Modern slot machines are much more complicated than the ones that existed 20-30 years ago, but then again, they are also in some ways more intuitive to make up for that. Take these questions from one player who attempted an older Top Dollar machine:
Please school us on the penny slots vs the dollar slots. I put my ticket in Top Dollar. It spit my 38 cents out in a ticket I didn’t understand. I walked away and left my 51.00 in the machine. I should have turned on the service light so they could explain. Found out the next night. Then I didn’t play max – I got Top Dollar but no bonus. Ugh!! I give up!!!
Brenda M.
What you’ve encountered is certain design choices for machines of that era. This will happen on many machines like it, so it’s probably something that, if you play enough older machines, you’ll encounter again.
Up to a certain point, slot machines would ensure the amount inserted divided evenly into credits based on the denomination. So if you’re on a dollar machine, any amounts in cents would get printed out as a ticket. On a quarter machine, any fractions of a quarter would be printed out. And so on.
So that 38 cents likely was because you were on a dollar machine, and it was evening things out.
As far as the Top Dollar symbol, the design of Top Dollar is to get players to max bet, so anything less than a max bet causes you to not have the bonus active. It’s not the only IGT game that does this from that era. These games often have their pays printed on the glass and tell you how many credits you need to bet to activate all pays – this is known as cost to cover and is an important element to understand about the game you’re playing.
You compared this to penny slots – penny slots won’t have the issue of printing a ticket, but you should still make sure your bets on penny slots make you eligible for all payouts. If there’s a big progressive requiring a $3 bet, you won’t win it if betting less than that $3 level, so the same potential can happen there – it’s not always the case, but sometimes can exist.
