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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Tue Jan 16, 2018 23:45 
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Nemmie wrote:
I am still waiting to find out the Action Cash emptier that caused me to put £220 in one before I got a repeat in around 1989.

These videos have been very enlightening for me, I went through a period of arcade loitering in my local town and now realise that some of the visitors were pros whilst pretending to know nothing.

I thought they were just consistently lucky, more fool me!


Yeah I try to be fairly pragmatic about it, no point crying over milk that was spilt over twenty years ago, besides which, it's the manufacturers of these things I'm minded to blame as opposed to the people who went round nailing them.

They had a responsibility not to chuck such dreadfully flawed products out of the door.

Anyway, have a bit of Bully.



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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 5:49 
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One of my favourite machines.

Clearly nobody knew the trick in my area because I got some amazing streaks from this baby!

Hmm I can only find a layout from 2013 that only works in 2.1. Is there a newer version?

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 13:21 
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Nemmie wrote:
One of my favourite machines.

Clearly nobody knew the trick in my area because I got some amazing streaks from this baby!

Hmm I can only find a layout from 2013 that only works in 2.1. Is there a newer version?


Is it that layout?

You can load it into V5.1 and then when you quit it'll automatically update it to a V6 compatible layout.

(V5.1 is the latest version of MFME that will load .DAT file based layouts, but it will convert them to .FML based layouts, which V6 will then load in.)


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 20:39 
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Just a quick note to say I am loving the vids that I have seen so far! Excellent stuff; I almost felt as though I was standing besides you, pint in hand in that pub or wherever you were, "going halfies" and losing my bollocks with you - before you fluked that hundred quid box or whatever it was. :D

Awesome, mate, awesome. Sort of "The Hovel" in 2018 video format.

Keep 'em coming, thank fook I no longer play is all I can say. :p

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 20:45 
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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 20:46 
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Yes? :D

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 20:46 
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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 22:41 
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Cavey wrote:
Just a quick note to say I am loving the vids that I have seen so far! Excellent stuff; I almost felt as though I was standing besides you, pint in hand in that pub or wherever you were, "going halfies" and losing my bollocks with you - before you fluked that hundred quid box or whatever it was. :D

Awesome, mate, awesome. Sort of "The Hovel" in 2018 video format.

Keep 'em coming, thank fook I no longer play is all I can say. :p


Cheers Cavey :)

In all fairness there is a method to what looks like madness on those DONDs, you just keep taking the DOND game as many times as possible, avoid all other features and wins, and eventually it will (hopefully!) put £100 in the box. (Which it did on that occasion.)

As for all the other videos, I'm trying to cover everything from the old £4.80 jackpot machines right the way up to £70 machines, generally where there's a trick/cheat involved but sometimes just gabbing about the machines in general. Some of the 'methods' are absolutely shocking TBH and I refuse to believe they're anything other than bent as fuck.

I know you've told the tale of that £1000 GrandSlam earlier in this thread, but even those casino machines had methods on them, and with one thousand pound jackpots on the line you'd really expect them to be a bit more careful.

Basically, we never had a chance, we were up against not only an incompetent and/or corrupt industry, but also a roaming band of professional clued-up players, reaming the machines for every penny they could.


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Thu Jan 18, 2018 14:35 
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Hearthly wrote:

Is it that layout?

You can load it into V5.1 and then when you quit it'll automatically update it to a V6 compatible layout.

(V5.1 is the latest version of MFME that will load .DAT file based layouts, but it will convert them to .FML based layouts, which V6 will then load in.)


Great. Thanks for that tip. I haven't followed FME for years so I am out of the loop.

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Thu Jan 18, 2018 20:00 
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Nemmie wrote:
Great. Thanks for that tip. I haven't followed FME for years so I am out of the loop.


No problem old chap :)

I do sometimes question the sanity of buying a £2500 gaming PC when for the vast majority of the time it's running Hearthstone or fruit machine emulators. (Sometimes, both at the same time, which only the power of an 8-core 16-thread CPU makes possible. LOL. Most of the time the fans on the graphics card aren't spinning at all.....)


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Fri Jan 19, 2018 9:09 
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This was a good machine, paid for many, many nights out - 'MORTAL WOMBAT'.

It has a variety of messages that scroll past when you get the jackpot, some of which are a bit 'inappropriate', (especially considering the £5 version was sited in kiddie sections of the arcades), such as:

'It is nice for girl to meet boy in park, but better for boy to park meat in girl'.

Oh yes, and when you lose a gamble the display says 'UNRUCKY' - :roll:



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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sat Jan 20, 2018 9:51 
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The wonder of the free cashpot.

£335 out of a £70 jackpot fruit machine.....



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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sun Jan 21, 2018 16:24 
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Hearthly wrote:
This was a good machine, paid for many, many nights out - 'MORTAL WOMBAT'.

It has a variety of messages that scroll past when you get the jackpot, some of which are a bit 'inappropriate', (especially considering the £5 version was sited in kiddie sections of the arcades), such as:

'It is nice for girl to meet boy in park, but better for boy to park meat in girl'.

Oh yes, and when you lose a gamble the display says 'UNRUCKY' - :roll:



Great stuff once again; I’m loving the level of detail and back story stuff, as well as the core review itself.

Stupid question: Why can’t you simply use your 1 nudge to bring down another JP symbol on the win line (but still not a win), and then use Wax Off for another quid and nudge exchange, given that the JP will then be in 1 nudge range? (I presume the answer is that the machine will simply kill you rather than giving an overt JP nudge, without being “tricked” into de facto giving it on an invincible gamble to 2 nudges as you’ve shown?)

Fascinating. This is actually getting me back into FME (at least a teensy bit)

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sun Jan 21, 2018 16:27 
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The Bullseye was funny as well..... given all the shared code, I would be very surprised if other hi tech Projects of the era like Chico the Bandit and Fun in the Sun did not also have similar exploits in them? Project’s foray into hi techs was short lived after all...

As for the DOND, Bell Fruit has form with the whole free cashpot thing; just think Scorp 2 clubbers like CCnR (and near clones like PEN#1 ;) ) from years earlier. All out for that free, already paid for CP - then afters - was the name of the game then too! (DOND, with its three £70 jackpots, is a clubber too, in all but name of course)

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Mon Jan 22, 2018 11:29 
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Cavey wrote:
Great stuff once again; I’m loving the level of detail and back story stuff, as well as the core review itself.

Stupid question: Why can’t you simply use your 1 nudge to bring down another JP symbol on the win line (but still not a win), and then use Wax Off for another quid and nudge exchange, given that the JP will then be in 1 nudge range? (I presume the answer is that the machine will simply kill you rather than giving an overt JP nudge, without being “tricked” into de facto giving it on an invincible gamble to 2 nudges as you’ve shown?)

Fascinating. This is actually getting me back into FME (at least a teensy bit)


Cheers Cavey :) I do my best with the videos and try to make them entertaining and informative, it's only ever going to be a very niche endeavour which is fine, as long as a few folks enjoy the videos it's worthwhile. (223 subscribers and slowly counting.... 1400+ hours viewed in the last 28 days according to the analytics.)

As for Wombat, AFAIK (and as you suspect) it'll just block the gamble to the nudge once the jackpot is one nudge away. The code is really quite bad at forward-branching, which I think is a result of it being effectively a £25 upgrade of Spin On It, but with the addition of the Platinum Impulse symbol - but they clearly didn't think it through properly. (Hence it being prepared to give a 1/12 or Reel Skill to trap the jackpot, when they could have coded it to simply never do it the scenario I present in the video. There were some rumours of a late rechip but they were probably just misreports of it really playing up and needing to go round 10-20 times before caving.)

Cavey wrote:
The Bullseye was funny as well..... given all the shared code, I would be very surprised if other hi tech Projects of the era like Chico the Bandit and Fun in the Sun did not also have similar exploits in them? Project’s foray into hi techs was short lived after all...

As for the DOND, Bell Fruit has form with the whole free cashpot thing; just think Scorp 2 clubbers like CCnR (and near clones like PEN#1 ;) ) from years earlier. All out for that free, already paid for CP - then afters - was the name of the game then too! (DOND, with its three £70 jackpots, is a clubber too, in all but name of course)


Yes it's bonkers really that you can take over £300 out of a pub fruit machine in a single session, quite how the humble AWP managed to somehow end up as a de facto clubber I have no idea, it was definitely the £70 era that really saw them go nuts though, and BFM with their (often) free cashpots were perhaps the worst offenders. At least they were paid for upfront though, so didn't leave the machine in a totally wasted state for the next player.

I'm hoping to get some more Project videos up in the near future, even some of their lo-techs could be done in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways. The only issue is that some of the methods are pretty obscure and it takes me a while to get my eye in with them. Bullseye for example took quite a bit of practice before I felt confident enough to try and video it!


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Fri Jan 26, 2018 0:30 
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A tribute to one of the finest AWPs ever made.



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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Fri Jan 26, 2018 1:01 
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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Fri Jan 26, 2018 11:28 
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Very good. +10HP.


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Fri Jan 26, 2018 12:01 
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Screenplay! All time classic, I loved this machine in ‘92!
Can’t really check this out yet as I’m at work, but look forward to it later. :)

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sat Jan 27, 2018 10:38 
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This was a bit of a tussle.....

My phone had 100% charge at 12pm, by 8:30pm it had 18% charge.



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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sat Jan 27, 2018 18:24 
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Hearthly wrote:
This was a bit of a tussle.....

My phone had 100% charge at 12pm, by 8:30pm it had 18% charge.



That was some spawn at the end :)


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sat Jan 27, 2018 19:01 
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Currently unavailable, will be back again as a fresh upload tomorrow morning. (Or in the nearish future.)


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sat Jan 27, 2018 22:43 
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I watched that vid earlier. Well, the opening 10 mins and the closing 20 mins. Made me laugh. You jammy git :D

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Mon Jan 29, 2018 17:51 
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Now available again, with a bit of added preamble and about 45 seconds removed for censorship reasons.



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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Mon Jan 29, 2018 21:00 
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Hearthly wrote:
A tribute to one of the finest AWPs ever made.



...Ah great stuff. Loved the trip down memory lane.
These were great old games, weren't they? Very innovative; stuff you'd never expect on an AWP, as enabled by the CRT... innovative for '92! This old machine was well ahead of its time in many ways.

For me, the mark of a good game was one that remained fun to play even when not streaking: any machine is "fun" when it's paying out hand over fist, giving feature after feature in "enriched play" mode (as I think you famously remarked years ago, something along the lines of even total woffers like BWB Superstreak being fun when streaking :D )

This machine ticks that box, clearly: always plenty going on (even if the trivia challenges actually paid feck all worth having even when right time and again, if the machine was in suck mode). The £4.80 early ROMs were sublime - like you say, with a measly 24x jackpot (and even then, token JP - and as we know, tokens ain't cash and can be treated quite differently in any real payout reckoning. They're going to be pumped back into machines and the machine's payout profile is quite different with tokens rather than cash - at least in some cases (IIRC)). With a top cash prize of x12 (as compared to x333 for DOND on 30p play lowest stake and £100 JP - on a supposed AWP!), wins and boards can be frequently and loosely controlled, with true skill elements with such a small jackpot to 'protect'. Fat chance of this with a club machine - and of course, today's AWPs *are* "club machines" as according to any definition that we, as FME bods would've coined that term.

I agree completely with the sentiments you express in your video regarding today's greedy, flawed, "doable" machines that any "normal" player is almost certain to lose - and lose badly on. There ARE no "normal" players now; even the addicts know they'd be far better off using their phones to play a (supposed) 95-97% RTP random machine than ever they would a real, physical machine of any description. That they stand unplayed and ignored night after night should tell their operators and creators that they would, in fact, be far better off bringing back small JP fun machines, but they won't do it. Which in my case is just as well I suspect.

Interesting that you got three wins off the Win Series; I found that 10 nudges was usually the one to go for, as I rarely ever got more than 2 spins for £2 or £2.20 (whereas nudges would always be at least this amount and usually the cash repeater or JP)

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Tue Jan 30, 2018 21:07 
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I'm sure you'll remember this machine Cavey, but here we have it running old emptiable ROMs, once thought lost to the sands of time.

Free lines!



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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Mon Feb 05, 2018 19:46 
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Heh, most amusing to see this being actually done, before our very eyes - like you, I remember very well the great myriad of ubiquitous Ace clones and sub-clones that were all essentially the same machine back in the day.

Crikey, some people must've made a very, very good living off of stuff like this, back in those halcyon pre-internet days; £50 per machine easily, at a time where my annual salary was £12k pa and a half decent 3-bed semi in the West Country cost around £35k to buy. These would've been "live" for months.

Proper dogshite machine, though. I hated 'em all - probably because they always seemed to be dead as a dodo....

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Fri Feb 09, 2018 15:40 
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Yeah y'know Cavey, even though all this stuff is ancient history I've been managing to get slightly annoyed by it of late.

Between what I've found out over the years (and more recently have covered on my channel), the stuff on Cheerful Pessimist's channel, and also a new chap called 'On A Bucket' who's doing a channel as well - a picture has gradually emerged of an utterly incompetent and corrupt 'industry' that by all reasonable accounts should have collapsed under the weight of its own ineptitude decades ago.

My opinion is that it's only survived as long as it has due to the fact it feeds on addiction, so it doesn't need to do anything particularly right to succeed in business - rather like a heroin dealer.

Finally getting to see some of these 'doable' ROMs in action, that we'd heard about over the years but never had chance to play, brings it all into even sharper focus, I vividly remember getting absolutely shafted by these ACE 'Hidden Treasures' machines on many occasions, and wondering in bemusement what it could possibly be that I was missing about them - and now we know......

One is forced to conclude that compensated gambling machines simply do not belong in arcades, pubs, train stations, or anywhere else - as the 'industry' tasked with producing them to operate fairly and consistently, simply isn't up to the job. (And as ever with these things, the regulation has been lax and toothless to the point of irrelevance.)


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 20:06 
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Fruit machine emulation history.

PARTE THE FIRSTE.



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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sat Feb 17, 2018 0:40 
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Hearthly wrote:
Fruit machine emulation history.

PARTE THE FIRSTE.


Interesting - i think i've told my variation on this before but Chris actually offered a 'test' of the emulator first which was a very early version with a single game (Nifty Fifty) which i got (I think he was just looking for feedback)

I then got the demo one as you did but rather than hand over the cash i 'hacked' out the registration check so i could put more money in
Again I was not interested in the design part I just wanted to put more cash into it

When the 'early' layouts then ran out I was one of the first people to get someone else running in there (Ghost Train downloaded via the manufacturers website because of course they had roms just up to download since the only way you could use them was if you had the actual machine :-)

From there messed around with the tools to get things running and with a few other people released some of the very first *non* approved layouts - some of the 'second wave' of games on that very disk will be stuff that I put together.


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sat Feb 17, 2018 12:26 
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Don't think I've heard your side of the tale before zaphod, or if I have I've forgotten it :D

Where did you get hold of the early 'test' version? Was that via the newsgroups, same way I got wind of the demo, or was Wizard punting it out somewhere else as well?

Certainly at the time an internet search for 'fruit machine emulation' came up blank. (I started up the MSN Community 'Fruit Machine Emulation' and of course the original Hovel.)

I do remember the hacked demo version being made available with the tools enabled and suchlike, was that one of your sites, MPU World or something?


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 1:02 
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Hearthly wrote:

Where did you get hold of the early 'test' version? Was that via the newsgroups, same way I got wind of the demo, or was Wizard punting it out somewhere else as well?


It was a mailing list that was put together by someone flogging off 'fruit machine tips' although this was actually useful stuff - there were emptiers but nothing new however there was a lot of good info on best ways of playing some machines to max your profit (like playing club cops n robbers and ignoring everything but the cashpot symbols within 4 nudges) - Chris Smedley is the name i remember from the list and googling his name + club machines gets you some old pages about the mailing list he used to run

Chris (Wizard( was on that mailing list and offered it on there first a little while before he tried the newsgroups

Hearthly wrote:
I do remember the hacked demo version being made available with the tools enabled and suchlike, was that one of your sites, MPU World or something?


Not mine , I just uploaded the layouts to the various forums , i think that was Harveys - who was one of the other people in 'MPUDEV' or whatever name we put the early layouts under - it was basically 3 people - we had a handful of roms without any layouts and made the layouts and put them out until Gary created the very first DX and things went mental from that point on


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 10:23 
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zaphod79 wrote:
It was a mailing list that was put together by someone flogging off 'fruit machine tips' although this was actually useful stuff - there were emptiers but nothing new however there was a lot of good info on best ways of playing some machines to max your profit (like playing club cops n robbers and ignoring everything but the cashpot symbols within 4 nudges) - Chris Smedley is the name i remember from the list and googling his name + club machines gets you some old pages about the mailing list he used to run

Chris (Wizard( was on that mailing list and offered it on there first a little while before he tried the newsgroups


Yes that's the 'Club Machine Association', I paid £45 to join it and got the 'secret tricks document' which sounds like the one you're referring to there, I've still got a copy of it in fact :) It was mostly club machine information and older information at that. There was also a URL for the CMA Members' 'Golden Page' on their website which had some AWP information as well, I wrote a couple of guides for it.

I've got it in my head they had a newsgroup named after them but I could be mistaken on that. In fact, thinking back it's possible I'm getting a bit mixed up, maybe it was the mailing list that Chris posted to about MPU3/4 and not a newsgroup? (Or maybe he posted to both.)

It was through that mailing list that I got my very first contacts, and was told about forcing Barcrests, the Lotta Luck/Psycho Cash Beast knockback method, and a few other things as well. (None of this was discussed openly, but people were prepared to share behind the scenes.)

I do remember the figures on how many copies of the emulator Chris sold as being single figures, like literally less than 10 sales.


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 16:22 
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Heh! Fascinating reading and listening. :)

I was around from late 2001 I think; I stumbled across The Hovel, and then Fruit Forums as a result, and I well remember reading Hearthly's very helpful MPU3/4 getting started guide for dummies, and marveling at *actual fruit machines* playing on my unbelievably awful and shonky Time Computers (remember them?) Win98 home PC. Gobsmacking.

Of course, as I was to soon discover, the incredibly energetic, turbulent and volatile "scene" was at least as interesting as the emulation itself, and I would marvel at all the shenanigans, schisms, massive strops and imploding forums over the next few months alone. Marvelous stuff; those halcyon days... FF was pretty much loaded onto my browser day and night; I worked very odd hours and I still do, and yet even in those small hours of the morning, people would still be posting, stuff would still be happening in abundance. I think the net was far more vibrant and exciting then than now, despite all of the tech advances.

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 23:19 
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Hearthly wrote:
Yes that's the 'Club Machine Association', I paid £45 to join it and got the 'secret tricks document' which sounds like the one you're referring to there,


Yip thats it - i think it was me + a pal went in 1/2's to get that - he played a lot more club machines than i did but it was still worthwhile - he got the 'printed' version and went off with that - i got the chance to read the stuff online and access to the mailing list

Hearthly wrote:
I've got it in my head they had a newsgroup named after them but I could be mistaken on that. In fact, thinking back it's possible I'm getting a bit mixed up, maybe it was the mailing list that Chris posted to about MPU3/4 and not a newsgroup? (Or maybe he posted to both.)


So there was a mailing list that had stuff that was sent out onto to those on the list - I know Wizard posted the first version and other stuff on there - I think he did also post the links elswhere but it was the CMA list that i got it from i also seem to remember a password to get somewhere else on that website you've shown the image of and some other facebook or similar link that it changed into along the way

I will also have my archived emails from there on a backup disk somewhere


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Mon Feb 19, 2018 7:45 
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I found the MSN group first and then Fruit Forums later.

After that I contributed nothing to the scene. :)

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Wed Feb 21, 2018 8:54 
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A tribute to one of the finest AWPs ever made. Note that this machine features actual AMUSEMENT, with PRIZES. Unlike modern AWPs which are fucking shit.



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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Wed Feb 21, 2018 10:41 
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Fantastic machine, no question. Fond (if rather hazy ;) ) memories of 1994, for sure.
Look forward to watching the vid at home later. :)

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2018 19:08 
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Early ROMs for Frenzy now available (cloned as Psycho Cash Beast and Big Brother).

The knockback manipulator works on these in the emulator for the first time.

A splendid chap passed me the ROMs a couple of weeks ago, here is the video and you can download the layout+ROMs over at Desert Island Fruits.

Also features sensational bonus content* from 34m38s onward.

* May not be sensational.



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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2018 22:00 
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Ahhh, Down Up Right A Left. An old friend of mine ;)

Was quite a talented Photoshopper until the pills destroyed all of his abilities.

These days I find opening Photoshop and typing a word tiring.

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sun Feb 25, 2018 16:32 
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An emptier on an old £4.80 jackpot Barcrest lo-tech.

Is there anything they didn't fuck up?



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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Fri Mar 02, 2018 14:21 
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'A hand ball, but was it deliberate? Yes, a yellow card.'



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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Fri Mar 02, 2018 14:55 
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Heh, I did enjoy the Blue Moon vid mate, fascinating stuff. It's certainly a dangerous thing having a pre-programmed happy state on RAM clear (or even just machine reboot, as I believe was the case on ancient stuff like MPU3 Hyper Vipers, meaning all the scrotes were forever switching them off, inserting 10p and taking the guaranteed small win/exchange, rinse and repeat lol).

I'm sure those few "in the know", in those pre-internet times, did very, very well out of it indeed.

For me, the fundamental problem lies with the apparent legal/gambling status of AWPs. Fairplay touched on this back in the day; I believe that an AWP isn't classed as bona fide gambling, in the same way that a crane grab at the amusement arcade isn't either - as absurd as that sounds, and indeed is. I mean, if the arcade owner's kid seems to win all the Action Man figurines and best sweets etc. off the crane grab that's one thing; whilst this might piss the other local kids off, no-one is going to lose their shirt/job/livelihood/life over it. Conversely, those "harmless fun" amusement with prizes machines that "everyone knows" are not gambling, "just for fun", "always a con" are actually Grade A gambling incarnate and wreck lives. No-one cares, though, because fruit machine players are mugs/scum and if they're stupid enough to play the things, they deserve all they get. Etc.

It's hard not to be angry; I was for a decade or more when I found out the truth, but fuck man, life really is too short. If you don't want to be ripped off, stay away from anything to do with gambling.

Keep the vids coming though, loving them all, and most informative! :)

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sat Mar 03, 2018 12:45 
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43260012

Bookies look to be worried about the outcome of the FOBT stake reviews

Making noise about cutting the 8 million a year they spend sponsoring sports events, to encourage people to gamble, if things don't go their way :roll:


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sat Mar 03, 2018 13:05 
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Good.


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sat Mar 03, 2018 13:48 
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Good.

:this:

If I never see another banter-laden gambling ad it'll be too soon.

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sat Mar 03, 2018 14:25 
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Yeah, the bookies can feck off with their awful FOBTs (which make fruit machines look harmless by comparison).
We get to "lose" all those 'lovely' establishments defacing every High Street in the land, most especially in poorer areas. I don't care that the shops would otherwise be empty; let them be empty. Empty shops don't destroy lives; convert them into other uses incl. residential.

We must have been fucking mad to have ever thought this shit was ever going to be a good idea. It's really not.

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sat Mar 03, 2018 15:09 
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The biggest problem with the FOBTs is the stakes (up to £100 per spin on roulette), the jackpot at £500 seems faintly ridiculous for machines you can just walk in off the straight and play, but we've had £500 jackpot random machines in the pubs here for well over a decade and whilst I'm not particularly comfortable with that, they don't seem to cause any great societal problems either. (Although some folks definitely like them far too much.)

Reducing the maximum stake to £2 on FOBTs will take a lot of the sting out of them IMO, there's a limit to how much money you can lose on low variance random games at 90%+ payouts.

In an ideal world I don't think you'd have such easy access to any form of 'instant fix' gambling from the AWP upwards, and the devices should only be playable in casino environments and suchlike, but bugger all chance of that coming to pass.


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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sat Mar 03, 2018 15:28 
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I agree that reducing the stake to £2 will at least roll back the current catastrophic situation, but I'm still not comfortable with machines like this being on every decaying High Street corner, every run down part of town.

I think we, as a country, need to have a serious discussion about how we want our small towns and their retail areas, High Streets etc. to evolve. For me, bookies aren't (or shouldn't be) part of the mix.

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 Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
PostPosted: Sat Mar 03, 2018 17:27 
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Hmm, for the first time with the vids, I am going to have to strongly disagree with you here, Hearthly. How you can say that dross from BWB like Cup Final is supposedly some kind of minor classic is beyond me, especially when you yourself uncover many of the reasons when this is patently not the case in your own video!

I mean, seriously - this harks from the very early 90s £4.80 era, almost universally recognised as being an absolute fruity golden age, but people are thinking of classic skill-based Scorp 1 Bell Fruits like Double Chance, great Maygays like EastEnders, Corrie, super low- and mid-techs from Project (and, yes, the Band Aid ACEs if they were yer bag). It's an embarrassment of riches, but I'm afraid BWB (and parent Barcrest for that matter) were out in the cold. This just wasn't a good time for them at all; their clonky "Money Maker" early MPU4 offerings were simply awful (remember that 4-reel AWP Blackjack thing? Four reels on a £4.80JP?)

As even you yourself say in your piece, the feature board isn't well thought out at all; no nudges (and therefore no way to use the Band Aid in the feature.... wow great idea that), totally progressive i.e. absolutely nothing worth taking up to the last few squares, no actual feature games *at all* (e.g. fruit roulette, cashfalls, win series etc.), it's as dull as fucking dishwater, and as you found out, despite being £50 ahead of percentage whereupon it should be gagging to pay, that final "Incident" square was/is an absolute piss-taking bastard.

The Band Aid has simply been stapled on, it having absolutely nothing to do with the feature itself (the focus of the whole game), and unless rolling straight in, almost never in paltry open play nudge range. Play It Again Sam this ain't.

Just to add final insult to injury, the Hi/Lo was a nasty, cheating twat (again as you note), and the profile was boringly flat. Never saw one do anything like a decent streak (despite worse than average dead patches), or go mental on the repeater. In short, there was absolutely no reason I can see to have played one of these, especially when almost every other machine from that era was vastly better, most notably the skill/Winning Streak BFMs which were an absolute delight.

It's all a matter of opinion of course ( :) ), but I think you might be falling into the nostalgia trap here. I won't deny that even this looks like a masterpiece in amusement and entertainment in comparison to today's nasty £100 machines but then *anything* does. I must say it just doesn't do it for me.

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