Be Excellent To Each Other

Thanks for the download link. I'll have a look through later.. as for the noughts and crosses game, I've seen it in various different guises to be honest and I can't be any more specific than that it had red crosses and black noughts and you won £1 if you got the crosses across the centre line.

Don't worry though, I'll have a good look through the downloads section and see what I can see.

Just out of interest, which emulator is best for these? Or do they come already prepared like Gladiator/Wildzone/Arcadia did?

I've just been using Archive.org and nosing back at your Web Hovel stuff.. the earliest entry they've got is 2003 - didn't realise it was that long ago.

I started The Hovel back in 2001, 'public' fruit machine emulation is very nearly ten years old

Like the OCD bugger I am, I've got the whole lot archived out. Feel free to browse the past

http://files.enjin.com/62279/offlinehovel.zip

(Just unzip and open index.htm from the top level folder.)

It's even got he who must not be named in there.... (From the October 2001 issue of PC Zone.)

One you might like to play TheVision, definitely one of my favourite machines ever, and on the original 'proper' £6 jackpot here. (The machine itself was released in, IIRC, 1994.)

http://files.enjin.com/62279/indy.zip

I had a few goes on Indy last night and I never noticed that in the EULA for the JPM emulator, it says that you're not permitted to use it to analyse the play mechanism of a machine, particularly in association with the Fair Play campaign. Guess the author wasn't a fan?

I played a bit of Indy last night too.. I like it but Gladiators is still my favourite.

Any more you'd like to chuck my way?

Yeah Fairplay was a bit of a sore point for a lot of people, to say the least. Especially when the issue made the national press and television.

If you like the Maygay style of play (and they do make entertaining machines, with brilliant use of samples), I'll get a few more of theirs uploaded in due course and post the links here.

(Alternatively TheVision, PM me a name and address, and I'll burn out a DVD of the complete FME collection and pop it in the post for you. Was running to around 5GB IIRC last time I checked.)

Here's a nice little machine called 'Deluxe Monopoly' to have a crack on, all kinds of snippets from 80s and 90s music on this, although Spandau Ballet and The Stranglers wouldn't normally be on the same playlist

http://files.enjin.com/62279/deluxemonopoly.zip

I've still never figured out why this was the case.

I fortunately never really got the bug for fruit machines as a teenager - I would occasionally put a few quid in them in the arcade while waiting for Virtua Fighter or whatever hot new game was free, but I'd begrudge being as much as £3 or £4 down and wouldn't try and "chase" my money back.

What I do recall, though, was the amount of (presumably completely fictional) "codes" and tricks that various machines were meant to have. For example someone at school would tell you that their big brother says if you get holds on a certain type of Monopoly then if you lit them up in one direction, then cancelled, then done them the other way, then cancelled, it was a cheat code to increase your chances. Of course, after trying it a couple times the machine would (randomly and completely unrelated to your actions) give you maximum nudges on the next spin and like Pavlov's Dog you then believed it really worked!

I assume to the more hardened gamblers seeing someone like me doing this immediately marked us out as an idiot whose money would soon be in their pocket

A hardened gambler would of course never have the money in their pocket as it would be shoveled straight back in

There was a cheat of sorts on a noughts and crosses game I was on about a while back.

If you had some nudges which didn't result in a win, and then on the next turn had the opportunity to hold, ignore the hold. If you didn't hold anything and carried on as normal then you'd always spin in a winning line.

It was only £1 but it did work (on the 2 or 3) occasions I tried it

Yes and no - there were tricks and cheats on the games (i remember a bit in a newspaper about a long complicated key pressing set built into the £6 jackpot Bellfruit cops'n'robbers) but for all those silly things there were legitimate cheats which worked some were just knowing how to do something in a particular way , or some were turning the machine off at the right moment.

The problem is that the ones which you can easily demonstrate on the emulated games typically are hard to do (or we dont have the right rom versions for the cheats to work).

Here is an example of one that uses a particular feature



If you can do the feature every time you'll get a jackpot - you just keep taking it - the jackpot is £15 and it will cost you less than that to get back to the feature - do it long enough and you'll take all the money out of the machine

(thats not going into the 'tricks' they built into the machine for you to find like holding down cancel to slow down skill stops or random stops / 3 holds for wins / let em spin after nudges etc etc)

That's one of the more common ones - a lot of the Astra ones do it. Usually it'll spin in the win that you'd just been nudging for, but occasionally it would upgrade your win to the next one, or even a jackpot occasionally. The bloody enormous Double Decker was good for that -

Just noticed a friend of mine on Facebook playing 'Slotomania', which I'd not heard of before. For those who might be curious as to how modern machines play, it's worth a nose - it has Wilds, Scatters, a feature and free spins, but also shows how little interaction there is with them these days - you're just hitting spin over and over, so when there's nothing at stake, it shows how tedious they soon become.

Add me to the list of people who've never seen the point of Fruit machines. I used to put cash into a Space invaders one a while back but thats about it. I'm more a penny falls type of guy, they seem more fun and my favourites are either Namco's Pacman ball or Haniwa De Go (by Taito). I don't know if they can be simulated or indeed emulated, but they are about the only gambling type thing I can be bothered to sink a pound or two into.

The problem there is emulating, or rather, simulating, the physics.

For pinball 'emulation' they had to splice Visual Pinball and VPINMAME, with VP handling the table design and physics, and VPINMAME handling the emulation of the electronic gubbins.

The penny/coin falls machines would require a similar pairing.

As for the 'point' of fruit machines, once you get past the obvious 'to try and win money' I honestly think that many of them stand up as decent games in their own right (which is where emulation comes in) - but of course not everyone will agree

31 days now. (Obviously to normal folk, a month is nothing, but considering how this year has gone, I was doing well if I'd go a week without) If I make it to 12 months I might even post in the Yay thread.

Congrats - keep it up dude

Seriously, in six months time you won't have a clue what to do with all the spare cash.

Well done, mate.

Hopefully the next Steam sale will have kicked in

I'm such a fucking

Just run the VisualPinball executable as a fucking administrator, job done. It popped into my head yesterday and I just remembered to give it a try now.

There must be something around the vbscripts that Vista/Win7 doesn't like unless you run it with elevated privileges, as it was always when processing the scripts that it bombed out before launching.

TWILIGHT ZONE AHOY!

Right - after C64 stuff lets see if I can package up a set of pin tables for the next challenge !

Bit of refinement on this, it can still be a bit twitchy, especially if you load more than one table per session. Quitting out of VP and then loading it again for each table seems to make it happier.

Setting it to Windows XP Service Pack 2 compatibility mode, and checking the box for it to run with administrator privileges, seems to properly be the charm.

The VP 8.1 consolidated installer should do the job zaphod, then all you/me/we ( ) would need to do is add in the required ROM and table files.

I'll do a test run on Mrs AE's laptop to make sure I'm simulating a 'clean' install, and post back here as to the simplest way to get it all running.

Banzai Run's music - pure heaven

I done got me a YouTube channel. Mostly for my own masturbation purposes really, but it's important to share jackpotty goodness!

Averaging about £100 profit every Sunday evening at the moment, only started filming the wins the last couple of weeks though. If I could be arsed to travel around a bit there's definitely more to be made, but I just can't be doing with going back to that kind of discipline.

http://www.youtube.com/user/chopleyspinach

Blimey.. good going there. I've never really played any of the £70 machines, or indeed most of the modern machines with features as I could never be bothered learning/finding out the best ways to play them.

(Oh, and 98 days without gambling now, so I'm not about to find out)

Absolutely stay quit devilman - over three months is a great achievement so don't mess with that

I'm just getting a little bit of payback at the moment with the £70ers which I have pretty much sussed out and also now have the discipline to walk away from one that's dead or not quite ready to go (which back in the bad old days I could never do). I'd need to carry on winning £100 per week for the next ten years or so to get back to even over a lifetime, it's just a personal satisfaction thing mostly, which is why I'm not going to start driving around the island's pubs to find 'doable' machines.

The £70ers are pretty brutal, catch one wrong and it'll take £200 over the back and give you a flat £70 for your trouble. I got a proper kicking off one a couple of months ago (£150 down) but learned enough from that to get the profiles pretty much sussed, and haven't come unstuck since then.

It's keeping me in beer and petrol money overall, not exactly lottery winnings but not to be sniffed at either

I seem to remember reading this kind of thing before. Many times from many people. Don't get sucked in again man.

Nothing can possibly go wrong!

Yeah, think on.

The only one I did play was a Bullion Bar type clone called Pure Gold (I think). I've never seen it pay a jackpot, although on the feature I have seen the combined win value reach £70 once. It also has a Mega Streak type feature which I've never seen anyone get either.

I've also put £250 through it in one session. Me=mug.

I've had consistent periods of winning in the past too, so it's not unprecedented. Indeed there was one time I quit (going back 8 or 9 years now) simply because they were taking up too much time and demanding too much travelling around, I scrupulously updated an Excel spreadsheet with wins/losses to make sure I wasn't deluding myself.

In fact, just had a little search, I've still got the spreadsheet in my backups, it was actually 11 years ago And yes I do have backups going back 11 years, because I'm that sad.

Anyway, point remains, that after an initial loss period where I was practising the craft, I consistently made a profit on the buggers, although back then the jackpot was £15, not £70.

Is that a lo-tech or a hi-tech?

I'm sticking rigidly to certain hi-tech AWPs in pubs where I know the staff and/or their mates aren't into them.

I also think that certain Barcrests and Reds have some kind of rip on them at the moment, there's an Indiana Jones machine in particular (I've come across them at more than one location) that is consistently dead to the extent that it makes me think they've been hammered with some kind of manipulator. I don't know what it is so I'm steering clear of them now.

I forget what the definition is, but I suspect lo-tech. It's a bit of a weird one actually - it's one of those with a second reel at the top as the feature and on the normal reels there's no actual way of getting the jackpot - the highest win on there is £15 and anything higher has to be won on the feature.

This must be like what my gf hears when I talk to her about computers...

Yeah it is a bit of a 'world unto itself' I must confess

There is proper money to be made out of fruit machines though, over the years they've had loads of mistakes in the code and/or bent programmers putting all kinds of dodgy shit into them, or just good old fashioned uber-players pulling stuff off that the coders had never anticipated.

I've pretty much worked out the profiles now for a few of the £70 jackpot machines, they definitely have a few 'tells' that you can look out for, so I now know when it's worth forcing them out - to the extent that I'll turn down a £70 jackpot offer and keep on pushing for the megastreak, as they're the ones that can go big. (£156 in the clip I posted on the previous page.)

From the other viewpoint, I like not knowing anything about newer machines - it means I'm less tempted to invest the time in figuring them out.

From a gameplay perspective you're really not missing anything at all devilman, the £70ers are absolutely fucking dreadful - only a masochist would be able to glean any actual enjoyment from playing them.

I stick to the ones I know and ruthlessly just seek to make money out of them, and that's it. On £1 per play (which is what I have them at when I'm going for them), you literally can't put the money in fast enough.

As I said to my chum last night, 'I ain't here for the view motherfucker!'

Basically, stay quit and stay clear! I'll drop them like a hot potato when I stop making money out of them.

Now post the graph from your internet fruit machine experiment.

I didn't do a spreadsheet for that one, just morosely wrote down my losses with a pen and piece of paper as the weeks dragged on.

Finished up about £3000 in the red, although I was nearly £1000 up at the high point.

And I had all my brilliant theories about it too! Which proved to be wrong.

I know and I hope that if your theories go wrong this time (due to chip revisions or the like) you stop playing immediately.

Although you do have an advantage being in the Isle of Man if you lived in Suburban London where every body is out to make a buck in the easiest way they can I am sure you would struggle to make any money regularly.

Long may it last.

£3000 is a lot of red.

I lost £37,000 (approximately) Between 18 and 23.

Which if you take in to account inflation in the last 16 years is probably an amount that I dare not think about in today's terms.

But I had SCIENCE on my side!

Admittedly it turned out to be bad science, but still.

So basically, it was your £100 jackpot watered down to 10p. But it had a memory of being a hundred quid, and that was the main thing.

I don't get it

A joke on the bad science part relating it to homeopathy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy where instead of medicine or even natural remedy's instead things are diluted until they contain absolutely none of the original ingredient but contain the 'memory' of it.

Ahhh right I see, I'd probably have got that but for the percentages involved, doesn't homoeopathy basically end up at 'one drop of 'medicine' in every ocean on the planet', like 0.000000000001% or something utterly fucking ridiculous like that, so is water in a scientific sense.

10p out of £100 is a more meaningful percentage, hence it didn't click, although the 'memory' thing should have given me a clue as well. I look at things too literally sometimes, especially when it comes to fruities

That James Randi dude did something about it a few years ago..... Tap tap tap....

Ahhhh yes:



I noticed they had a 'homoeopathy rack' in Holland & Barrett the last time I went in - £4.50 for little bottles of water! That's nearly more expensive than the average restaurant.