Boulderdash

The original £2/£4 Top Tenner had action cash. It always felt like it deliberately showed the jackpot when the symbol didn't land, then went back to 30p when it did, but having played it a lot lately I guess it's just random.

Not sure why I said JPM. Yes, they are barcrests

There were loads of jpm machines with three word titles like top the lot, stop the clock etc. I loved them

The £2/£4 barcrests like Top Tenner were surely some of the worst, yet they took far too much off me as a student in 1989. Playing them again now I struggle to see why I persevered - basically it's a slow death hoping for the once in a blue moon £2 repeat to go four or five times. I could easily lose a tenner in one, and given that beer was at most £1 that's a heavy loss!

Absolute classic. My dad worked for Courage putting these things in pubs, so we had a stand up asteroids and cresta in the dining room for months

That was the strange thing about the £100 upgrade - the effective jackpot was reduced because they could only repeat once, whereas the £70s were allowed to pay £210

And Sidewinder in my experience almost never went to the top on Air Bomb

The oldest I've ever felt was in the pub with @woodsy, and one of his mates was also there with his 18 year old girlfriend. So basically I'm in the pub with someone young enough to be my granddaughter

That's a good discussion - how long have you managed to make a quid last? In Keele services in the early 90s they had a Mario Bros pinball game that me and a mate were so good at we could basically last indefinitely. For whatever reason it didn't increase the replay score much, so we'd play as much sas we wanted and almost always got a replay and maybe even a match at the end, leaving it full of credits when we got bored.

Lol. Took them three months after the £10 cash release to get the machine to stop looking at the token sensors

I just got killed at £5.80, even though it offered jackpot on the previous board

Oh, my mistake

So who was bastardising @Projectgilda's code, because he's adamant it was 50/50? We all know machines that would ALWAYS go to the top on nemesis.

Cool, I look forward to it, whenever that might be

Any progress on this chaps?

Looks great. I want one! Although you could do with a 4th hold button for clubbers...

That reminds me at my golf club many years ago playing Blackjack Club, which let me climb to the pot, which was £100, but it wouldn't let me climb past it to the £100 jackpot and leave the pot intact. It just gave 'snap' constantly, so after about two dozen attempts I assumed it was blocked and collected the pot.

Top Gears etc were from the era that the machine only paid out £1 coins, so almost no one would be putting in anything other than £1 or notes. It also had a thing on it where you could usually gamble right up the trail. Can't remember if it was an emptier or just a glitch...

Indeed. But long story short, all those machines were very dull and would rarely pay more than £20 from the current pot. But I suppose that was 4-5 times the AWP jackpot of the era...

Most people on here enjoyed compensated AWPs. What the have in pubs and clubs now are very dangerous gambling machines that will take to every penny you have in a very short space of time. Definitely not worth the risk if you have the 'it'll pay eventually' mindset.

You just have to collect wins when offered really. On the games I mentioned, just let George play it and it'll run about 2% below RTP until it chucks in the cashpot to get it to target. You can get it ahead of RTP with a big gamble, but it'll then stop letting you on the trail and when it does you won't get very high up. If you're that much behind, just keep collecting decent wins and it'll soon get back to target probably without paying anything over £40. Dull.

You simply cannot force a Barcrest clubber from the late 80s/early 90s pontoon/celebration era. It will always block you one or two steps below the cashpot. What you can do, however, is gamble out a big win. I used to try and start from triple bars and 3x,3x, 2x etc, but if you're lucky you could do 12x from a lower win. Golf clubs were usually the best for this as the members weren't very brave!

Despite Ace AWPs being absolutely everywhere in the early 90s, I don't think I ever saw an Ace clubber. Be good to have a go on one to see how it plays. Barcrest machines of the era would reliably pay their cashpot as a jackpot when the reserve was about three quarters of the main pot. The cashpot didn't seem to be linked to the current pot in any way but you couldn't force it out; it would just roll in when it felt like it and the rest of the game continued as normal with its fairly flat profile.

The Betcoms have the longest load times in general. They spend about 30 seconds looking for a note changer

Sounds like something put in for testing and forgotten about, like donkey Kong. Or at least that's the plausible deniability