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Dougsta

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Everything posted by Dougsta

  1. 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?
  2. Dougsta
    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.
  3. Dougsta
    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.
  4. Dougsta
    Be interesting to know if it compensated that win properly? That sounds like a programming error somewhere
  5. Dougsta
    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.
  6. Dougsta
    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.
  7. Dougsta
    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.
  8. Dougsta
    I think this is a very minor emulation issue, some sort of timing in the code. They didn't do this in the wild.
  9. Dougsta
    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.
  10. Dougsta
    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.
  11. Dougsta
    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.
  12. Dougsta
    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.
  13. Dougsta
    Yeah Rob Hubbard's stuff was top drawer. Anyone who can produce stuff like this despite the ZX Spectrum's limitations has got skills.
  14. Dougsta
    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.
  15. Dougsta
    Most of the time it’s the note acceptor that slows down booting. Turning it off might help. Depends on the game really.
  16. Dougsta
    Some good questions there! The free win issue on Maygays was a common theme (so was the permanent invincibility trick) on their games. I guess you discover it by noticing that the machine never gets unhappy when you take these wins, work out that the wins must be "free", and just keep rinsing and repeating from there. Once you've done a machine enough, you'll notice the change to the chipped version when it refuses to play ball. With Super Pots, it just never spins an 8 or 3 unless it's streaking. Then the next Maygays you encounter you immediately start searching for ways to get over the block. I think Hot Pots had one of the Gold Pot wins free as well if you could get it over £5. Off and On wouldn't be enough on most games, as they don't all tell you the specific revision when booting. One thing I heard of was on some games you could see a sticker/plate they added once an update had been done, if you looked between the reels. Could be urban myth. Pros often bought and sold info between themselves, especially once they were done with an area. Visit, rob the machines, then sell the trick to a local for £200, since you'll never be back. Personally I just subtly observed others on games, especially if they looked like they knew what they were doing. I got the Jackpoteers trick that way, for one. Other stuff I worked out for myself, like optimal strategies on JPMs and certain Barcrests with a fixed streak cycle (Revolution, Gold Strike etc).
  17. Dougsta
    Apologies if I got that wrong. I agree that you’ve got to be careful with social media these days
  18. Dougsta
    That's good to hear! The channel was loved because it was unpretentious and based entirely on your enthusiasm for your hobby. You tell a good story and covered a good range of topics. There was something for everyone. It's a shame that someone in your personal life saw fit to spoil that. There are some assholes around.
  19. Dougsta

    Version 1.0.0

    59 downloads

    This is an update for a classic I made more than 12 years ago. This game had a previously unemulated component called the Win-O-Meter, which gives the player a hint as to their chance of winning the next gamble. It's always annoyed me, and I recently went back and discovered how to get it working. Whether this was always possible but we just didn't realise, or if this was an update Wizard introduced more recently, I don't know. Anyway it's a bank of multi-colour LEDs, and was quite simple to set up. I've also given the classic a spruce up while I was adding the Win-O-Meter. I have to say it doesn't add a massive amount to the gameplay. There's a vague correlation between the amount of green and winning the next gamble, but overall it's pretty meaningless. If presented with a lot of red, you can Shuffle to perhaps have more green for the next gamble, but it just doesn't add the depth to the game it could have. It's telling that Barcrest never used this idea again. Anyway the game is OK and it's good to have the emulation spot on for another game. There are DXs by Ady and BruceGeorge, but I'm not sure if either of them are involved with FME any more. In any case, it would be good to see an updated DX one day. Thanks to @Wizard for all he invested in MFME, and to everyone else for their ongoing contributions to the site. @Geddy - in a spare moment could you replace the Legacy Classic with this one please? Both are my work, and this version is the more complete experience
  20. Dougsta
    I don't ever remember seeing an Elegance cab with a note acceptor fitted, so it might be impossible in any case. That said, the manual for Duff Beer Guide does mention Note Acceptors, so they must have been planned at some point. Is the round panel where the Global Games sticker sits removable? If not, I can't see any other obvious place an acceptor could be housed.
  21. Dougsta
    Sad to hear it, but if the channel has become more trouble than it's worth then it's totally understandable. Thanks for all that you put into it.
  22. Dougsta
    Watched @Chopaholic's latest video on Autoplay and reducing RTPs. I reckon that banning Autoplay will cause a significant, but not disastrous reduction in volume from UK players. Addicts will always gamble, almost regardless of what conditions they have to do it in. Sad but true. Same with the reducing RTPs. Obviously people who are active at Casinomeister are a far more informed breed of gambler. Joe Public probably isn't even aware of the fact that RTPs can vary like this, and this is why more and more casinos are just dropping their RTPs. They see only positive effects, since the vast majority of customers are completely blind to it and carry on regardless. With all that said, it is a clear race to the bottom. Once RTPs are screwed down to the absolute minimum, players are going broke quicker, and regulations are tightening faster, the industry will have run out of options.
  23. Dougsta
    Great stuff Reg. Well done to you for organising this, and to everyone who donated. I'm sure Chris would be delighted.
  24. Dougsta
    Is it true or was it urban myth that if you stopped no numbers on Shoot Em Up, you'd get an instant jackpot? And also wasn't it possible to get 3 red bars too?
  25. Dougsta
    Yeah it looks like Barcrest just gave up and did the bluntest fix possible. I guess they thought it would only ever be seen by players they didn't want, so sod it! They were already well past their peak by this point, and Bellfruit were eating up market share with DOND. Mistakes like the ones on Alien must really have cost them. I've seen Red Alert do 12 -> 12 before and lose for Fireman's Lift. This was on the very final chip, I think. Rich Geezer also did 12 -> 12 when gambling for the Reel Stop feature, which was guaranteed jackpot.
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