between the memory cards and the motherboards , completing circuits that circumvented the machine ’s security . This gave him the ability to load any IGT game he desire onto the boards .
And that ’s when providence struck well ol’ Rodolfo . Just as digital slot machines get down to thunder in Vegas and other area where play was legal , Russia was in the thick of outlawing casinos . So he found himself with approach to a glut of old machines and the power to twist them into the much - desired young models and trade them to block off owners and loosely - regulate casinos . Cash . Money :
Demand for these raw machines was so strong that Cabrera had to go on a hire spree ; FE Electronic ’s staff ballooned to 20 employees ; most spent their day soldering pinny wires onto IGT ’s proprietary electrical circuit boards . Cabrera , meanwhile , continued to hone his control of the machines . He figured out a way to make the games forge with just four or five memory cards each , instead of the 16 cards IGT normally uses .
In the death , Cabrera was done in by his own achiever . His bootlegged slot machines became so popular that IGT ’s sales fell off the map in some parts of the world . He was arrested , but initially he was only held for a few day and told he ’d confront some community service . But that manifestly was n’t going to stand : he was rearrested and now might be the first prisoner ever extradited from Latvia to the United States . For the full account of Rodolfo Camrera , and some more background on the slot political machine as an institution , guide over to the lineament at [ Wired ] .
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