Abstract: A magnetic ink character reading apparatus, magnetic ink character reading method and program, and a POS terminal apparatus reduce recognition errors and thereby improve the read rate. The magnetic ink character reading apparatus reads a text string of magnetic ink characters using both a magnetic reading mechanism and optical reading mechanism to obtain magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) results and optical character recognition (OCR) results, which are compared. The OCR process is repeated if the results differ. The positions of the read character blocks are compared to find character blocks that are offset perpendicularly to the base line of the magnetic ink characters, and the OCR process is repeated. The area to which the OCR process is applied again is near the position of the offset character block corrected in the direction perpendicular to the line of magnetic ink characters to be in line with the character blocks for which the MICR result and OCR result were the same.

Abstract: A diagnostic server software component for an automated banking machine is provided. The diagnostic server is operative to periodically retrieve diagnostic messages from a nonvolatile memory of the machine and store the diagnostic messages on the hard drive of the machine. The software is further operative responsive to communication from an external computing device to send diagnostic messages stored on the hard drive to an external computing device. The software may further be operative to route transaction diagnostic messages between the machine and a remote host banking system. The software may retrieve the diagnostic messages directly from a specified memory address of the nonvolatile memory. The software may periodically communicate with terminal control software of the machine to cause the terminal control software to retrieve the diagnostic messages from the nonvolatile memory.