Be Excellent To Each Other

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?

Weird! The only pubs I *ever* see even a single fruit machine in are Wetherspoons/Chef and Brewer type affairs (which I never go into if I can avoid). I honestly believe that these days, and for a long time now, they are seen as rather seedy objects that totally lower the tone and, no disrespect to Hearthly whasoever intended, but frankly - tend to pull in the "wrong" kind of chav punter anyway.

It wasn't always this way of course; back in the £3JP heyday - when these machines were genuinely for amusement only and exploits were little known so you were not generally encountering dead machines (and even if you were, with such small jackpots and flat profiles, they did not take hundreds of pounds to recover a semblance of gameplay). Crucially, it wasn't just deadbeat chavs playing them, but a wide cross-section of people, many of them 'change from a round' punter types. Can anyone seriously countenance that these days? If someone I was with during an evening turned round to pump money into a £1/play fruit machine, I'd think they'd taken leave of their senses (as well as committed a serious faux pas. I mean really, it's just not the done thing, is it?)

The biggest problem for fruit machines (in the UK at least) is a lack of credibility; it's widespread knowledge that they can be cracked by those few with 'the knowledge' leaving everyone else with vastly less than the advertised "80% payout" displayed on stickers or whatever. If playing fruities is yer bag, and assuming you don't have an emptier - why on earth would you bother, pissing about with coins and cash etc., as opposed to playing a 97% payout random slot on your phone or whatever...? Physical machines are so 1990s (as are "compensated" games).

It has been a while since I've out in big pubs

When I worked in the railway station c2001, it was about £600 a week from 2 machines.

The last time Spoons reported on fruit machine revenues they'd halved from 6% of its overall income to 3%. (Sep 2016.)

They're also siting less machines in many of their pubs now as a result.

It's hard to do a like-for-like comparison with the situation over here as pubs are allowed to site £500 jackpot random/B3/B4 machines, and these have proved so popular that they've almost completely replaced AWPs in pubs.

They were 6% of annual income?

SIX PERCENT?!

Holy shit.

Even 3% is a fucking staggering amount.

Bookies make 80% of their money from the slot\roulette terminals some 1.4 billion a year.

That figure came from the Guardian in 2013 so its probably more now as they will have opened a lot more sites in 3 years

I had a pub in the early 90's and the slot in there would take £200-£300 a week, that was on booze takings of around £1500 a week

Yes, they are still pretty big business, but previously they were very big business.

https://www.ft.com/content/dcb2154a-7bf ... 4b4333ee43

I'm not surprised, for the reasons I've long argued old chap. Good old empirical proof and validation.
From a non-pro perspective, why the fuck would you play a battered, cheating "80%" (more like ~0-30% in the actual states found) compensated game, as opposed to a 95-97% genuine payout random game where everyone gets the same chance? No-brainer, even with that huge clubber jackpot.

It'd be the same in mainland UK in a heartbeat, too, if such machines were allowed in pubs here, I've no doubt at all.

I haven't touched a pub machine in years. With online slots, the playing field is level and you're basically just clicking a spin button, but with the machines I see in pubs, I wouldn't have a clue what to do and what features to aim for.

Isn't 80℅ "i'll keep 20p of every pound thatt goes in, the 80p is to pay out to punters to get more people interested". Then "how to beat the machine" stuff comes out to generate a "beat them at their game" feeling amongst punters and people put more £1 in and it keeps more 20p of that.

Otherwise, there would be huge varaition in machine takings week on week which I didn't see.

Oh trust me, for *some* people the payout is vastly over 100%, as Hearthly demonstrates above. There are those who have made tens, even hundreds of thousands over the years, believe you me.

Yes, from the 80℅ of the money it didn't keep.

?

Wikipedia lists their revenue for 2015 as near enough £1,514 million.

That's £45.4 million just from fruit machines.
They have 956 locations (again, according to Wikipedia)

I'm not sure how many machines are in each, but based on the few that I've been in around the country I'd say an average of 5 would be a relatively safe bet.
Nearly £10,000 per year, per machine.
~£150 per week, per machine.

10 people stick a quid in.
Machine keeps £2
Persons 1 to 9 win nothing
Person 10 wins £8

Machine pays out 80℅

If machine wants to earn more money, it needs more people sticking £1 in. People like to win. Letting some hints tips and cheats out into the wild mean 20 people stick £1. 1 to 18 get nothing, 19 gets £6 and 20 gets £10. Machine gets £4.

Punters 19 and 20 taking money out ofthe machine doesn't alter its profitabity. It probably increases it, as 1 to 18 think they can do it, too.

The machine wants people to win

It doesn't alter profitability, but if each of those people put in 100 pounds, and one has rinsed the machine for a grand, you can see how the experience as a punter is a bit shit for those who are playing in the 0% zone.

Incidentally, my knowledge of UK fruit machines (and how rigged they are) completely put me off using the slots while I was in Vegas. Even after I'd found out that every spin was totally random, I still couldn't bring myself to do it.

Slots in Vegas are literally the most boring thing in the entire city.

In Iowa 2001, there were slots but no prizes because gambling machines were not legal there.

Undoubtably, but, y'know, that's the rub of it, as callous as that sounds. Nowadays there is a sticker, but not sure what that does.

Not true - the "are you interested in a [thinly veiled attempt at a timeshare]holiday home?" guys are more boring

GOATS

Thats the 'normal' for a non f*cked machine - for ones with emptiers or other things its more like - the machine has a £125 float (so £125 in money from the people who own the machine and various other punters over time).

Persons 1-9 put their pound in and the machine keeps 20% of their money for its profit.
Person 10 comes along and over the course of maybe around 30 - 50 quid takes all the money in the hopper / tubes out of the machine , the box at the bottom will have 20% of what he put in as 'profit' but there is nothing in the machine at all to pay out (they walk away around £70 up)

In the case of 'accounted for' cheats the machine will do all it can to claw back the money it has lost so persons 11-XXX put their pound in and win nothing
In the case of non accounted for cheats , person 11 comes along , puts in £1 and wins £2 , the machine shows empty and the bar / owner / whoever needs to give them money from 'elsewhere'

In the 90's I played a *lot* of machines but never really had any emptiers i just learned the machines , learned when and what to play for , and could hit the skill shots often enough to make money out of them especially when the other players did not.

I generally only found out about the emptier afterwards , but I'll see about writing up a few to explain whats going on if i get the chance to this afternoon - what i would also say is there is often a lot of skill setting up an emptier , and its often very boring to do.

And a very quick one to illustrate that - and i cant remember the damn machine name - it would be a 20p / £8 jackpot barcrest with a cannonballs / soldiers theme and a big feature board at the top.

Basically one of the features was badly coded - it was a skill stop on the number real and the number real went from 1 to 12 but not in sequence , you were supposed to stop it on 12 (or as close to as you can) to get the highest win.
The code also gave you a commiseration prize if you were unlucky to stop it on a 1 , it gave (i cant remember exactly but lets say) 20p and gave you another spin to try and do better.

So most people played , if they got that feature (which was pretty early) , they got a win , the end , or they were unlucky to stop on 1 and got the 20P and stopped it on something better the next time , the end.

However someone worked out that if you stopped it on 1 every time , it just kept going .... and going ..... and going .... so by standing there and hitting skill stops on the 1 , you could empty the machine , it would take a really long time to do but you could take everything from the machine just by hitting the 1 every time.

No idea if this was accounted for in the system or not

Another quick one :

In the upgrade from £10 jackpots to £15 jackpots there was an Ace (the brand) machine with a cowboy theme , one of the features on there was two numbers which would count up on a screen which would move up and down at random in 20p increments , you got what was shown on the screen at the end. The RED (special) feature version of this was a slow climb which on the £10 version always went up to £5 in each column to give you the £10 jackpot.

On the £15 version the bug was that it could not get to £7.50 on each column so instead it went to £7.60
It took those , added them together for £15.20, rounded up to £16 which it knew was not a valid win so put £15 in the bank and 'forgot' it had done that - next play it would still know it wanted to pay out so you could get the feature again , to do the same again.

This one was not accounted for , so the machine would get emptied.

Over a week, the machine would still keep 20℅ of what went into it, though, wouldn't it? It wouldn't matter how much it paid out in that time*, and any float would be a possible cost of doing business and just anothe step to get to that 20℅ in the equation.

My focus is not on the one punter walking away with £50 or whatever, look at the whole.

*Again, the machines need to pay out to keep customers coming in. More customets is more money bet which is more of a 20℅ slice.

That very much depends.

On a lot of machines what went into the cash boxes at the bottom was the 'overflow' when the machine was full , the amount in the machine that it was keeping was mixed in the hopper / tubes with everything else - in these circumstances that would be zero because the machine would have been emptied.

On other machines they really did put a percentage of everything that went in , into the box at the bottom , on those your 20% would still be there (although the rest of the machine would be empty).

Very much depends on the machine , and the year we're talking about.

For 'accounted' for tricks - your right - the owner will not lose - its just everyone else who plays the machine who does - if they never win out of the machine they will stop playing hence the owner will stop making profit at that point but until then it should not make any difference that someone took all the wins that the machine was due to do for the day at once.

So, every £1 that goes in there, it takes a slice of it (20℅ because it makes maths easier, here) and the remainder is potential prize.

Your oversimplifying a bit but in some circumstances yes.

Hearthy's examples above with the Aliens machine for example - given they are accounted for the owners of the machines will still make the same profit - its just all the other players who will lose.

Assuming we're not talking about 'free wins' that the machine doesn't account for at all, then yes, over time the end result would effectively be the same, namely that the machine delivers a profit of 20% of everything that's been played through it to its owners.

The issue with a 'doable' machine is that it can be pushed so far behind where it needs to be in percentage terms, that for everyone apart from the handful of people who know the method on it, its effective payout percentage can be damn near zero for an extended period of time - which was never supposed to be the case with AWPs (AMUSEMENT With Prizes).

I remember back in the day getting absolutely battered by £6 jackpot machines time and time again, wondering how on earth I could get so deep into machines with such a small jackpot and an alleged 80% payout, of course I only found out years later that many of the machines back then were either bent and/or poorly coded, to the extent that a small band of players travelled around making a very good living out of them.

Even then however, there were good days and good results for me (I was always adept at skill stops and skill features, and sometimes just got lucky of course) - which were enough to keep me going back for more.

Although where a machine is on site for any length of time, the locals will soon learn that a given machine never pays out a fucking thing to anyone apart from the guy who comes along every few days to rinse it, and as such will stop playing it themselves.

Given enough visibility of these constantly twatted machines over time, you can end up with someone who just calls time on playing the machines at all - so lost revenue in the long run.

Anecdotally for example, the folks over at Jackpotty routinely report that the casual play of fruities in Spoons is almost non-existent these days.

Watch this guy get £300 (!!) into a Batman AWP in a Spoons a couple of weeks ago.... Incidentally this is one of the 'new breed' of AWPs that is very flat profile and by all accounts has no sneakery on it. Boring as fuck to play and doesn't seem to be doing it any cashbox favours either.

So how do you actually work these machines to maximise profit then? I know it'll be different on all machines, but what's involved? Is it certain button presses or certain orders to things?

Give us an example of one of the easiest/your favourite.