Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Wed Dec 20, 2017 23:48
Hello Hello Hello
Joined: 11th May, 2008 Posts: 13382
100 subscribers can't be wrong. Soon I will monetise the channel and be a YouTube millionaire.
Amusingly, because I was looking on Google Maps last night for a pub where I used to play Roller Coaster back in 1995, Android Auto helpfully offered up an alternative destination this morning for my drive to work, the town of Radcliffe in Manchester, which it pitched at me as being a mere six hours away, including a ferry crossing.
Thanks, Android Auto!
Watch in amazement as a bohemian combination of dazzling incompetence and endless optimism conspires to yield a reasonable profit from trapping DOND Desert Island Deal.
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2017 10:09
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Joined: 11th May, 2008 Posts: 13382
After a stunningly successful first week the channel has now amassed the truly amazing total of..... 111 subscribers. It's a Christmas miracle.
Here's The Empire Strikes Back, to tie in with the release of The Last Jedi which I haven't watched and think is a bit rubbish because people on the internet whose opinion I trust think so. And my brother does too.
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Thu Dec 28, 2017 0:19
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Joined: 11th May, 2008 Posts: 13382
Proper old school emptier nonsense. Even though I'm not very good at doing the method, the incompetence of the original coders apparently far outstrips my own bumbling antics, because I make a shitload of (pretend) money. (Which would have been real people winning real money, on the real machines, back in the day.)
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Thu Dec 28, 2017 17:18
Excellent Member
Joined: 30th Mar, 2008 Posts: 3542
My first drunkenness was when i won "lots" of money on a fruit machine in Spain and decided to spend it all on booze. Even then i don't have any kind of emotional attachment to fruit machines.
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2018 18:22
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Joined: 11th May, 2008 Posts: 13382
The channel continues to take the world by storm, now celebrating 200 subscribers and confirmed by the NYT as more influential than Boris Johnson's Brexit Bus. I can't promise £350M per week for the NHS, but I can promise more fruit machine emulation excitement than you'd get in the average bag of potatoes.
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2018 19:34
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Joined: 11th May, 2008 Posts: 13382
asfish wrote:
Think maybe some of these were deliberate and sold to players by Barcrest staff?
You could milk this and let the weekend causal players fill the machines up for months before it was chipped out
I honestly don't know, it's hard to decide sometimes if it's just incredible incompetence, straightforward corruption, or some sort of toxic combination of the two.
Check this shit out...... Oh to have known about it back in the day, I'd have been in the pubs twelve hours per day, seven days per week......
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2018 22:30
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Joined: 11th May, 2008 Posts: 13382
devilman wrote:
No idea if you're boring though.. I didn't watch (I don't need the encouragement where fruit machines are concerned)
If anything these videos will discourage you from ever going near a fruit machine ever again, they've been spectacularly flawed/bent since Day One by all accounts - so unless you have the 'good info', you're fucked.
I'm really glad I've found out about all the shit that used to go on with these things, gives some context to what happened in the past. Yes it was still me who was the addict, that's on me, but at least I can understand now that I wasn't playing against a straight deck.
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2018 11:00
Comfortably Dumb
Joined: 30th Mar, 2008 Posts: 12034 Location: Sunny Stoke
Hearthly wrote:
If anything these videos will discourage you from ever going near a fruit machine ever again, they've been spectacularly flawed/bent since Day One by all accounts - so unless you have the 'good info', you're fucked.
Actually, I stopped playing pub-style machines a while back - possibly around the time I started playing online slots instead. At least with casino-style slots, it's a more level playing field (although it's still a field of quicksand)
After a bad December, with regular gambling spells, I'm slowly coming out the other side. At least now I think I'm finally self-excluded from every online casino that runs Microgaming or NetEnt slots - no mean feat as there are dozens of the buggers. I did pop into my local arcade a couple of times recently and all the pub-style slots are now gone and it's all £500 machines and bullion bars type stuff. Also it was pretty dead both times - I don't think your average person round here has the disposable income to sit and play £500 slots - I went in with £300 and played on Rocky and hit the feature once, which is just piss poor. I won't mourn the loss of those places if they ever close down.
_________________ Consolemad | Under Logic Curse, the day is long Realise you don't belong
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2018 12:18
Meh
Joined: 13th Apr, 2008 Posts: 1643
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!
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2018 23:45
Hello Hello Hello
Joined: 11th May, 2008 Posts: 13382
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.
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 13:21
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Joined: 11th May, 2008 Posts: 13382
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.)
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 20:39
Joined: 23rd Nov, 2008 Posts: 9521 Location: The Golden Country
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.
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.
_________________ Beware of gavia articulata oculos...
Dr Lave wrote:
Of course, he's normally wrong but interestingly wrong
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 22:41
Hello Hello Hello
Joined: 11th May, 2008 Posts: 13382
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.
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.
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.
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2018 14:35
Meh
Joined: 13th Apr, 2008 Posts: 1643
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.
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2018 20:00
Hello Hello Hello
Joined: 11th May, 2008 Posts: 13382
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.....)
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2018 9:09
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Joined: 11th May, 2008 Posts: 13382
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' -
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Sun Jan 21, 2018 16:24
Joined: 23rd Nov, 2008 Posts: 9521 Location: The Golden Country
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' -
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)
_________________ Beware of gavia articulata oculos...
Dr Lave wrote:
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Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Sun Jan 21, 2018 16:27
Joined: 23rd Nov, 2008 Posts: 9521 Location: The Golden Country
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)
_________________ Beware of gavia articulata oculos...
Dr Lave wrote:
Of course, he's normally wrong but interestingly wrong
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2018 11:29
Hello Hello Hello
Joined: 11th May, 2008 Posts: 13382
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!
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Mon Jan 29, 2018 21:00
Joined: 23rd Nov, 2008 Posts: 9521 Location: The Golden Country
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 )
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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Dr Lave wrote:
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Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2018 19:46
Joined: 23rd Nov, 2008 Posts: 9521 Location: The Golden Country
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....
_________________ Beware of gavia articulata oculos...
Dr Lave wrote:
Of course, he's normally wrong but interestingly wrong
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2018 15:40
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Joined: 11th May, 2008 Posts: 13382
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.)
Post subject: Re: The pointless emulation thread - fruit machines
Posted: Sat Feb 17, 2018 0:40
8-Bit Champion
Two heads are better than one
Joined: 16th Apr, 2008 Posts: 14489
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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