Be Excellent To Each Other

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013 ... ng-bookies

Didn't know this went on, but not surprising that drug dealers lauder cash through them.

The measures to stop this vary depending on which bookies you are in. In some if you put a ticket in with a value of £200 and load £100 into the machine, then print a ticket for the other £100 then that ticket will not be accepted by another machine, in other bookies this is not in place. They claim this is to prevent laundering

Some have a check if you win a lot of money quickly (which can happen) then want cash, if you load back onto a card they don't have an issue.

At the end of the day the drug dealers are loosing some money on purpose as a cost of cleaning their cash so its all profit!

The best solution to this sort of problem is to implement a rul tha all amchines in a public place have a limit of 20p stake and a max prize of £20. If people want to play for higher stakes, tehy must do so in private, in a club. Such a club would have a high membership fee to discourage those that really can't afford it from wasting their money on these things. Those that play for the fun of it can still have their fun, and those that play for the money will have to understand opportunity cost.

If I were in charge, I would ban them compeltely, as they serve no social purpose at all and only exist to fleece money from punters.

Sadly that will never happen, the stakes you quote there were in place maybe 15-20 years ago. Now there are £1\£100JP machines in pubs.

The £2\£500 stake machines were sneaked in by the gaming industry. The bent some rules that said 10p\£25 was the maximum stake. So they made machines that followed these rules but you could make 20 bets max at once. The government took their time to apply rules, but were on the backfoot so it was a bit of a mess.

£1 / £70 in pubs (although the £70 can often be a repeat chance or a streak so multiple amounts of that are possible) - and as for 'old days' - the early chip revisions of JPM's Snakes and Ladders / Roller Coaster could repeat the £10 jackpot 6 times (so a £70 'win' for just over a £1 stake (stakes at that time were 20p a play) - going back further the typical 777's heaven or 777's Jackpot were 20p play with a £4.80 token jackpot but had streaks to pay out in £30 lots



Again not quite but the first £500 jackpot machines were 20 plays of a 5p stake with a £25 jackpot (20 plays at 5p stake = £1 , £25 jackpot x 20 plays = £500)

Max prize has changed in pubs to £100 now. Also the very first £500 were S16 that were max £2 a stake, then the government intervened and for a while it went to £1 max stake, then it moved to £2

Changed in January apparently - I've never seen one (or at least never looked close enough at a machine to see they had jumped up to £100 instead of the £70 in the past



I remember the 'max £2 stake' but I'm sure they also offered a £1 stake with the same jackpot (£500) - probably the difference between a 5p stake £25 machine and a 10p stake £25 machine at the time (and then combining them together for 20 lines)

Ferry to Liverpool, and ferry back to the Isle of Man

Talk about some nice 'captive' machines! (To get to them you need to purchase a ticket, get on the boat and sail one way, then you'd have to sail the other way to get home. So even if the investment of money made it worthwhile for a player (which it would), the investment of time would make it uneconomical.)

Unfortunately of the four 'doables' only two were ready to be spanked, one on the way there, and one on the way back, or this haul could have been more!

As it is they pretty much paid for the sailings and the hotel.

Excellent article about fruit machine emulation (specifically Microsoft's latest)

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015- ... ft-jackpot

" The only reason to play a fruit machine simulator...

... well, it's because your brain fires the same reward chemicals during a well-simulated meaningless victory, or even a celebrated near-miss, as it does during a real one. I get it. But still: you're celebrating coming up for a gasp of air in an endless drowning simulator. It's perverse."

That applies equally to any enjoyment of gambling though.

Microsoft Jackpot is not emulation of a fruit machine though, it's a simulation of a random 20-liner, with an unknown RTP at that.

In the piece he's confusing simulation with emulation, and/or isn't aware that genuine fruit machine emulation exists.

I do take his point that you're 'playing against yourself' in a fruit machine simulator (emulator), but that doesn't stop them being fun IMO. I still play a fruit machine emulator nearly every day.

Or gaming in general, to some extent.

Sorry, I was conflating simulation with emulation.

I suspect 99.9% of people wouldn't care and/or notice It's just that fruit machine emulation is one of the best things ever to happen on computers for me, so the distinction is very important in my head!

(Simulators have been around forever, and they're universally crap and unrealistic.)

You've clearly never played Strip Pot on the CD32....

NSFW.... Strip pot on the CD32.... NSFW

Ha! Still got the original disc downstairs somewhere

I remember all the women on there being a bit Readers Wives, and not in a good way.

All the bookies have done now is put some weak controls in.

When you put some money in it asks if you want to set limits. When you blow through £250 it will ask you if you want to stop and wait all of 2 seconds before you can start again.

If you want to play £100 a spin on roulette you either need to get a loyalty card or have the money loaded on the machine by staff, this is only applied to cash, if you load money via card you can play £100 a spin.

Staff do nothing to question players. Watched a bloke last week burn through a big stack of £50 notes on roulette getting more and more pissed off and they the staff said nothing.

EXCITING NEWS!

MFME (Multiple Fruit Machine Emulator) has had its first official new release in over a decade.

(The last official release was in 2005 IIRC, there was a 'leak' after that and the author then said that was it, no more official releases ever. It did look sort of back on the cards a few years ago but then the MAME community enforced their terms (MFME has always contained MAME code but not historically complied with the source code release requirements), so the source code was released for MFME and that was it again, no more official releases ever. And that has held true until the last week, when the author released a new version of MFME, and the changes are huge.)

The TL:DR in some regards is the emulation now comes very close to the present day, although the author has deliberately made all £100 jackpot ROMs non-runners (as these are the machines out on site in pubs and arcades now), however he has left all £70 jackpot ROMs as runners, and these were the latest and greatest up until about two and a half years ago, and indeed can still be found on location in quite a few places.

What this means in practical terms is, for example, a huge swathe of the Deal Or No Deal fruit machines will now run in the emulator, and layouts are already being produced and released.

(Of equal or more interest to a lot of us are the historical techs that have been added to the emulator, and a huge number of improvements and changes to techs that were already in, along with a massive list of improvements and enhancements to the emulator itself.)

For those of us into our fruit machine emulation, this really is the biggest news to hit in over ten years, and was something we'd kind of accepted would never actually happen, so there are a lot of really happy people at the moment.

So yes, very exciting times for fruit machine emulation, and massive kudos to Chris, the author of the emulator, as he's put an awful lot of history behind him and done a really great thing in releasing a new version of the emulator. (It was well known that he'd never stopped improving, coding, tweaking, and refining, but there was no expectation that he'd ever give his work another public release.)

http://www.fruit-emu.com/
http://www.fruitemu.co.uk/ib/

WTF

This is Nov 1st not April 1st !

I remember the Simpsons game. Christ, it must be twenty years old.

Never mind your f*cking Simpsons and Deal or No Deal sh*te this is what I really want



Real games for real people - play and get the feature - big win - 6p !

Where's Cavey when you need him

This is the thing, there are over ten years of changes and improvements in this release, so there's pretty much something for everyone.

Bringing the most recent machines to the table are SCORPION4, SCORPION5, ADDER5 and MPU5 technologies. Scorp4 and MPU5 have been in since the 'leaked' version but with very erratic ROM/hardware support so lots of games have been non-runners, for example all machines by 'Red Gaming' on MPU5 because of some extra encryption, and all Scorp4 machines that used a CCTALK module.

(Interestingly the ROMs surfaced a few years ago for a Red Dwarf fruit machine (by Red Gaming) that never got past the test phase, only a couple of units were built for a trade show, and was never released or produced beyond that, so that is now a runner in the emulator - loads of great sound samples!)

At the other end of the spectrum you've got some really ancient techs from the 80s (such as the machine zaphod linked to above), which either weren't emulated at all, or had all sorts of issues.

Then in the mid-ground you have the links of the EPOCH tech, which for example that Simpsons machine ran on, and now makes available a huge number of machines by Maygay, Impulse, Global, and others. (EPOCH as a tech was pretty flaky, (leaking batteries on the boards and exploding power supplies), so not many EPOCH machines have survived for real compared to other techs of the era, so emulation is a great way to bring them back to life.)

Plus there are all sorts of outliers which are now included, so MPU4 video fruities are in, machines that used large plasma or DMDs are now supported, all sorts of extra reel/lamp extenders, and stuff like that.

On top of all that there are quality of life improvements and changes far too numerous to mention.

It's a massive, massive event in the world of fruit machine emulation, for folks like me who have been a huge fan of the scene solidly for fifteen years, (and arguably kicked it all off with the first fruit machine emulation site on the internet, fact fans), it's pretty much a dream come true.

I don't suppose the Party Time type machines are emulated yet?

The technology is emulated and you can now run multiple instances of the emulator and they'll talk to each other, emulating different aspects of the set up.

So for Party Time you'd need four instances of the emulator running, one for each of the three base units, and one for the top box.

I believe there's a Golden Game layout in development, which will be running on this principle - I'll keep you posted in this thread. (Or just follow the forums at the sites I linked to above.)

Cheers for that. Every time in the past when I've looked for info on it, you'd see anyone asking questions about it get roundly shouted down.

There was a variant of it that was just for one player -

which would be fine for me.

Very early WIP of Astra's 'Celebration' which is basically the same machine

Pretty.

That's pretty much what all layouts start out as, and finish up looking like the screenshots above.

There's a huge amount of effort involved with working out the reels, lamps, buttons, etc.

Isn't that what JC was good at? Prettying up fruities?

Yes he was awesome at it, taught himself Photoshop and could work absolute magic, even with the shittiest of photos/flyers or other ropey source material.

There's a good number of really talented people on the fruit machine emulation scene, who've given an awful lot of time and effort (and money) to get old machines brought back to life in an emulator.

Layouts for a couple of very 'doable' £70 jackpot fruit machines have just been released, ALIEN and STAR WARS A NEW HOPE.

These machines between them paid for many free nights out for me, with bundles of cash left over. ALIEN in particular was so lucrative that on one occasion the pub's landlord appeared next to me and said he was going to turn the machine off as 'it had paid too many jackpots'.

The layouts released are in the 'classic' format (i.e. a simple graphical representation of the real machine), but resources for DX layouts (DX layouts are the 'real' looking ones) are high quality and plentiful so I'm sure they'll be along in due course.

The methods for both these machines are complex and involved, the idea that the 'cheats' for fruit machines revolve around just bashing a few buttons are very far off the mark, however, with a bit of practice both these machines were substantial money-makers for me. Was very sorry to see them go!

Yay the Alien is a doable chip, it costs about £45-£55 for each £70 jackpot, until it finally clams up and stops boarding.

Quite awkward to do though, and I can sort of understand it looking a bit dodgy to the casual observer or vexed pub landlord.

How long does it take to get the jackpot? If you're pumping up to £55 into it for up to £15 profit, hopefully not too long!

Well I used to average about £45-50 per jackpot, £55 would be an outlier scenario, I guess I'm still getting my hand back in with it.

Of the ~£50 it costs to get the jackpot, £40 of that is lost as quickly as you possibly can on £1 play, it's only the remainder that you play out on 30p play that you're actually trying to win the jackpot off. I'll have a proper kick about with it tonight and see if I can get back to my old efficient ways on it, but off the top of my head I'd guess maybe 10 minutes or less per jackpot, so if we say £20 profit per jackpot that's £60 up in half an hour. (Generally speaking you'd never get more than three out of them anyway.)

A properly battered one would be left in an incredibly foul mood, and could easily cost upwards of £50 just to offer any win or feature again, even a quid.

The first 4K layout is now in the pipeline. I'm beta-testing this for someone so there are still tweaks and improvements to be done, and I'm having to use the emulator's 'shrink to fit' option even on my 2560x1440 screen!

Look at the quality of the source artwork though, and the awesome job that the guy is doing with the lamping work.

This is another significant tech added to the new emulator, specifically in this case the MPU4 variant that used a CRT screen instead of traditional reels and had quite a lot of games released for it.

Really great machines to play with loads of little tricks and features, and great sound packages too. (This was one plays Crockett's Theme on the Lucky Lotto feature, for example.)

Please note this isn't available to download anywhere yet as is still in the beta-test stage (you can see for example that he hasn't lamped one of the 'BUSTED' squares on the feature board or the coin mech and a few other bits and pieces, and some of the debug buttons and switches are still off to the right). The guy who's doing this layout is a bit of a legend on the FME scene, I believe he's a professional artist by trade so can really work some wonders when it comes to putting these layouts together.

In other news on the Alien machine, which I spent a shockingly extended period of time playing yesterday (my PC was running MFME solidly from about 8:30am in the morning to 1am the following morning), I've managed to hammer the thing so mercilessly it's wanted over £50 just to get on the board

We finally get that emulated then, is that some sort of multi-game cabinet you are showing there?

No it's one of these (video of a real one below).

They were basically just a normal fruit machine with a screen instead of reels, and it used the screen for all the different games that were available on the feature.

The games up on the top glass are all part of the same feature. When you get the three car symbols on the winline or exchange to the feature, you are offered one of the eight games in either NORMAL or SUPER form, which you can either collect or spin the dice to move around the board, which will either land on a feature again (sometimes the same one!), or the BUSTED square which is feature over.

Despite there being eight different games there's no skill involved in any of them, you just get awarded what you're given really, the key thing is that the SUPER games always pay at least half the jackpot value and often a lot more, whereas the NORMAL games can pay proper wank like a quid or something.

Great machines IMO, really good fun to play.



My personal favourite machine in the series is Reno Reels. I used to love the music on this one, back when I was a shockingly hardcore fruit machine addict, I would just let the music samples loop round and allow them to relax me a bit, before losing whatever money I had available to me, and then walking home wanting to die.

You'll have to turn the sound up on this video as the recording is poor, but you can hear the tunes well enough.

The ROMs are in the FME DAT for this machine so a layout should be along shortly

Here you go devilman!

Also included the 'before' pic to compare with the finished article!

Cheers Hearthly. I figured I'd give it a go and just play for a bit till I got a jackpot. Had to put £170 through it to get the £15 jackpot and ended up with £116. Bargain.

Just watch out though that as downloaded it's set in 'Read Only' mode so it won't update the RAM file (i.e. machine state) when you quit out, you need to press CTRL+W whilst the layout is loaded, you'll see that the 'read only' text disappears from the description field right at the top of the emulator.

Kind of as expected, the release of the new emulator has unleashed a tsunami of layouts, there's clearly been a lot of pent-up demand for something new for people to get their teeth into.

I've been a bit conflicted between two very different 'streams' if you will, the older machines that can now be emulated and played that I've been looking forward to for years (for example the Maygay 'Screenplay' machine which had a telly incorporated into the top glass to play video games on), and at the other end of the spectrum, the far, far more modern £70 jackpot machines - specifically the ones that had all sorts of cheaty shenanigans going on with them.

For example there's a Deal Or No Deal machine called Banker's Bonus, which I heard about back in 2011 but never even saw a real one over here, so when a layout was released for it yesterday I was super-keen to finally give the method a try. (I'd had it explained to me in 2011, but none of the buggers turned up over here!)

The cheat on this one basically gets the machine to break the law. The legislation at the time allowed for a maximum £70 win on a single credit, yet you can get this machine into a state where it will bank £140 on one credit, and then amazingly, you can get it set up to do the same thing again once you've switched the stake.

I managed to get £280 banked off just £56 of credits, and that was with me not having exactly finessed the method, I could do better on repeated attempts at it for sure. The real kicker is that the wins are accounted for, the machine knows it's just spat £280 out so you can well imagine the absolute pillaging it will dish out to subsequent players to claw all that back. (And at standard pub percentages it'd need to take an eye-watering £350 to get back to a level-pegging sort of state, appalling stuff.)

Opinion remains divided as to whether this was deliberately coded in (corruption) or just a mistake in the code (incompetence) - but it's really quite a sight to behold as you can effectively get the machine to break the law twice in the space of about 15 minutes.

I had the emulator running on my PC yesterday from about 8:30am, right the way through to 1:45am - so when I got up, to when I went to bed, basically.

Attention devilman!

The full Party Time experience is now emulated!

http://www.fruit-emu.com/forums/topic/5 ... ime-arena/

Without going into every detail, what's actually involved in these exploits to get machines to pay out?
What is an expert doing that a normal punter isn't?

This thread made me stop and think about when was the last time I played fruities for real, and roughly - very conservatively in fact - how much I'd saved over that time.

In fact, I gave up fruities mid-2002, so approx. 14.5 years ago. Back in the day, I probably shoveled £60/week into them on average (that sounds like a lot, but that's only a £20 note or so changed up every pub visit or service station).

So, ignoring interest, that's £60 * 52 * 14.5 = £45,240.00.

Or, to put it another way, my brand spanking Porsche Cayman 981S was actually free of charge, because I gave up the fruities. Quite staggering, really.

Was that 60 how much you put in, or how much you ended up down?

I always lost it (or pretty much always, except for the once-in-a-blue-moon occasions where I immediately made a packet from the off, and had the ability to stuff the proceeds into my top pocket... but usually 'the fever' set in, so even if I was a few quid up, I'd pump the lot back in addict-stylee. )

Towards the end, even the occasional win NEVER happened, it was just one raped, left-for-dead machine after another - whether AWP or club. I didn't know it at the time, but through the wonders of emulation I *subsequently* became aware of widespread "cheats" and the existence "pro" player. I have to confess to feeling mightily aggrieved and bitter at the time and for years afterwards - residually even now if I'm totally honest. But, I have to remind myself that, when I started out with fruities and for a long time thereafter I did at least enjoy "a punter's chance" and as slim as that was in actual reality, it still meant I got a run for my cash and occasionally even made a few quid... "good times" if you will. This kept me avidly playing (and losing). However, it was only the latter *catastrophic* and guaranteed quick losses - in short order, and every single time - culminating in a particularly disastrous £800 beating in a single (very drunken) session on a notorious £1000 jackpot Bellfruit Casino fruit machine that I won't mention here (I later owned one of these beastly things as a form of cathartic revenge afterwards, for many years) - that finally wrested me off them for good, in a near marriage-ending kind of way.

I admire Hearthly for "taming the dragon" as it were and caking the machines, poacher turned gamekeeper style. But that would've never worked for me, I was too hooked through the bag (and probably would've been too shit to master the necessary arcane procedures, skillstops or whatever anyway). Total abstinence was my only possible salvation.

There's really no single answer to that question, the various methods/manipulators/exploits/free wins/emptiers/etc are so many and varied that the explanations for their existence are equally varied.

Some of them are undoubtedly the result of coding errors or bugs, or oversights in testing, or whatever. On the other hand some are undoubtedly deliberately coded in, i.e. corruption/inside job. (The one constant always has been, and still is, that some people know about these things, and some don't.)

The unique aspect of UK fruit machines (AWPs) and club fruit machines (clubbers), is that they are COMPENSATED. That is, they actively seek out their target payout percentage.

So unlike a roulette wheel, for example, which simply relies on mathematics to deliver a profit to the operator over time (i.e. an inbuilt house edge that random numbers will deliver with 100% certainty over enough time), fruit machines will actively compensate their position depending on how far adrift they are from their target. (This is also in stark contrast to slot machines just about everywhere else in the world, Vegas slots for example are all completely random.)

As such, AWPs and clubbers have always been vulnerable to manipulation and exploits, and as Cavey notes above, what this meant out in the real world was that there were those in the know, and those who were not in the know. I most certainly was 'not in the know' hence the best part of a decade of catastrophic addiction as I lost my shirt time and time again to machines that were dead far beyond the point of any logical explanation. (I've still got the scars on my head from where I attempted to drill into my skull with a knife after one desperate session, and once destroyed my own car with a rock.)

I finally started to get my shit together around 2001 or so and was able to start making some money back, but truth be told I will never recover my lifetime losses which are in the many tens of thousands of pounds. (You can destroy an awful lot of money during a decade of addiction.) I continue to play now because every pound I make back is a small victory, a small clawback, a Pyrrhic victory in many regards of course, because that decade is never coming back - but I'll take the victories anyway.

I have total respect for Cavey's solution, which is to fuck the things off forever and maintain total abstinence - whatever approach one takes to conquer a destructive addiction is valid.

TBH I've mostly stopped playing AWPs for real these days anyway (although when my brother was over last month for example, they paid for a night out with a chunk of change left over), but I still love playing them in the emulator, and the wave of £70ers that the new emulator has made possible have been fascinating to really get stuck into. (In the case of Alien it was a machine I made good cash out of and it's been very entertaining to kick it around in the emulator again, whereas a Banker's Bonus I've never even seen a real one so it was fascinating to get my head around the mechanism of how to do it.)

Poor Chavalier

I bought that car for £50 and it never let me down, until I set about it with a rock, and jumped up and down on top of it. (Note the dents in the roof.) Sustained some nasty cuts to my arms as well.

It burnt almost as much oil as it did petrol, and it had all of THREE forwards gears (automatic), but it never broke down.

Very nearly got arrested that night. Fortunately of the two policeman who turned up, the Sergeant grabbed me by the arm and took me off to one side, and snarled something along the lines of 'Calm yourself down right now, or you're getting nicked and going in the back of that van, and you can spend a night in the cells'. (This was in response to me bashing the side of their police van and screaming 'WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO GET ARRESTED?') I decided to calm down.

Not the best of times.

To add insult to injury, I had to pay to get the fucking thing towed away.

I don't go to big pubs that often but they all have 3-4 machines in them.

So they must make money even with people who have cheats or advantages or the pubs would just get rid of them?