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Other Hobbies and Interests that our NLG members enjoy => Other Hobbies and Interests => Topic started by: acura123 on February 15, 2023, 02:42:04 PM
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So I was a lottery agent back in the 1980's and we used to sell lottery tickets with this very unusual barcode with a 4 by 12 set of blocks (representing the binary). The thing I was never able to figure out was the serial number of the ticket was 17 digits long ( 028-23199489-167004) and the barcode could only fit 48 characters of blocks. If the each numeric number has to have 4 blocks to represent each number then the barcode would not be long enough. I also found a similar barcode on a racing ticket that had the block style barcode along with a modern barcode but on that ticket they used hexadecimal and the barcode Field was 6 X 12. I would think this technology for encoding the barcode would come from the horse racing industry that used amtote tickets at the time but I had never seen or understood how this barcode was encoded? Does anyone have any idea how this was encoded? Much appreciated.
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A 900 number hotline to hear the lottery numbers? oof.
I recognize that from tickets in the 90's, but it would of been from the Ontario Lottery. My guess is the encoding is documented by the terminal manufacturer both regions used and that would of probably been something from GTECH.
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It was from the 90's from gtech. Any idea how they coded it?
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Can't even begin to think. I don't think Gtech even distributed intelligent terminals until the late 90's so whatever kind of barcode that is would probably also worked on their older machines, which gave you something like 15 years worth of documentation that probably exists.
Thing is Gtech/IGT seems to keep all of their technical documentation extremely close. I've never seen anything beyond state-specific retailer manuals in the wild. I'd bet it's also something they don't want people finding decades later either.
Edited: here's some PA tickets form 1990/1991 that use a compressed version of the same barcode.
(https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/vqkAAOSwa39fvBhm/s-l1600.jpg)
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My guess would be that the barcode would translate to another set of digits or characters (that is unknown to you and not visible anywhere) to be used against a lookup table to find which ticket it belonged to. It obviously can't be encoding the whole serial number. Something like: <scans ticket>, barcode reads as A1C6G370, server says that combo is pointing to 028-23199489-167004.
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This is such a great answer. It can't convert a 17 digit serial. number directly so it must either compress it (which I doubt) or use a lookup table.
Wish I could find out how they did it. Any idea what the Pa lottery used in the tickets shown?
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A 900 number hotline to hear the lottery numbers? oof.
"Still only 49 cents a minute" :rotfl: