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Yeah those fixed input ones like Dragon's Lair were commonish, along with big screen gun shooters like Mad Dog Mcree, that had an Amiga in them doing the genlock/overlay (was pretty unusual to have an Amiga inside an arcade game!). William's tried this, I think there may be some use of pan 'n' scan going on, the racers I believe are sprite overdraw... so more like a traditional (if slightly rigid) racer, but with better background graphics than any racer - it was a bit of a flop I think, but I saw one being tested (in a sitdown Hang On cabinet) in Cleethorpes, and I remember being totally blown away at the time... as I had no idea how it was doing those graphics If you skip forward in this old promo tape rip, you can see just the LD background layer of just the top background, but without the disk rot:

Either way, there was a clear mechanical sound inside the machine. I was chatting to a casino fruit machine player who thought it was due.... but had given up and taken a couple of £50 wins. He got a board on his last credit..... i was nattering - he told me to shut up - then said did you hear that - its a JP. It was as well..... board went to the super feature and then to top of the trail. I was lucky enough to experience it myself - some sort of grinding whirring noise when i had put £6 in it once. On the board it gave me a skill stop off a question mark when the JP was 2 nudges away. It pays the first £750 in three lots of £250 at about a pound a second - takes ages! Then speeed pays the last £250....

I don't understand why you would add mechanics like a moving hopper to a machine that gives something else to fail. I would imagine the second hopper would always be screwed firmly into the cabinet and the sound you hear is a safety door that was being removed when it was about to pay out. Said door could prevent theft by people sticking things up into the hopper, or some disastrous failure causing all the coins to fall out. Your logic for cashpots is sound, however. On 80s and 90s BFM and Barcrest machines the pot could be taken at any value (unless seeded) as it was a paid for win. On most BFMs until Clubwise you could take both the pot and the reserve, but after that they wouldn't pay both. I guess they worked out the machine gets less play when there isn't the illusion of a jackpot available from the cashpot. Barcrests wouldn't generally pay the pot until the reserve was about three quarters of the jackpot, so the pot itself was almost always jackpot. Earlier machines like Blackjack club would climb out - you'll see the block at 'Notation' where you'll always have a 7 or 8 to gamble from so there's the illusion of fair odds but when it's taken enough you can gamble up to the top. The pot on later Blackjack programs and almost all subsequent Barcrests could only be won when the machine span the win in on the reels once it has taken enough money.

TBH, it's a bit of a minefield when it comes to these sorts of things. You'll never get a perfect device. There's always something that isn't 100% emulated correctly or certain games, that will be totally unplayable. On the surface it's simply plug and play, but in reality, it's never that simple. But having said that, if you are happy that 90% of stuff, will generally work and be completely playable, then there are some great cheap devices out there. This video is excellent for explaining things.

Absolutely, that is indeed the situation right now - to rebuild and expand on Chris's incredible legacy of emulation work will take a lot of coding and reverse-engineering... but that said, steady progress is being made in MAME-based FME As fruit machines are very niche compared to even pinball, we are short on coders with the requisite skillset+motivation - so patience is the name of the game right now. Hopefully in a couple of years or so, Arcade Sim (plus the new MAME internal layout/config work), will make developing/rev-engineering these drivers more appealing, so more coders may get involved - but we already are seeing great progress over the past year; James and David have pretty much done Impulse hardware, and David is massively pushing forward on MPU4 (most notably the new Chr chip work which has revealed previously unknown patterns wrt. lamp scrambling). And of course @SomeRandomGuy is absolutely killing it on the early techs right now I plan to always keep MFME support in AS (when running under Windows OS) alongside MAME so the Pluto 5 games will be playable for MFME users before Pluto platforms are done in MAME. On a somewhat related note, the user @Sneddrs has had Arcade Sim working fine on a newer Apple Mac M1 under Parallels: ... so great news there , and it sounds like MFME-based fruities should also work fine under that setup . So while not a true native Mac version, it does sounds like it's already fully working 'for free' on the new Apple silicon macs.