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So you say the dice are rotten... here is your chance to help

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If you are not happy about the dice on GamesByEmail, now is your chance to do something about it:
Help me build a dice rolling machine by making a donation below.

I get a lot of emails from players about the frequency of impossible series of dice rolls. I have tried many methods to programmatically generate "good" rolls. None of them seem to make the players happy, and it has been back to Math.random for some time.

A few years ago I tinkered with a dice rolling machine made from Legos. Though great fun, it was noisy and cantankerous and unreliable, and it never recovered from the move two years ago.

But it made players happy, at least for a while.

So I am endeavoring to build a "professional" dice rolling machine, something that can take the abuse of rolling 200,000 dice a day without needing a babysitter. It is 6 feet tall, 2 feet on a side, with an aluminum frame. I have a machine vision camera with an SDK. I have 200 "Michigan Red Eyes" for starters. I have a USB relay control. Foam, felt, buckets and sprockets fill my garage.

Now I need a bunch of items from McMaster-Carr, also some Plexiglas, a controller, and some other odds and ends. This stuff is not cheap, and I could really use the help. This site is on a personal hobby budget, so it has been a slow process of acquiring parts (almost a year now). It will get done eventually, but in the meantime the tone of the emails I receive are getting rather nasty. Some of you I just know are looking for an excuse to donate to a worthwhile cause. Here it is.

I cannot promise that the new dice roller will make you happy about the rolls. But if you donate and it does not, let me know and I will pull a die out of the machine, melt it flat, and mail it to you, as an object lesson to the other dice. Tangible revenge. Please help.

Thanks as always for playing,
Scott Nesin

If you would like to donate, please do:

Most donations come via PayPal, please click the button above or use the address .

If you would like to donate but prefer not to use PayPal, write to the above email address or fill in the Comments form and let me know.

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