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Thanks so much @Reg. But trying to help others build their own cabs is a thrill in itself. I love following everyone's design threads and seeing the updates. Way back in 2016 I decided I would try to build my own cab (back then, MFME didn't have any pacdrive implementation so I had to think of workarounds for practically everything. Payouts were worked out after quitting a game, by working out the difference between the TotalOUT figure from starting and exiting a game taken from the .GAM file. Lamps were 'always on' and different machines would trigger different combos of lights to be on depending on what buttons they used. It was all very sloppy. But I really loved the idea of being able to insert real coins to play machines and then the sound of coins hitting the coin tray when you collect a bank. I had no knowledge at all with mechs and hoppers etc. Initially for the hoppers, I found this website: https://www.casino-software.de/shop/en/Hardware/Boards/HOPPER-Interface?source=1&refertype=10 Spoke to the guy who created it and he helped me on how to implement this board for what I needed. It was originally created for vending machines I believe. But this worked perfectly and a massive thankyou to Bernd who created this over in Germany for help with that. I had to study the coin mech manuals for pin-outs and how they operated, I had little clue on circuits and that sort of thing, so kind of winged it with some old mechs and thankfully managed to find a way to wire them up that would work well with MFME. I then started my project and created a thread over at fruit-emu to see if anyone would be interested: https://www.fruit-emu.com/forums/topic/51381-mfme-machine/ I coded my own front end bespoke to my build which I still make tweaks to to this day. Anyway, as it turns out, it piqued a few peoples interest as in the next coming months other people started to create theirs. @uptown47 @WibbleWobble @Road Hog Mad to name a few off the top of my head. And of course yours, @Reg and subsequently we had the new forum areas to talk about each others' creations. And then the late, great @Wizard added functionality for the pacdrive into MFME, and that was a GAME CHANGER. suddenly we had instant payouts and flashing lights. Naturally it meant I had to re-do my cab wiring and I also made some changes to the cab itself to make it as small as I could with what the hardware would allow. I love seeing other people getting on board with it all and seeing everyone's visions for how they want their cab to be. I'm really glad you got yours going in the end Reg, It is still strange yours won't work with 12v, as I have 2 and both say 24v but work perfectly (I don't notice any slowdowns either) on 12v. Not that it matters, if its now working, that's all that matters. I really do look forward to seeing the additional progress you make.

It's far worse now, because losses on randoms are essentially unlimited. At least with the compensated machines you would win something eventually.

@No1Stoney so please to have it back together and proof it works. Thank you again. Coins in and Paying Out

Not quite the case on Jammin' Jars, it has a pool of (IIRC) 1.2 million results in the RNG table and each game round it basically just picks a result out of the pool and plays out the sequence, so how much a bonus round paid isn't random once it actually starts, the pick itself at the start of the game round is fair and random though.

Well, not if you kept running out of money.

@No1Stoney thank you mate for all your help. I got there in the end... ...your diagram was perfect and to the mark - the problem was this hopper. Turns out that it really did want 24v in the case of this one. I have just finished jury-rigging a 24V PSU that I took from the broken first cabinet that will be scrapped and it worked. The only additonal change I had to do was add a link from the ground terminal of the iPac to the new PSU and all worked fine like a dream. This is the mess I have created when I really should be sleeping - but it works. Next steps are to: 1. Install New PSU in machine. 2. Tidy up cabling. 3. Sort routing on coin mech. 4. Place Hopper nicely. 5. Play and enjoy. I will not be putting a second hopper in and it violates the machines T&C - look at this ! @No1Stoney this may not mean much - but honestly thank you so much and by not meaning much as you already have access being a designer - I have given you a contributor badge. Looking at these cabinet threads you've helped so many - me included - so thank you again.

from about 3.30 in...

DK'Tronics - remembered that name - turns out they produced Maziacs for the Spectrum - image below

DK Tronics keyboard... could be used with spectrum (replaces those horrid rubber keys) or zx81 (those horrid membrane keys).... I had one for the zx81, but it never worked so swapped it for a 16k ram pack and a tape recorder

Oof, here we go again. An hours worth of me nodding, saying "yep same here", and lots of mourning my fucked up earlier years. A good lesson to watch these for our younger members - don't make the same mistakes as we did. Easy to say I know, and harder to take notice of. Right. Got beer check, got tabs check, and strap on for another rough ride of watching pain unfold. Many thanks for these @Chopaholic

Tech update It's going to be quite a lot of work doing the server-based machine library stuff, but I've been making some initial headway in getting the fundamentals of a system together that will work for solving some of the problem. Here's a vid of using a very small test project, for researching a good way to have structures/assets 'in the cloud', so that when an arcade is started, only at that point would required machines be downloaded into the local library - I'll copy/paste the youtube description: This shows a 'clean build' of a test project that is run for the first time. The server-side path has _______ added to the start of it so it can't be found - then the machines cannot be initialised. Then, the server-side path is fixed (removed the ____ characters). Now, running the test project again, we can now create the two test 'machines'. They are simply a unique lamp texture each (just a texture rotated in the source image by 180), and a shared common 7 segment display texture. Then, I break the server-side address (adding back the ___ characters), and run again - this time, the machines can still be created, as the assets that were downloaded to create the two machines (and the shared 7 segment texture) are cached on the local PC drive. This system is probably going to be what is developed further to house the many varied unique/shared asset hierarchies associated with the final 3d machines. Also, I've done some initial work looking at splitting out the library's pure 'metadata', from the specific (read: larger) data for actually showing/running the machines - here's a quick vid of a basic table system, that I may develop on (it's not a great table system, but most user's will not ever need to really go in here, as everything will 'just work' automatically. So when you start an arcade, any machines you do not yet have downloaded, will automatically download (or any updated to those machines assets). This is to be somewhat independent of the 'patches' that will be going out for the ArcadeSim base program... A more technical update than some tech updates, there's quite a lot to do to set this up and automate it, so it'll just be updates like these for the next few weeks I'd imagine! But then it means that there's no upper limit on how many machines can be supported, whilst having a relatively compact initial download