Be Excellent To Each Other

Even on the original £15 jackpot they had a massive streak in them, and were therefore quite capable of taking £200+ without kicking out more than the odd win here and there.

I generally kept clear of them, or just tried the odd tenner, they were deadly if you got sucked in and they didn't go on the streak.

In the past I've been very guilty of abandoning my friends/girlfriend on a night out to play the fruities, and fucked off home early, broke and despondent, more times than I care to remember.

On one particularly 'memorable' occasion I ended up in hospital, which was nice.

I might be remembering wrong, but I think the Party Time over the road was a £2 play, one of the popular ones when they were "winning" definitely was anyway

For something so common & seemingly innocuous it's amazing the amount of damage gambling can cause. Though you could say the same about booze, drugs & even food I suppose

If it was £2 per play it won't have been that Party Time, the only machines that allowed £2 per play were the infamous 'Section 16' machines, which was quite one of the cheekiest and nastiest evils ever created by the gambling industry.

We're only going back six years or so here, but at the time the maximum permitted jackpot for arcade fruit machines was £25, with a maximum 30p stake. (With repeat chances and streaks, the 'real' jackpot was more like £100 (£25 + three repeats), but these were rare, and the price of play was capped at 30p.)

The 'industry' had been pushing for bigger jackpots and stakes for ages, but the regulator kept knocking them back.

So what did they come up with? Section 16.

These machines had a £500 jackpot at a price per spin of £2, except such a machine would have been illegal, so how did they get around it?

The machine had 20 winlines, each winline cost 10p to play, and the jackpot on each winline was £25. The industry argued that what the player was choosing to do was play twenty 10p games simultaneously, and that each 'individual game' had a jackpot of £25. If all twenty games were played at once and all came in together, 20x£25 gave the £500 jackpot, at £2 per spin. (It was possible to choose how many winlines to play, including 1 winline for 10p with a jackpot of £25, but no one ever actually did that, of course.)

And they fucking got away with it too.

The legislation was changed to outlaw S16, but not before a huge amount of damage had been done, there are absolute horror stories of people losing thousands and thousands of pounds in these things over the course of several sittings, as arcades fell over themselves to install row upon row of S16s.

People literally in the arcade first thing in the morning, to pick up where they left off the day before, and getting attendants to reserve machines for them whilst they cleaned out their bank accounts.

Also, S16 were random, not controlled/compensated, so they can and did take many thousands of pounds without ever paying anything close to a £500 jackpot. A lot of folks simply didn't understand that unlike the old £25 jackpot machines, there was no way to 'force' a random machine.

Truly hateful things, I never got much involved with them myself (worst I ever did was a £300 kicking one night IIRC, never to be repeated), but some folks basically lost their lives to them, jobs, family, house, the lot.

Eek, some of the tales of gambling addiction are harrowing, as some who felt bad enough wasting £4 trying to win a g.f. a Hello Kitty plush from a claw-crane machine. It's good to hear that AE and Cavey have gotten over their problems – must've taken a lot of willpower to get over the physiological side of the addictions.

That's seriously grim.

As I said with Party Time I could well be misremembering, might just be thinking about the sickening amount of money getting pumped in to it with nothing coming out

Just remembered something that amused me. I don't suppose you've seen Thunderstruck II? It's the first fruit machine I've seen that actually has achievements. Considering that like most online slots it's just a case of hitting 'spin' and has no element of skill whatsoever, it doesn't really feel like much of an achievement.. particularly when you don't even win anything for unlocking them.

Yeah I had a little dabble on Thunderstruck II last year, very clever achievement system, to say the least.

Thing is though, the different free spins rounds that you unlock still remain random and none of them is really 'better' than any of the others, they're just weighted differently.

Indeed, I eventually settled on the first one as being the best suited to getting large wins, the third and particularly the fourth were far 'flatter' so gave loads of small wins but hardly ever added up to anything exciting. They made the progression look better by giving the later unlocks far more free spins, but you only need to look at the reel sets they used, fucking full of basic symbols and hardly any of the higher paying ones. (See also the 'MEGA WILD' round, the reels for that were chock full of 9,10,J quite a lot of Q,K,A and very few high paying symbols.)

The first free spin choice could give bugger all, but thanks to the multiplier you only needed one decent win to make it worthwhile.

NOTE TO SELF - Do not be tempted, despite being on holiday and at your PC with a fridge full of booze available. Eeek, lol

I can see how they get you... I've just won £6 off £1 credit on the Gladiator machine.

I like these AtrocityExhibition. Do you have any more exciting ones or could you point me in the direction of some?

I noticed that too. I did get one decent win on the end one, but more often than not, the 2nd, 3rd and 4th options were pretty weak.. more spins, but hardly any wins from it.

My 2p.

Hate Fruit Machines. I watched my mate nearly piss his life away (like literally starve to death as he stopped buying food) on them until I physically dragged him away from one and told him to sort his life out. This guy would buy a pint of milk and a packet of chewing gum in Sainsburys at 8am and get as much cash back as his Switch Card would let him and then play the fruities until he was spent up. Then back to Sainsburys for more cashback. He must have been £30k in debt by the time any of use noticed. Loans, credit cards, borrowing off mates, all in pursuit of a fucking £250 jackpot. Evil fucking machines. Life ruiners.

Anyway, sorry about that.

Nah man entirely fair comment and TBH I kind of like where this thread has gone, forums are (IMO) far more interesting and human places when folks open up a bit and actually talk to each other, even if the subject matter isn't entirely cheerful.

And yes, fruit machines can indeed be absolute life ruiners, in conjunctions with drugs and alcohol, they very nearly landed me in the morgue. There are literally years of my life that with the benefit of hindsight I effectively wasted and lost, and they ain't never coming back.

What resolution does your PC/laptop run at?

There are some complications around different eras of machines requiring different versions of MFME, the most recent machines all run on a version of MFME that doesn't support any kind of resizing, so some of the best layouts require a vertical resolution of 1200 pixels, otherwise you won't be able to see the whole layout.

This is one of the most recent machines emulated (indeed, the basic codebase is still in use on brand new machines), but it's designed for 1600x1200 or better.

30p play/£25 jackpot, with a solid £100 streak, but it can eat money like a bastard when it's in the mood, with horrible blocks at £5 and £15. And it's got fucking Ant and Dec in it - 'Welcome to the jungle!'

I'm running 1280x1024.. I guess that's going to limit me then.

Ummm... I've never really understood fruit machines, and the terminology here isn't helping

A solid £100 streak? What does that mean?

The JPM ones have some good features - Indiana Jones, Roller Coaster, Sonic the Hedgehog and Casino Crazy spring to mind. AE might be able to sort you out with some links for those.

It's a continual run of wins (normally with no interaction from the player) which add up to £100.

[edit]At Trooper.

How is that allowed if the jackpot is £25? Surely that means the jackpot is £100?

Oh, and "Horrible blocks at £5 and £15"?

Yep.

The new £70 jackpot fruit machines are capped by law at two repeats, but that's still a rather scary £210 (Scary as in, you wouldn't want to be the sucker catching them after paying out.)

Here's a £70 jackpot Rainbow Riches repeating twice, as you can see the dude already had some wins in the bank, so he's got nearly £300 in there. (For balance it should be noted that these machines can take hundreds of pounds in cold blood, very nasty.)



And here's a £140 mega streak on a pub machines, as Grim... says, it requires no interaction from the player, he just stands there and watches the wins roll in, 'behind the scenes' it takes a credit at £70, as that's the maximum prize per credit.

Mega streaks are basically the 'top feature', and quite compelling

It will take another credit for each £25. There are stickers on these things that say that the maximum you can win from one credit is £25 so you have to play another to win a repeat etc.

I have a question.

Is there any "skill" involved in winning on these things or is it all down to chance?

Have I told the story about my mate 'Chinese' Rob* winning 2 £250 jackpots from adjacent machines within 2 minutes of each other in a crowded pub on a Firday night? 250 pound coins fit very nicely into a pint glass.

*He's Indian. Lol.

Well back in the day when the jackpot was £6 (and before that £4.80), machines had to go on streaks to make them worth playing, as £4.80 wasn't exactly a thrilling amount of money, even in 1991.

As such they'd pay loads of big wins and jackpots in quick succession, even the £4.80 machines could kick out £40-£50 on the streak.

That behaviour has basically scaled over the years, as the jackpot has increased (£4.80 to £6 to £8 to £10 to £15 to £25 to £35 and now £70), the streak has always remained.

'Blocks' are a really horrible control method that fruit machines use to prevent the player achieving 'undesirable' wins, BFMs (they make I'm A Celebrity) had a block at £5 and £15 on their £25 jackpot machines, when the machine is 'blocking' you'll never, ever get a win above the block, whatever you do. This leads to stuff like unwinnable 'gambles', whereby the machine will offer you a hi/lo 'gamble' on the number reel, and whichever you choose, it'll just choose a losing result. (i.e. If you're on a 2 and choose 'HIGHER' it'll spin in a 1, however if you were to choose 'LOWER' it'll spin in 3 to 12. We tested this in the early days of the emulators with VMWare, as we were finally able to do what no one had ever done before, and rewind time.)

A certain and myself teamed up over this issue for fruit machine Fairplay campaign - http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.c ... /index.htm

Knowing what the features do, knowing the reels, being able to hit skill stop features and all that sort of stuff would certainly count as skill.

JPM/ACE machines from the 90s are widely regarded as being the most influenced by skill.

Have a crack at this bugger, if it ever spins a jackpot straight in, you're doing it wrong and a decent player could have jackpotted it long before it actually rolled in.

This uses a different emulator (included in the zip file), fairly self-explanatory, just run the executable and scan the folder you've unzipped too.

The guy who did this layout was (is) a fucking Photoshop genius, the source photos he had to work from were total gash.

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

I've just spunked about £30 of fake money into that machine and won nothing. I can totally see how people get addicted to the "just one more go" factor of these.

*Edit* And I've just won £18 off a couple of credits on Gladiators. I don't get it... but yes, addictive!

I probably hammered it the last time I played it, and if I do say so myself, I'm very good at it - so you're effectively the poor guy playing the machine after me and losing his shirt.

(Real fruit machines have battery-backed RAM so that the machine keeps track of where it's up to with its payouts, so that when it gets turned off at night and switched on the next day, it remembers where it was up to. The emulator uses a .RAM file which emulates the behaviour of that physical RAM, so the same principle applies.)

Blimey I did leave it in a bad mood.

Took me £20 to get a jackpot, but there's usually more than one in it, or a bit of afters at least.

There's no point pushing for the top STREAKER feature as JPMs don't maintain traditional streak pots as such, so all the value can be taken out of it by other means.

As AE has said there used to be a fair bit of skill involved in these , especially around the mid 90's , and being good at the skill parts often allowed you to get the jackpots and big wins easier and quicker than those who did not.

Also after the manufacturers worked out that people could really be that skillful they changed the machines to 'cheat' you out of them - as an example a number of games at the time had a stop'n'step feature (normally low down on the feature board) where one reel spins really fast and you press the button to stop it - these were all true skill so if you were good enough you got the jackpot off this feature 'most' of the time.

Later chips then made this feature 'cheat' where even if you pressed it at the correct time the reel would 'slip' onto the next symbol (and no this wasnt the person 'missing' the feature as you could take it again and again and you could hit 'up to the bar' with no issues but it would not allow you to hit anything above)



There were really 2 people who could turn any rubbish small image of a machine into a work of art , one is the person who did this (who i'm suprised you didnt name) , and the other was Pook

New media centre PC = excessively massive gambling game.

It's only pretend money, mind.

There is a free download programme which will block any form of gambling from your computer. It really works (I once spent a good hour trying to unlock it for a game of online poker on facebook). I strongly recommend it, although, it is no more than claiming you've given up smoking when really it is because you are at the in laws

Which one's that? The ones I've seen have all been paid apps with free trials. I imagine they work in similar ways though - in which case, I can work around it if the urge gets strong enough.

AE - As you're on a Microgaming thing.. have you tried Cashaccino (or something like that)? It seems pretty naff at first but if you can get on the feature, it can bring in a good few (virtual) quid and go on for up 90 free spins sometimes.

I had a quick dabble on it last year but it became apparent pretty sharpish that it's a medium variance machine, probably more like medium-high in fact - so too dodgy to risk real money on. Also, I hated the theme, as daft as it sounds I like machines with themes I enjoy and sounds/music that I like. (You've got to hand it to Microgaming, they do make aesthetically lovely ass-fuckers.)

I've got Cashoccino running now with my pretend winnings (I won £150 pretend pounds on Thunderstruck II playing at a 90p stake, even with pretend money I stick to £1 per spin or less which was my optimal 'real' spend).

I've given myself £100 pretend pounds for the evening, £240 in the bank at the moment, this is the kind of time when one has to be very careful, all too easy to switch to the real money account to see if it can be 'won for real'

Oooh just had the free spins on Cashoccino (90p stake), didn't retrigger so just the base 15 spins and only went for £31.

Ah, I always go for the extra bet to give you 30 spins.

I can't find any way to enable that on auto-play? Otherwise I would have done, and just taken a coin off the bet amount to keep it under a quid per spin.

EDIT - Currently at £387, had a decent free spins round and a £90 win roll in. I am determined this ain't gonna turn into any kind of real cash session though.

Hmm.. I'm trying to remember now (I'm not installing it again!) - I'm sure I used to be able to get autoplay working, but then when you win a single free spin, the damn thing cancels the free spins

They really do show up the real fruit machines in terms of graphics, sound and features. The Lord of the Rings machine in particular looks amazing - although it has a feature that doesn't come in anywhere near enough.

I had a thought today. You never see a millionaire acredit his fortune to fruit machines.

Anyway.. I quite like this. Is there a proper place I can go to peruse machines and download them? I'm looking for one in particular. It wasn't anything special, just a simple noughts and crosses machine where the maximum jackpot (I think) was about £25?

It'll bring back lovely memories of my grandparents you see.

Have a nose through the Download section of Fruit Emu.

Honestly can't remember, however the one I stumbled upon was a full registry jobbie, that if you wanted to uninstall, you had to wait a week and then hit a set 3 hour period 7 days later to confirm. Was a PITA on some sports sites though, as it could block them for gambling based adverts.

That said, if you can give us any kind of timeframe, vague recollection of what a game looked like, what sort of venue it was to be found in etc we can probably have a go at identifying something specific. (TBH though 'noughts and crosses' is a bit too vague as a whole load of low-tech machines conform to that sort of basic premise.)

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