stevedude2

Is there a text file that lists every bpak game title floating around anywhere? Just so I can see what we might get in the future?

Messing up wild picks doesn't necessarily make the community feature more likely. It might just give Bonus Spins more often after wild picks, or give 2 wild picks a bit more often.

No worries - it should be me apologising because I was a bit vague If you messed up wild picks - for example you had £20 there but chose the wrong reels and ended up with £10 - and the game was random, there would be no way of returning that 'lost' £10 to the player at some point in the future, because by definition each spin on a random game is independent, which means it doesn't know or care what has happened previously. The game would only achieve the stated RTP% in the help pages if no player ever messed up wild picks. You'd have to show a percentage range in the help pages instead, or have a statement along the lines of 'THIS GAME RETURNS 92% WITH OPTIMAL PLAY' or something, which is a bit shit and would alienate a lot of players. By using compensation you can make the game remember that lost £10 and modify future play to ensure that money is given back to the player somehow. There are loads of different ways this can be done. Therefore the game will return the stated RTP%. Similarly, if the community feature is triggered and one of the slaves gets disconnected and the player doesn't get taken in, the money they would have won from the feature (or the fact that they have missed a feature when they were eligible) will be remembered and that 'value' will remain on the compensator.

You can disagree if you want but I worked for Astra for 20 years doing game design and maths - some games across that time were random and others were compensated. All these 3-reel community slots will have 'compensated' on the loading screen, whether Barcrest or Astra/Bell Fruit/Inspired. It's not just because of the wild picks; it's because the slaves are linked and if the comms fails and a slave drops out of the feature when it was eligible, that lost money stays on the compensator and doesn't get lost. I join discussions to help people, not peddle opinions as statements of fact. EDIT - Also what @superl33ch says. The way the comms talks to the slaves and the way the community trigger mechanism works can also be regarded as a method of compensation.

All the community 3-reelers are compensated - they have to be because if you messed up wild picks that money would be lost and the game wouldn't achieve RTP%.

Check out my massive tournament score

A few errors when exiting one or two games as others have said, but it's a seriously impressive bit of kit. Only 29 downloads so far but that number's going to go through the roof in the next few days...

Loved this on the c64. Great music by Jim Evans. Tough game because the enemy bullets were hard to see on the c64 version.

Welcome to the site! Click this box on the right of the portal page to get yourself started

There was also that JPM Casino Las Vegas game in the Vogue cabinet, which was a bit like Sonic the Hedgehog but with every single vestige of skill and excitement removed. My word that game was bland.

You can't beat a bit of 2p fun So many great games back in the day - Rat Race, Lucky Lady, Aladdin's Cave, Blue Streak, Test Pilot, Spoof, Crack the Nut, Copper Run. Fantastic times!

You'll find most of the 2p games you like in the Legacy Downloads section. First click on the Downloads tab on the front page - On the right you'll see the Legacy Downloads section. Click on (and 37 more) at the bottom - Choose your manufacturer, for example, BWB - Click on BWB #-Z - Then click on Download this file - This will bring up a list of all the BWB games that are emulated. Scroll down and click the blue Download button alongside each game you want - And it's as simple as that. Most games will have multiple layouts in the folder when you download them. Some were done 20 years ago, others much more recently and will look better than others, so just find the one you prefer and hide the others in Game Manager or delete them. Also look in the Layouts section in Downloads as you'll also find some very recent layouts of older games in there too. Welcome to the site and enjoy!

I remember playing an £8 token jackpot version of RC which used to give Test Your Strength off Last Ride, and it would nearly always repeat afterwards (as long as you got the jackpot from it). I would go as far as to say I never saw it not repeat. And certainly there were versions of the £10 all-cash ROMs that near enough always gave the full £28.80 off Nemesis. There was a 20p play £10 cash Roller Coaster in a complete dive of an arcade called Sunnyholt Amusements in Brean Sands back in the late 90's and it used to absolutely love a Nemesis to the top. They had some good bits in there including a Wonderboy video-game on which I could make 20p last for half-an-hour. Sadly it was one of those places that was owned and run by a family of wankers who would ban locals or anyone who looked like they knew what they were doing, and despite trying to blend in by playing pushers, video-games and even holding a seaside bucket and spade I was clocked before long and was banned by the woman sat in the change kiosk, a fat dreadnought who looked like Biffa Bacon's Mum. The thing is, the idea of a guaranteed £28.80 Nemesis feature might be non-compliant as far as the technical standards go, but it made the feature much more attractive and the game more exciting. Who the fuck wants to gamble Waltzers for Nemesis when it might stop at £5.80? And besides, it was possible to get things like that past the Gambling Commission if you were clever enough and willing to think outside the box. For a start, the fact that you could hi-lo against the numbers and fuck it up yourself meant that you could set up a soak test of the game that would, on a 50/50 chance, go the wrong way once per credit break, meaning when the GC look at the results the average win from the Nemesis feature would be more like a tenner. But on-site the actual average would be close to £28.80 because of 'player skill'. It's a bit 'grey area' - you're making the credit-breaks pass 100% of the time and then the player controls the rest of the feature. You could squeeze that past the GC but then months later they'd tighten up the regs to stop people from doing it. Half the fun with designing games back then was trying to find creative ways of interpreting the regs differently to how the other manufacturers were at the time, to try and gain an edge over the competition. With the Test Your Strength 100% repeat chance, to get that past the GC you just show them the total number of TYS features won on the game overall, and the number of them that repeated - it's going to be way less than 50% because there was practically no chance of that feature repeating if you took it any other way.

Road Hog £6 cash.zip Andy Capp £6 cash.zip These should work for you @Patman. Let me know

No probs - if someone links me to a location on Drive I'll get them uploaded

There's also a couple of random, reel-based IGT games on the site - Double Diamond Haywire and something else.

My guess is that it was put in Indiana Jones to stop you getting JPMs in the base game on a 1 or 12 and being able to gamble past the £3 block when the compensator couldn't afford it. And then it just got left in there and became an unintentional way of being able to tell what level the compensator was in. And then when Big Bucks came out where you could step the number reel, it needed to guard against 3's and 8's as well when burnt, and that's a third of the number reel it couldn't spin to. Big Bucks was the first game where I became aware of numbering and it made sense because it didn't want you getting Stop-a-Fruit and being able to gamble to Stop-and-Step. Nor did the game want you to be able to get 2 or 3 nudges and be guaranteed the first gamble, which might give you a win it couldn't afford. There was no 'looking ahead' to check what number was showing before deciding whether to let you onto the nudge or feature trail, so it was easier to just stop the game spinning those 'guaranteed' numbers, rather than rewrite the decision process on whether to allow certain scenarios or not. A sort of crude, blanket-fix if you will. I never thought that the same would apply to games like Roller Coaster and Monopoly 60 with a £4 block because those games didn't need to inhibit those numbers because there was no way of it trapping itself due to the game design being completely different to Big Bucks. But as it turned out it was in everything.

This was an absolutely fabulous club machine, second only to Cops 'n' Robbers in my opinion. Pretty unique because there were no nudges in the base game and this made for a rapid throughput of money. The base game was still fun to play though because if you held a pair of fruits there was a good chance of the third one coming in to get you on the hi-lo gamble, which felt very fair on the numbers. On the feature board you could go round a few times building stuff up and it felt very fair, even though there was a lot of jeopardy because it was possible to lose from any square on the board - you could always reach a LOSE of a question mark from anywhere. It was genuinely exciting when the columns started getting high up, and if you got an extra life it was a great feeling because you knew you were assured of a few more moves and at this stage you felt you had a good chance of getting 20 or 30 win spins, especially once the bingo numbers started filling up for the double and triple add. Also exciting was the fact that you might even fill the name up again before you lost your extra life so you now had two, and then it was all about hoping you got one of the columns to the top before your lives ran out. Getting Boombastic with an extra life was really annoying though! But you'd also get Boombastic quite a lot instead of getting kicked off the board, so at least the player could take something. I used to find that you'd get a lot of Boombastics early on in the feature if it was close to paying the jackpot, but it might have been my imagination. I liked the way the game alternated between paying the Jackpot and the Cashpots - if you got the Jackpot from the cash/win spins column, the next jackpot would be paid from the Cashpots, and vice-versa. A tremendous club machine in every respect. The way the jackpot was delivered was great - if you've got an extra life you're going to carry on aren't you?

This is what gap testing is for on random games. It's a count of the number of losing spins before a winning one. For example, a run of 6 losing spins should be less frequent than a run of 5 losing spins but more frequent than a run of 7 losing spins. You can work out the average expected gaps and how often they will occur by using the overall hit rate of the game. The gap test results from a sample of random spins have to fall within this range or something is amiss and the game will fail at the Test House. Obviously the shorter the sample of spins the more it can deviate. For me random games, especially Cat C, are really toxic. The reason people lose money in them so quickly is because of the lack of holds, nudges and features to break up the rhythm of the game, and the resulting short minimum game time. Plus the fact that some of the RTP% options, especially in pubs and service stations, are fucking dire. Games for zombies basically, with no break in play until some 1 in 100-150 spin event (like free spins) occurs, which can often be over in less than a minute. Compare this experience to a lapper board on a £15 jackpot AWP like Psycho Cash Beast that comes in once every few quid and can involve a few laps and then some thinking time while you try and set the reels up for Nearest Win or whatever. At least with compensated games you can meticulously curate a specific experience for the player to ensure they get a bit of interaction for their money. On random games you're extremely limited in what you can do other than tweaking the maths to improve the hit rate of the bonus, at the expense of the average value of the bonus itself, or the quality of the base game.

You can't beat a nice watch! Check out this bad-boy...

Nah it wasn't that. It was a £6 token game, came out around the time of Big Banker. Failed test most likely

Good point I guess you needed to realise very quickly that random machines cannot be beaten, nor some of the lo-techs that were starting to creep into the all-cash areas and push the hi-tech stuff out. The biggest issue I have is finding things to do other than gambling that feel as exciting and interesting, something to replace the buzz of it. I think a lot of people can't do that and lapse as a result, or find the same buzz in drugs or alcohol which isn't very good.

Hello @Projectgilda and welcome to the site In order to get this thread back on track, I have a few questions for you about games... Back in the 90s when JPM started doing games in the Vogue cabinet, the first game I ever saw in that cab was some sort of Robin Hood-themed game with gold and silver arrows on the reels. Do you remember it? It was in my local arcade (that used to get a lot of new machines on test from various distributors) next to a Big Banker, both on £6 tokens. Also, the same arcade some time later got a game called Don't Forget Your Toothbrush on test. I remember very little about it other than I guess it was licensed from the popular TV show with Chris Evans. I think someone once told me it was a clone of Money Talks. Do you remember that game? Might be before your time but do you remember a System 5 game in the same cabinet as Fairground that had parrots on the reels as feature symbols, and you moved around some sort of pirate ship in the feature? Only ever saw one of them. Do you remember a Barcrest £15 Jackpot machine called Boogie Nights? It was very similar to Psycho cash Beast except I think you could save your nudges or gamble them in the base game. Theme was 60s disco... Lastly, did you have anything to do with a Project machine called Balls of Steel, which reminded me a lot of Caesar's Palace? It was in a weird cabinet and I only remember one more game Project did in that cab - some sort of Treasure Island-type game, both were in Carousel Amusements in Newport I think. Best regards!

My apologies - I meant to say 'accusations about the industry being bent' rather than 'anger'. My point was that I'm sure Projectgilda didn't join the site to be the spokesperson for the industry and how it has conducted itself over the last 40 years

Pretty much the same here The trick is being able to identify when to get out at the right time, and having the willpower to do it.