Graham the goldfish
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Posts posted by Graham the goldfish
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28 minutes ago, Projectgilda said:
Do you really believe that most players were addicts? I don't agree with that. This site has it's fair share of recovering/recovered addicts but I don't think that's a fair split. I think most players were in it for fun win or lose. It's like saying everyone in the bookies has a gambling problem. Some people, most I would say, like a flutter and enjoy the thrill of gambling responsibly. I bet on most things sport related, it makes the said event more interesting, but I stake only what I'm happy to lose. I think I'm in the majority not the minority.
I think players in this context is people you played them to make money. Most of them were addicts at some point, yes. Probably as a percentage of money spent on all forms of gambling i would guess 80%+ is from addicts, even if 80% of the participants overall are not addicts.
From my point, I think it is a legitimate business if, should you take away the addicts money, the business is still viable on the scale it is. I think that most awps of old would have stood that test. I think casinos might. I don't think bookies and AGC's today would. I think the amount of casual play is minimal.
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1 minute ago, Chopaholic said:
That totally isn't a real thing, BTW, and isn't something that LLMs (which is what underpins all so-called 'artificial intelligence') are capable of doing.
The AI bubble will start popping within the next 6-12 months, it's a nonsensical hype machine about a pretty cool tech that has some uses but is absolutely not going to take over the world. At all.
LLMs are a technological evolutionary dead-end and will not develop into AGI. It's like having a car and saying that if you just strap enough rockets to it, you'll be able to fly to the next solar system.
I totally agree. Using LLM's for work they're very useful, but it's also very easy to hit their limitations. In order to make them useful you have to curate the input and provide very vertical problems. Then verify the output which is as often wrong as it is correct. I'm sure they'll improve further.
I can 100% see jobs that can be replaced by AI in the short to medium term. The guy watching the baggage scanner at security looking for prohibited items, for instance -- an obvious AI fit. They're already used for first level support. I don't see it replacing all jobs, though. It's a useful tool, but the marketing from AI companies is definitely not the reality on the ground.
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4 minutes ago, Projectgilda said:
Ok I need your help? Where the best place to download MFME? I've tried a few sites but they either want money or the version I found for free doesn't load games off this site. I downloaded Jpm's 'Fast?Trak' and it states missing artwork and sound files yet they're in the folder?! Is MFME the only one out there, or are there specific emulators per manufacturer? I really want to play my old games again but I'm new to the scene. Any help is greatly appreciated ✌
Everything, including mfme from this site.
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4 minutes ago, slotsmagic said:
Works great for sorting your diet out too. Maybe a bit too well. Surprising how one book can undo a lifetime of what is basically self sabotage, convincing yourself you need to gamble, that giving up is difficult.
Not had a single desire about random slots at all. Can't see the appeal in them. I've mentioned that a few times I've had some stupid thoughts about my old vices - the Electrocoins mainly - standing outside arcades and wondering what they are like, what the machines feel like, smell like, play like. But it's still bollocks when you stand back and think about it. It would be more interesting to go to a car showroom and just look at some proper machinery. Or in my case probably a train or two!
I still reckon randoms are bent and the more we learn the about the industry I still maintain it is entirely possible, despite what others claim, it is entirely possible for them to be bent. They shouldn't need to be, but then they didn't need to have some blatant bollocks done with the compensated slots either, and that didn't stop them.
Randoms are still programmed by humans, and humans aren't perfect. Either intentionally or otherwise things can and will be left in. Random slots will have had, and will continue to have 'critical updates' issued. Sometimes because they play too well (emptier found), sometimes because they play too badly (I'm thinking one of the RR games, was it Drops of Gold maybe?).
My main concern in this thread was that a new member, who could provide valuable insight, might be getting forced out, in which case nobody wins. But that's a choice for him to make. I'm just here for the knowledge at this point. My playing days are behind me, I came out of it (massively down, but still alive and with a roof over my head, and thankfully some savings left).
Just need to learn to stop buying watches now. But at least (as I've joked with people in the collecting community about), when I impulse buy watches I still have tangiable assets left at the end of the experience, an ownership experience and try new things. I don't feel like a dirty failure of a human being and hate myself like I did with machines. Just an idiot with too many watches!
I know it has been debated to death, but I agree on the randoms. They just don't seem random to me. By that I dont might the light and sound show, I mean the win distribution on some of the land based slots I've played just doesn't add up for me. Things like 150 of no wins at all -- not one. Then it springs to life and amongst perhaps an elusive bonus or two there's dozens of small wins in short succession. I understand that the win distribution would be non uniform, but it is quite extreme and I wonder what the odds are of placing those wins randomly on a timeline and they all end up in such a small window.
If it were picking random lines from a spreadsheet would it ever go like that? Yeah maybe once in a while. Would it do it frequently? I don't believe so. So if it's 'random' it's not the form of random in would recognise and expect.
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24 minutes ago, stevedude2 said:
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!
The Robin hood game was an ace machine called Robin hood, it was a clone of pot of gold.
I also remember the system 5 pirate game. I only saw one, it was in a kebab shop on 5p.
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5 hours ago, Chopaholic said:
We need to delineate between mistakes and plain corruption.
Remember it was AW who told us in the first place about the Union Jackpot compensator tell, and also that it was put in there deliberately by the coder for monetary gain. There's a word for that, it's corruption. (AW also informs us that the same coder intended to put this into multiple other machines but then 'bottled it'.)
Literally in this thread he's said that there was 'a lot of dodgy code out there'.
I think we'd all be a lot more forgiving of all of this stuff if it was indeed just mistakes, but we know for a fact that it wasn't. We can debate the percentages until the cows come home, but of all the fuckery that existed on compensated machines over the decades, from the early days of solid-state control right through to the dying days of the £100 era (Powerplay/Batman Power Up, anyone?), some of it was incompetence, and some of it was corruption.
Fact. No debate. It's a fact.
(Some may object to my use of the word 'incompetence' but when Barcrest were kicking out machines in the £35 era that were vulnerable to plugging, something that had been a thing since the £4.80 era (or earlier!), I don't think it's unreasonable to call that incompetence.)
And it wasn't just the AWPs either, right up to and including the absolute daddy of them all, Casino Grandslam with a £1000 jackpot, someone at BFM apparently didn't think to have the learnable patterns on the top reels reset when stake switching, leading to machines that could be smashed into oblivion whilst others who were just expecting some sort of fair gamble, to be left in the hole to the tune of hundreds upon hundreds of pounds in a single session.
AW's input here is IMO both valued and welcome, but the truth of the situation is that a lot of us were hurt, in some cases very badly, by malfunctioning compensated fruit machines, and when poked those wounds can still be sore.
I get where this hatred is coming from, but I don't really share this view. The machines I most had a problem with were the ones that had less on them of all of the machines i ever played. The £6 era, barcrests and jpms around the feature game era. I would play them from the moment the arcades opened sometimes until the second they closed. First in, last out and if i could id be back the next day. The truth is they were compelling games, with a unique cost and reward ratio that I think were both cheap to play and I could potentially win significant money (for teenage me).
I'm fairly sure that there was a mix of unintentional software faults and some back handed bits too. But if im honest they made the games less playable and therefore appealing for me and I know that's the case for others too. Take a look at the £6ers in the pubs. How busy were they? Now think of the £100ers. They could literally sit there all day without play sometimes.
Reflect that perhaps the reason you were able to break the cycle of addiction was ironically because of the opportunity you got to sit on the other side of the fence and spend a couple of years winning. I'm not doubting there's times you got stung because you follower a player, but would you not have just played anything anyway until you drove your finances into a wall? I know that's exactly what I did in my darkest addict days. I wasn't leaving with any money, it's just fact, whether I won or not. If I turned a profit I was so buzzed to seek out and play the next machine.
One other point -- plugging, sparking, strimming, etc, didn't really cost other players money, they cost operators money, with the exception that the machine you play might be a bit light on coins.
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What's Chris Packham done?
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1 hour ago, StaceyD said:
hi does anyone know how to use this? i can walk around and load up a game but pressing 0 or clicking the mech wont work to put money in
Press enter to select the game to play. Exit with escape. If coin input isn't working there's a thread containing some Windows security settings to change.
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2 hours ago, johnparker007 said:
It's Windows Defender throwing a false positive, it's a pain! Glad you got it sorted so you can play again
I know you're working on v2 of arcade simulator, but arcade sim v1 would be 1000x better with a different set of machines. 90/2000s Barcrests, ace machines, some jpms of a similar era. Any chance?
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It definitely is essential. W11 laptop, off came the mcafee virus and visual studio, virtual box, mfme and arcade simulator have been installed.
I'm not sure my dev experience is in the right area, but perhaps I can help things a long a little at some point. I have so many projects queued up and there's just never enough time to undertake them all!
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Well, my new laptop just arrived. It has a 4070 graphics chip, albeit the mobile version obviously. I've just uninstalled some cruft and got the essentials on it at the moment, amongst them MFME and arcade simulator.
I just want to say how incredible arcade simulator looks on it. It's really something to behold! I can't wait to have an arcade with a few of the classic maygays and JPM's in it!
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@Chopaholic I'm really sorry to see your channel go. Honestly it was one of my favourite youtube channels and your narration is quite honestly superb, leading to me watching videos that are a little off interest for myself but still an excellent and interesting watch.
As others have said I have watched and commented on the videos for many years, but the most engaging and interesting content of ANY youtube video I have watched have been your personal recounts of your tours, both from a players perspective and of course the excellent and relatable low ebbs stories. I have to say I will be sad to never hear the final low ebbs story but I understand how compromising it might be to provide such details where those details leak into your actual life.
Just to repeat the sentiments of others, thank you so so so much for the many years of content and it will be greatly missed. It is genuinely one of the very few channels I would have paid for the content.
All the best and I hope that you will still be an active part of the desert island fruits still.
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keeps crashing
in Emulator Chat
Posted
I dont know if its anything like your issue but on my relatively recent laptop mfme would also crash for me when loading the majority of the games, although some would load fine. My laptop has a mobile 4070 gpu, but by default the gpu is switched out for a lower power simple gpu for power saving reasons (laptop runs for 6+ hours rather than 2 hours on battery). Switching to the 4070 gpu fixed all the crashing issues for me.