Dougsta

Good to have you around. Would have been great to have more industry insiders on the forums down the years, it's always super interesting to hear you guys talk about this era of fruit machines. You've personally made some excellent games there in your time at JPM - well done. Always had a real soft spot for Sonic, even though many seem to have disliked it. A few questions I have for you: - You've talked about dodgy code coming from elsewhere in the industry. Apart from emptiers and obvious stuff like last-credit-incentives, what other stuff have you been aware of down the years? - When JPM was its height, which manufacturers were top competitors you had respect for, and which did you not rate and why? - It sounds like the game's developer and coder were two different people at JPM. Why this division of labour, and wasn't a lot of the developer's vision lost at the coding stage? - Last one. What were the main things you did/produced for your part of developing a game. You've talked about generating probability tables in Excel, but what else in terms of the final game?

The Autoplay works in a repeating loop. Key = the Keyboard key that Autoplay will press for you. You want this to be one of the shortcuts for your layout. Like coin in, or start button. Count/Chance is how many times to press the key for each time it loops though. In your case, it would press the "7" key 7 times, then onto the next Key in the list. Once it reaches the end of the list, it starts again from the top. Chance is used to make it random on whether a key gets pressed or not. A common use for this is when a game will error if it gets too many unused credits. Your coin-in could be given just 10% or 20% chance for each loop. The Cycles, Until IN and "or %" options are used for when to stop the loop entirely. So after a certain number of iterations, or when a certain coin volume or RTP is reached. Just play around with it for each game until you find a good setting. There isn't one golden rule for all games.

Thanks for all the interesting info in this thread. Can the locations for the compensator values be found for this game? It would be interesting to see their current values and how they increment per £1 in, and maybe even try poking them with new values.

Be interesting to know if it compensated that win properly? That sounds like a programming error somewhere

Yeah I think you're right, the latest MFME does that job for us. I was thinking that if the PIC code is correct, the lamps would be correct across versions, as the CHR is just an intermediate mapping ruleset, but it could be someone will need to just amend the lamp numbers. @logopolisCan you post those oldest ROM versions please? I'll take a look and see if I can revise the lamping.

The CHR/PIC is wrong and needs to be amended. Later versions of Barcrest ROMs almost always updated the CHR. I'm not an expert on how that is fixed these days, but one of the layout designers will certainly know how. And what an amazing machine it was on the early £15 chips. You could easily get £100+ on a streak. I always found it interesting how Follow Me offered a repeat chance after the £25 upgrade, which it never did on £15.

I don't ever recall seeing this on a game in the wild. For example, Club Dracula is bad for it in the emulator, but didn't do this in the wild. It would be a terrible bug if they did, really. As andrew96 said, emulation can be off at times. Chris had a lot of custom code to handle various scenarios that might seem trivial, and occasionally something would naturally get overlooked.

I think this is a very minor emulation issue, some sort of timing in the code. They didn't do this in the wild.

I'm thinking get 2 phones while on the nudge stack, then try to trap via bonuses and/or shuffling to get cash stack positions that will guarantee you the 3rd phone. I think there are a lot of options there, looks a fun one to play that way.

Always fun to do these experiments. There was an Epoch Maygay clubber released here back in 2018, I've forgotten the name but it could be trapped. See also the early Club Psycho Cash Beast ROMs that turned up a couple of years back - switchable to 1K jackpot with a working emptier Edit - the Maygay clubber was Rags to Riches. Detailed explanation of how I trapped it here, but I doubt it will be easy to repeat.

I seem to remember one of the low down features - Pick a Reel or something was always good for an easy few quid each board. Fast Cash was also reasonable. Otherwise just drain the value and try to get a Multi Ball / Extra Life feature and see if you can get get a high win from those. If it awarded the Super feature it was usually a reasonable sign, you had to get to the outer edge to get jackpot. These were OK if played with restraint. Forcing was a hiding to nothing.

Isn't this the error that comes when trying to load a .dat file in the new versions of the emulator, or a .fml file in the legacy versions? In other words, you are trying to load an incompatible layout format in whatever version of the emulator you've got.

Yeah Rob Hubbard's stuff was top drawer. Anyone who can produce stuff like this despite the ZX Spectrum's limitations has got skills.

Yeah, this was a good game. There is an excellent DX by Dad, and a very poor classic which was the first layout I ever made. You'll find them in the legacy area.

Most of the time it’s the note acceptor that slows down booting. Turning it off might help. Depends on the game really.