[GPC Arcade Kiosk]

This looks like a great project, nice work @Reg!   

[Stand alone emu's]

Cherry Master machines can be played in MAME if that's any help:
 

 

[Cash roms]

2 hours ago, Patman said:

I was wondering do we have the £6 cash roms for Road Hog and Andy Capp please thanks in advance

If you look here, these are the ROMs we have, as of about 18 months ago - more have been added since, but I just make this archive as a handy snapshot.  Hopefully you can find the ROMs you seek in there  

[ Fruit Machine ROM  Archive ] The archive: https://tinyurl.com/3jhzbueb

 

[STOP N FLIP 2 POUND JACKPOT]

Here's a poor quality image of the clone machine showing bottom glass - there's only a classic layout available for that machine...

[STOP N FLIP 2 POUND JACKPOT]

That artwork cleans up alright - still need a bottom glass image from somewhere though!  

[JPM Pinnacle]

11 hours ago, stevedude2 said:

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

Sent you a DM

[Vector Graphics Offered]

13 hours ago, Scifinity said:

A video is still good enough to pull out still frames and interpret the graphics. I'm guessing nobody is going for pixel perfect representations of the original!

'Pixel-perfect' is a tall order   not sure what the DPI is of the printing process that made the original glasses - perhaps it varies... I suspect some early ones might have been screen-printed, I believe some early pinball glasses used that same tech (and had same stuff like full+half silvered mirror parts etc..  The more modern ones, I see that 'rosette'  pattern on a zoomed in scan, along still with the semi-trans mirror features - so some special form of CYMK maybe - not really my area, I'm sure others know far more about how they are made!   

12 hours ago, Scifinity said:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ur42R8UNDKTM1XKA5IB1t8McU5c1D44G/view?usp=drive_link

This is a video I rendered out. It shows the lamp brightness being animated just to demonstrate brightness possibilities. It was lit with a simple feathered circle image map but could easily be driven aby what would appear to be multiple bulbs for a large sprite. Take two brightness values and you have your lit and unlit images no need to brute force it in PS. Of course you need to start from a flat colour image.

Yeah, the guys who make they layouts here all have their own variations on techniques for building their 'lamped' image - a lot of different ways to illuminate.  But as you say, one of the critical parts is that flat color image   Then that basic on/off transparency mask - though the real ones have areas that are semi-trans, and mirrored etc.

[JPM Pinnacle]

On 02/07/2025 at 09:12, stevedude2 said:

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.

Appreciate it's a bunch of work, but that would be a welcome addition!

If you do decide to take that on; if you just wanted to dump them all in a folder, that'd still be awesome - I'm sure someone would be up for organizing them on the drive side, to take some of the burden of work from you    No pressure though honest!  

[Vector Graphics Offered]

1 hour ago, Damian6666 said:

Hi Thanks for you reply these are the best images i have i keep looking online for better ones 

A youtube search for:

bell fruit temptation 

yeilds a few decent quality videos - a lot of patient cropping and scaling would give a much higher quality base image (though unevenly lit).  Not checked them all, but this one is well lit and the machine lamps are off:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWj2uWB4Vws

Using a plugin to download frames at native resolution, they've got a lot of detail   e.g:

[Vector Graphics Offered]

1 hour ago, Scifinity said:

Now that is what I was expecting to see. Flat colour and alpha maps. Great artwork!

Baked lighting makes sense to make the emulator lighter on memory use.

Yes, that's how the new renderer I'm working on will work - flat color and alpha (prob a bit fancier with more of a PBR/SubstancePainter thing, as there's other effects like glitter, mirror, etc).

But for the MFME renderer, it's entirely basic 2d techniques with prebaked brighter 'sprites' to represent lamps.  If you do end up drawing some fruit machine art, please do make it proper flat unlit color, as the guys who make the MFME layouts can do the baked lighting effects themselves, but pure unlit flat color is then reusable for modern renderers (like mine  ).

[Vector Graphics Offered]

41 minutes ago, Scifinity said:

With vector graphics made in a program like Adobe Illustrator, they are infinitely scalable. They aren't pixels until you decide to export them as such.

When reproducing any artwork, the source material is key. Often tracing is the most solid start. Get an image, trace out elements to get the forms, deal with exact colours at after that as well as drop shadows, inner and outer glow gradients etc.

I initially thought the emulator might be acting like a 3D renderer with at least a colour map, and a transparency map. If it in fact uses it's lamp positions to define a mask between the unlit and lit images then these can be reverse engineered. Take a colour image, place it into a 3D program like blender, place lights as per the machine layout, render out images in both the lit and unlit states and feed them into the emulator. Correct me if the emulator works in another way.

Once I understand what the emulator is actually doing with images I can show a proof of concept for creating the necessary artwork.

The (current) emulator is all baked.  So I guess it'd want to be a 'lamps off' vector art image, e.g:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mw_P-VuywYnRFkJXsEq9_VbdUtZlBvvm/view?usp=drive_link

And then a matching vector/layer of the lamp mask, e.g:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MWnDV_A7q1tnVBHQiXtf30c2mS2zRBxy/view?usp=drive_link

And then the MFME layout creators would rasterise them at the resolution they needed.

I am working on a different system (modern 3d renderer using alpha layers, light shaders etc), but it's a long way off, so best to just go with what works for the MFME 2d baked image stuff I'd say  

[Vector Graphics Offered]

Tagging @Scifinity so he sees your replies  

[Vector Graphics Offered]

6 hours ago, Scifinity said:

Hi Guys,

I'm a graphic designer working in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Blender. If anyone has a project going and needs a bit of help making attractive image assets I would be happy to volunteer my time. Even if it's just some pretty text or a particular set of symbols you want designed or converted from photos, jpegs into vectors for clean lines I'm happy to offer some help. I'm not looking for any credit. It's good for me to practice various styles so that's my only aim.

Out of interest what kind of final images are used in these projects? I imagine you have colour and transparency maps for the emulator but I don't know much about how it's done yet. If there is a thread about this I would appreciate a signpost.

 

Cheers!

I'm sure there are some machines worthy of a redraw - maybe some other layout artists will come along with requests!  

Quite a few of the source images for the less common machines can be on low res photos/grainy flyers etc, that's likely where your redraw skills will be in demand  

[Oche Oche Oche empty results (and RAM/ROM hacking of it)]

17 hours ago, dondplayer said:

Well for anyone who wants to have a play I've done a hack of the ROM so the superhold bonus is now available on £1 play - attached.

I say I but it's a big thanks to @johnparker007 who has already said how to bypass the checksum and gave me a handy way of knowing when the code is in the bonus routine.

So for 25p or 50p play there is no change in behaviour - I've tested it on all 3 stakes and seems to be all good. Did make a schoolboy error on one run where the 25p stake magically became £1 stake 

Technical info:

Although memory location FFFF1185 seems unused it's being read up along with FFFF1184 so I used FFFF1124 as a storage location. This is easy to change in the new bit of code I've written should it be discovered it is in use.

As I've said before I'm an amateur Z80 programmer from the late 80s so this has been a challenge - it's took hours to learn the 68000 mnemonics and write some simple code using EASy68K to get the actual machine code values. Probably have taken John minutes to do what I have Today but I had a free day so it's all been good

 

OCI71_0K_SH.zip 2.66 MB · 4 downloads

Great work, good to see others getting into this stuff more, since there's lots of ROM hacks that could be done   I do need to do more of that tutorial series I started when I get some free time...

[Causing a bit of a stir.]

1 hour ago, Hamsun said:

It's mainly Barcrest AWPs released in the late 80's/early nineties that I've noticed this when playing in the emulator. I suppose it's possible that they have routines that tell the machine not to offer certain features if they detect that the current player is taking a lot of value from them in a single session, even when slightly behind percentage?

I'm thinking mainly of low down skill features that a skillful player can take to JP every time (in theory, at least).

Also, 'late chip' JPMs from the £15/£25 JP era appear to have something similar. They can block all potentially high value features for a long period before dumping a JP on the win line. If you gamble it for the top streak  feature and lose, they spin in a JP for every single credit until you either take it or win the gamble.

It could just be that the way I've been playing these on the emulator, loading a lot of coins in one go, has led me to imagine this but maybe not...

I think with all this stuff - the best strategy is to find a machine that you can prove is reliably doing the behaviour by MFME coin in/out stats, and then once that's identified and reproducible, someone could look at hacking or at least analysing the ROM, to find where the 'naughty' code is  

[Causing a bit of a stir.]

2 hours ago, edwardb said:

All Mazooma club machines were just clones of BFG machines; we got the code and just changed the audio, feature names and stuff. All the control/compensation was identical to the original machine. I think Pac Man Club took a few days to do.

Good historical info that  I noticed Bwb would do a bit more than just change the text - on MPU4 they had their own Chr routine that was reminiscent of Amiga games (unwritable disk sectors), where they'd work after a ROM hack, but, then use a return bit to affect the payout so slowly over time the machine would not adhere to the set program %.  I suspect that as code got more based on C routines (MPU5/SC5), those tight hardware tricks were less common.

[Causing a bit of a stir.]

44 minutes ago, Boulderdash said:

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. 

I've heard gamble blocks were a common thing among MPU3/4 club machines (folks asked me to hack them out) - I guess there was a slim chance the algorithm could be abused or something (gambling every win until one went up before %age had been correctly met).

Hopefully with those new rom hacking tutorials, some folks might get into it and start hacking those blocks out  

[Oche Oche Oche empty results (and RAM/ROM hacking of it)]

4 hours ago, dondplayer said:

I mean I'll have to get some clues from John at a later date like identifying what relates to communicating with the alpha or what relates to reading a keyboard input, etc.

I did post a rough strategy for reimplementing the hack, not as clean as removing the original code they added - but it would work I think:

If you read that post and the one directly below, that tells how to go about detecting whether the flashing bonus is active, running your own extra code if so to change the stake down to 25p, and also how to disable the ROM checksum test to allow you to make changes without it alarming at startup - hope that helps  

[Causing a bit of a stir.]

41 minutes ago, Projectgilda said:

Want this...

I heard this game has one of those JPM tells; if it starts rolling in number ones and number twos, that means it's numbering, and it's ready to splash out the jackpot (three brown 7s).

(warning: using the above method can lead to a full hopper dump).

[Causing a bit of a stir.]

25 minutes ago, Boulderdash said:

Taking the hopper like this you mean? 

 

 

 

lol that's so uk - guy breaks the pub fruit machine open and grabs the cashbox (?) - and then the guy filming shouts out 'Go on my son!' 

[Rick Dangerous DX]

Waaaah!  

[Causing a bit of a stir.]

2 hours ago, Projectgilda said:

Hi everyone, my name's Andrew. First time on the forum. I'm the chap who leaked the Union Jackpot exploit on Facebook and that has made a couple of YouTube videos from a guy off the forum. I was a games designer in the industry for 15 years and worked for JPM, Perfect Coin Machines and Barcrest. I also worked in London for an online, now defunct, company called Kismet Studios. I'll have a look around and contribute where I can. Peace out ✌

Welcome Andrew    Your comment about the Union Jackpot exploit along with @Chopaholic's video did indeed cause quite the stir over here lol

 

[Extended desktop]

7 hours ago, Coskey Fruits said:

With the top box on the hdmi 50" LG flat screen and the slave on the laptop on a small table, (EXTENDED DESKTOP) It's like being back in the arcade, without the pain and the huge hole in your pocket afterwards!  Try it....here's an image of my setup!!  Just for fun

I can't get the colour to go right on my phone when I take the picture no matter what I do, so it's very blue looking on here, but is not when I play it. 

Happy top boxing and slave gaming folks on different screens.  (Bullion Bars win10 v20.1 loaded here)

 C.F  

Nice idea!  

[Upscaling layouts using AI]

18 hours ago, Pook said:

That's impressive, be interesting how it'll pick up complicated fonts or ones with multiple external strokes like a lot of matching feature trails do.

I suspect the paper are showing 'cherry-picked' results, as is quite common with these things.  However it does show potential promise, depending on how well it does like you say, with the more complex font stuff that you see on fruit machine art.

Never be as good as a redraw (at least in its current approach of pure image gen at the pixel level), but could be useful for sprucing up some old layouts  

[Upscaling layouts using AI]

There is a new 'text aware' AI upscaling model, it's not fully publicly released (yet), I'll keep an eye on this repo  

https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/TAIR/

A couple of examples of it in action, this may be useful for our low resolution resources... (the TeReDiff / Ours images show the output of the model, impressive stuff)