Retrofruit

Rest well my friend, hope all is well up there.

It would be interesting to hear from someone who used to program for Electrocoin whether the next statement is true but I was told once that as far back as the original Bar-X the entire sequence of spins was pre-determined to a given percentage. The machine had a number of tables to select from so if a player went off track and missed a few wins it would simply select a slightly higher percentage pay table for the next sequence to bring it back in line. This is why hold after nudge could spin in the "wrong" win, sometimes hold after nudge on X would spin bars for example, and sometimes there was some strange behaviour like hold one bar and the other two would spin in - entirely consistent with a pre-determined selection for the reels. Chuzzy kits changed all that of course and made the outcomes variable and introduced things like three holds which the originals would never do. I wonder if the Magic-7's era behaves the same way?

As I posted on the other thread you started it is likely just making the same decision each time based on the variables it is working with. As there is no intelligence there it's just a+b=c every time. If you go the wrong way on the gamble does it still spin the same number or does it change the number and let you win? i.e. it determined that you will win the gamble or is the number determined. I think many machines have some logic that says if you go hi on an 11 it won't necessarily spin a 12 if it wants you to win (but it might if you repeat the process) whereas it will always spin a winning number if you go lower, so an element of "odds" if you will. A lot of MPU4 Barcrests 1,2,3,4,9,10,11,12 were pretty much always winners (1/12 always obviously) unless the machine had just given something like three holds on 7's and some MPU4 BWB builds the number reel would only spin 4 or 9 in normal play. It is my understanding that to make JPM games a bit more unique they programmed some randomness into the code so you might hit a decision where the machine doesn't want you to spin a third JPM symbol for £3 but the randomness kicks in and if it selected that symbol it will still land it, similarly on the hi-lo. I have seen some unusual behaviour on JPM's before where it may suddenly just spin three of a kind out of the blue and any value not necessarily jackpot, but even when dead it may suddenly spin triple bars out of nowhere. Unfortunately I don't know anyone from JPM to confirm.

Yes similar to the Chinatown RAM I posted that you can hi-lo out in £2. As long as you follow the pattern of holds the sequence is always the same and you can always get the win and hi-lo it out. Doesn't necessarily mean it's "fixed" just that the decision making process at that time always favours the same outcome so no pseudo randomness built in like JPM? So what happens if you don't hold the 3 and 2 on the plum and apple does it force it back in or is it then off on another path? I have had something similar with EastEnders, I was saving the ram regularly until it got so desperate it literally spins in three 7's direct. However I noticed there were always two outcomes from that position, either the 7's spin in or you get the feature that always goes to Fruit Stall and repeats for the same amounts. I guess where there is decision making logic if the machine is at a point where the outcome is weighted heavily in one direction it is always going to take the same decision, at least until the player changes the outcome by making a different decision, like holding or not holding something.

What you are describing seems to be exactly how pots work except in this instance the pot wouldn't be increasing it would always be a fixed value. To ensure long term (and it would have to be very long term) percentage is met for the 10% pot you would also have to ensure that when triggered it was always awarded and couldn't be rejected either by choice or mistake plus there is the issue of triggering when it coincides with another win but that would seem easy to solve on a compensated machine. I understand where you are coming from and in this simplistic scenario it would appear to make sense, it really depends how balanced the rest of the game is because if we were applying this to say a Money Mad Mushroom type game of £100+repeat players would be expecting this a lot more often than up to £4000 in it would probably have to occur maximum every £1000 or less.

Go for however you think is best to highlight it. Natural play is preferred from a machine perspective as they play silly in test mode but if it's to simplify showing the setups by test nudging there is no harm, then play in normal play to get as many as you can in the alloted time?

Please re-upload the one you did that you wanted me to watch as I didn't get a chance before you removed it.

Great words Reg Wow a year already - doesn't time fly. It doesn't seem that long ago that we were discussing this. I found out late at night and was straight out of bed and back on the PC. They say time is a great healer and for me that's more about remembering the incredible achievements Chris made. As time passes it becomes more about the joy the emulator brings than the sadness of passing. I know Chris wouldn't see any sense in staring into space when there is work to be done, Edit mode is after all just a click away. Hope all is well up there Chris.

A nod to the designers at Insomniac here, a couple of the strangest weapons from Ratchet and Clank are the Groovitron glove which causes your enemies to dance in an uncontrollable but satisfyingly choreographed way and the Sheepinator which turns the enemy into a sheep (obviously). The design effort that went into the Groovitron deserves an award with every enemy having it's own dance combination and in many cases the enemy will utter some kind of insult at you at being forced to dance!

I agree with this (Club Pink Panther). In my limited experience of this machine it won't allow a straight gamble to the top and will always die when you gamble from £50, even in test mode (when you aren't forcing it to win). Not as bad as the others from this era that won't allow a gamble past £25. Not that the top feature is a guarantee of jackpot either, unless it's set to 5p/£75 (£75 being the minimum top). It will flash "GETAWAY CAUGHT" on the alpha and when you hit collect it will award another win if it stops on GETAWAY. It will consistently give you less than JP, e.g. £150 or £200 instead of £250. The only way to guarantee £250 is if the triple bars come in (never seen it) or collecting four Panthers for cashpot when maxed. I haven't tried a straight force every gamble to see how it would react (I don't really have the patience) but as it can't force collects on you other than boosting straight to the end or awarding panthers for cashpots I can well imagine it could run way under percentage. To be honest I haven't played it a lot, it's a pretty awful machine at least from reset - just multiply the frustration of never landing on anything on Rovers Return / Instant Win and multiply it by 250! A shame because the sound package is great for Panther fans and the jackpot ditty is fairly decent (Pink Panther unique) but unlikely many people got to hear it in real life as these number trail based progressions are just annoying. In case anyone has their interest piqued I attach it for your aural pleasure. ClubPPJP.wav

Absolutely, no real version of Solid Silver ever had this nudge trail, but because the DX was done from the flyer it's had the wrong trail since birth.

If you are talking about real life payouts there is a hardware solution to this, or at least used to be. When tokens went all cash there were a number of machines that had no cash roms, some Project Coin machines for example. These were fitted with a small board that counted the solenoid firing and when 5 token fires were registered it would fire a pound instead. When less than 5 fires (e.g. the 80p in a 4.80) there would be a slight delay, then it would fire the appropriate number of 10p's instead. I doubt these boards are still available but it wouldn't seem too hard for someone electronically minded to build something similar to count the pulses and therefore "upgrade" old machines to be able to pay in pounds? There would still be long payout delays as the machine "pays" lower coins and these are counted and converted to hopper spins though.

Not being a pro-player I don't have much to contribute to this thread, but just to say I have been playing the stunning A:E layout of Reno Reels a lot recently. If it's happy then it just won't land on Bust. If you get to the stage where you are forced on the feature never collect the super feature always go for Blackjack, as 9/10 times you can just keep twisting yourself into oblivion. Occasionally it will force a straight 21 on you which is autocollect but it is consistently the best way I have found to bin yourself off with no win. You can door open/close if a feature is forced but depends how it's forced. If it just spins straight in then after reset it will just spin in again so Blackjack is a good out.

Barcrest Games Bond - presumably pissed because Maygay got the licence!

If they are older, converted layouts (like 5.1 and earlier) a lot of designers didn't use the "Notes" function and would often tell you the keyboard shortcuts on the forum thread they released the layout on! Great at the time but not now... You can check the buttons yourself in edit mode for the assigned shortcut, in these instances there was usually some logic to it for the extra trails like pressing C for cash, N for nudges etc.

That will cover the majority of machines but I would add another button at least as a lot of machines have an "Exchange" button. So if you have Cancel, Hold 1-4, Collect, Exchange, Start that will cover most. Where it gets tricky is that a number of machines also have buttons on the top glass, for example for collecting a particular trail. Like The Simpsons for example. Someone more au fait with building their own cab will need to advise you on that one but you could of course mount buttons each side of the screen like a quiz machine to handle trails, if your top screen is touch then not an issue I guess.

I'll do better next time I promise

I have followed Steve via various channels for many years but haven't met him in person yet. He obviously has a huge passion for it and has driven all over the country collecting. It is difficult to fathom a situation where a collector of such magnitude doesn't have a rom reader of their own so hopefully is at least taking backup copies of the roms at least for personal use. I don't know if that's the case here or not but rom readers aren't the massive expense they used to be, a sub £50 device widely available like the TL866II plus should certainly cover 1990's onwards (can't speak for 80's as I don't have any) so if he doesn't have one it would seem a low risk high reward purchase. In terms of trust we just have to accept that individuals have different comfort levels and part of that can be related to monetary outlay and fear of damage. Thankfully there have been some incredibly co-operative people in FME over the years and I have to make a special mention here for RussDX. He didn't know me from the next guy but when I heard he had sold it he let me drive to his house and strip his blue EastEnders down, scan the lot on site and rebuild it, literally the night before it was being collected. FME got a fairly decent DX out of it which no doubt Russ also enjoyed. You could probably count on one hand the number of owners that would let something like that happen.

jungle.com springs to mind, bought loads of bits from them, were kind of a DVD/Games/CD and hardware parts hybrid. They seemed to have a good business model at least for consumers where they would just add x% margin to any product. So whilst everyone else was charging say £60 for a SCSI cable they paid about £2 for, jungle were just applying the % margin to £2. So I remember I got quite a bit of cheap SCSI stuff for the company I worked for at the time. Another big site was uk.imdb.com which was the UK hosted IMDB. Amazon bought them but up until quite recently (I would say last two years) you could still use uk.imdb.com to get to the site. Finally long term users will remember www.altavista.com which was the search engine of choice in the early days, pre-dating Google. When I was at university it was the standard homepage in Netscape - in the days where you could pay for browsers!

I empathise. I spent £300 on a machine which in those days was a fortune, effectively just to get the roms. I got the roms dumped by another highly respected scene member as I had no access to a rom reader at that time. I started work on the layout, all out in the open. Unknown to me the person who dumped the roms sent them to another scene member. Before the layout was ready those roms were then released with yet another scene member claiming thay had worked to get the roms I had paid for and had dumped. When challenged, of course no reply and the scene member started changing their name on forums. Or how about the time I spent nearly £1000 on job lots of machines to get resources, these resources included a club machine that I desperately wanted to emulate and DX as it was the first clubber I ever got a £250 JP on. The machines went to another scene member who lived local to the seller. In return for my investment I got one scan of one bottom glass then they stopped replying. What happened to the rest of the machines I have no idea - I certainly didn't see any money or resources from them and FME never got the glass based DX it deserved from that clubber either (there was an M1Adness classic though). Many of the long termers know what FME was like in the 2000's, with people expecting everything instantly and for free, talk of robbing peoples houses for emulators etc, crazy times. Definitely a few who would rob the false teeth from your granny if she dared to yawn. All contributed to a very dark time for me mentally and one of the reasons I left FME for a number of years. Now I am as self sufficient as possible and have my own reader. Anyway that's in the distant past but don't think for a second that these things don't keep happening, in recent history I have bought game cards from ebay to dump only for literally the next day after I received it for someone here ask for details about the machine to do a layout. So there are people here, now, who will dump roms and wait until the roms are sold to another unsuspecting scene member before it's made known they are already available. Don't get me wrong I made some good friends here over the years but it seems that no matter how respected someone appears it doesn't mean they aren't prepared to do you over. So now I am very cautious indeed and trust only about 3 people implicitly.

It's a tough call because I understand both sides of the equation here having purchased and provided roms in the past and also owning a small collection of machines. The point Vectra has made about worrying your incredibly rare machine will break is a valid one. Even if someone is taking due care it's not unheard of for a leg to break off a chip when trying to prise it out of the socket, don't forget that some of these chips are now 40 years old and have been stored in sheds/barns with the extremes of burning summers and freezing winters. It's actually testament to the original design of EPROMs that even with a lot of abuse they can still hold a perfect copy of the data even after decades of use. However having said that even a broken chip leg is not necessarily an unrecoverable situation depending on where the break is and whether the pin is actually necessary to dump the content. The risks for me in not getting roms dumped outweigh the rewards for precisely the reasons given above. it's like having all your critical data on a single hard drive with no backup. There also seems to be a certain regression in machine design in the recent iterations where I often see posts on the facebook help groups of people asking for roms just because their battery ran out and this has erased or corrupted the game in some way - wouldn't expect that to happen in the 21st century but happen it does. You would also be surprised just how many fakes there are out there where the chip ID doesn't match what's printed on the chip body. I would say around 20% of the roms I have dumped the ID's don't match. Another reason to get them dumped and preserved. I would also add another thing. One aspect that is often overlooked is that roms sometimes don't get dumped if there are already roms available. Some owners have no concept that the machine they own has a number of different versions of the software for it. So I would always encourage everyone to dump every rom they can get their hands on even if a machine is already emulated. That's how the hidden gems turn up, early emptiable roms etc.

Doubt it's worth anything but I have a pre-release somewhere of Byte Bitten by Firebird on ZX Spectrum with proper artwork. The released game the sub game reward for finding the item is Sea King, in the pre-release it was Jump Jettin' (maybe Jump Jetting). Jump Jettin' was a rip off of a C64 game at the time so the game wasn't (to my knowledge) released in this form. Here is the released one. I will try and find the pre-release one. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/medium/96/16/product-119616.jpg

It's an interesting one and I have always believed there has been some apparently dodgy behaviour even as far back as the Section 16 days. I have given the example before of Party Games Slotto. Anyone who has played this at length will know that it exhibits compensated like behaviour despite being a "random" machine. It will enter a very dead period and suck money in, then suddenly it will wake up and you will be getting rows of £25 sevens every few spins giving the impression of a streak/enriched period. Sometimes it is obvious it is doing something in the background because you will press start and it will appears to stall for a second or so, then the change in behaviour becomes apparent. Mathematicians (and no doubt trancemonkey at Casinomeister) will tell you that the machine is definitely random, it is human nature to see patterns and we just remember out of the ordinary/unusual behaviour etc, but this machine will behave in the same way consistently, cycling between dead and enriched £25 periods. The clone Little Devils will show exactly the same behaviour. There is a random way that you can program this kind of behaviour, you use rotating pay tables. In one pay table you have loads of £25 wins and very few jackpots to compensate and in another you have more jackpots and very few £25 wins. As the £500 Jackpots are unlikely to hit this then gives the impression whilst that paytable is selected that the machine is very tight. When the pay table with loads of £25 wins is selected you will then see this often but whilst this is selected the entire table may only include say 1 x £500 chance. I have no idea if this is what is going on on those games and whether it would be compliant with regulations to change pay table versions in play - but as long as all tables meet the same percentage I guess so?

Great work!

Very interesting effect. Are the floor levels actually different between the two sides or does the blurring on the left give the impression that the room in the distance is lower on that side? The right side gives the impression particularly towards the end that it is actually an incline but when I cover the left side the right side then looks more consistent with the foreground.