Just went to Funco earlier today mainly to find any DC stuff they might have that are worth getting. They had a bunch of cards to give away, all of them Air Hockey.

I took the opportunity to see if the card's easily copied and if the code's crackable or not. Well, my scanner scanned the whole card at 1200 dpi and it's barely legible but you could tell there's 32 dots per vertical row(4 bytes per column) And it looks like a little more than 36 bits in between the dots (so it's about 144 bytes total per square section)

I would think around 2400 dpi or higher would be enough to make those dots legible but no inkjet printer exists with that kind of resolution and my old laser printyer's only a paltry 600. There probably is a super high res printer out there somewhere but it's probably under government's control because at such high res, counterfiet money or goods would bve harder to detect.

I tried to scan in at 2400 (my scanner's max "interplorated"* res) but Photoshop's complaining about lack of memory to scan big image (I got 1GB of RAM and another 500MB added via Virtual memory for a total of 1.5GB!!) so I guess not today. Beside the scanned image even with JPG compression wouldn't fit my web space or most any free spaces. So I scanned in only 1 stripe of code for sample.

I uploaded the whole card (1200 DPI) at http://personalpages.tds.net/~wilykat/airhockey.jpg (quality setting of 7, 2MB in size so sub-56K user, beware.) And the 2400 dpi version, code bar only, at http://personalpages.tds.net/~wilykat/airhockey2.jpg
(quality setting 7, 390K)

*my scanner's true res is only 600 dpi. It's capable of faking up to 2400 but it's really nothing more than a cheap zoom feature. A scanner with true 2400+ dpi would probably cost an arm and a leg :P