stevedude2

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.

Where in his post does Projectgilda say that individual developers put those things in themselves to profit directly from them? He's talking about stuff that manufacturers introduced into their games to try and give their games an edge over the competition and increase VTP, stuff that the Gambling Commission eventually banned because they weren't in the spirit of the Gambling Act and the Technical Standards of the time. Things like spinning 2 feature symbols on the line on your last credit to induce further play and so on. Yes, but now everyone is directing their accusations about the industry being bent at one person. People are hooking onto certain phrases and trying to work an angle to bang the 'corruption' drum at every turn. It's incessant. Who the fuck would come here and want to put up with that shit when all they wanted to do was share a bit of chat about the games they worked on over the years? Besides, I think the point of this thread in particular was to participate in some dialogue with an ex-industry employee and hear some stories. There are a million threads on here that Chopley has hijacked with his 'the industry is bent and corrupt' narrative. I was hoping that this wouldn't be one of them but alas, here we are yet a-fucking-gain. He's so utterly deranged and hysterical with it that at this point I think the only solution that might work for him is to see a shrink about it, and I'm being completely straight-faced and sincere when I say that. It's like he's preparing a dossier of evidence so he can go to 10 Downing Street, present it to Keir Starmer and demand answers as to why not every single fruit machine that has been produced in the last 40 years played a completely fair game for everyone. I'm aware some people have suffered greatly from fruit machine addiction and I've certainly had my own trials and tribulations over the years but can we at least have one thread that doesn't get ruined by anti-industry rhetoric? Maybe Chopley should start his own website up to keep all of this in one place?

The fucking state of some of you in this thread. And people still wonder why industry ex-employees are reluctant to come to this site and engage with players... You're just gathering statements so you can pick holes in them. It's more an interrogation than a discussion.

Here you go Thunderbirds - JPM fixed.rar

Never played this game - bit before my time - but there's a flyer in the gallery. It was quite big and I to scan it in two parts and there might be a bit missing from the middle... The resolution gets reduced when you upload a flyer to the site. I need to dump all my scans into a folder in the shared Drive at some point so people have better quality scans to work with.

Lucky Dip likes to give a jackpot. 1st feature on the board. Try collecting that a few times and see if it coughs one up

Hello, and welcome to the site If you go to the Portal section in the top left you'll see this on the right side of the page - You should find everything you need in there. With regards to dip switches, these vary between game and manufacturer and can be used mainly to alter the percentage payout or stake/jackpot values, as well as other things sometimes. There are some manuals for games floating about and those will tell you what the switches do on that particular game. They're best left alone if you're not sure. All the stuff in the Configuration section is used to get the game to actually run properly and if you tinker with those you'll most likely end up with alarms going off and the game unable to load any more.

To get started I recommend chucking all your game folders into one main folder, and then accessing them via the Game Manager - Then go to Database and from here you can scan your computer for layouts, set the main folder to scan and so on, and then you can load the game you want directly from the list of available games - You will find that a lot of games downloaded from the Legacy section have multiple layouts available for them. Some will be really old and not look as good as more recent ones made with proper artwork and so on. You can just go through them and hide/remove the ones you don't need or want by right-clicking them - Hope this helps! Enjoy By the way - those wav files will probably just be sounds you've exported from certain games. They get saved into that game's folder. If you keep each game in its own folder rather than bundle them all into one big messy folder you won't have this issue. The sounds in the game will still be correct as these are played directly from the sound ROMs.

Made you look I think I have seen this before though. Maybe from loading an old v5.1 layout into a newer version of MFME?

Yes, they are actual game program ROMs taken from a machine and extracted (dumped) to file. MFME emulates the technology that the games run on (Barcrest MPU4, Bell Fruit Scorpion 2 and so on - or in your case Maygay EPOCH) and allows people to load the game program file into it and run it. So they're not simulations or anything like that - it's real game code running through the emulator as it would do on a physical machine

Depends on the ROMs I think. The later ones took absolutely ages; it must have been something stupid like 0.5% going into the pot. You'd end up with the game playing off its face with £300 on the main compensator and the jackpot would still be miles off.

Any further progress with this @redbags or has it died on the vine?

This is probably my favourite game of all time. The replay-value and simplicity is hard to beat. The counters underneath that dictated what items appeared on levels was groundbreaking at the time, as were the score mechanics. Universal appeal, wholesome message at the end... they really piled so much into this. A fucking tremendous video-game.