Dougsta
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Posts posted by Dougsta
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Can you let us know the layout please. It's probably a legacy layout needing some changes to Config.
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Thanks for the video. Bit before my time this one, but an interesting watch nonetheless.
Hi/lo gamble sample is Good Thing by Fine Young Cannibals.
Repeat chance is Ride on Time by Black Box. As a kid, this song seemed to be at #1 in the singles chart forever!
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2 hours ago, Chopaholic said:
The big club version of Up & Over.
Thanks, as ever, for your videos.
A happy RAM and details of how to fix the errors in 5.1 can be found here, for others who want to follow in your footsteps
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Thanks for sharing this. It comes as no surprise that he was highly regarded as a professional programmer. Clearly a genius in his field. So sad he was lost before his time.
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Great game, loved it as a kid. Visit the herb garden in the bottom left, dodge the angry gardener, grab enough herbs for Lightning, Fireball and Sprites, then find and murder your own brother. Fun times!
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14 minutes ago, Big J said:
Wow that is some bump
I only wish I had Wizards as did try and got a little pushy in this thread (was anxious) but am sure it has something to do with the profile pic, Yoda, Wizard, emulators, does kinda fit.
I believe he was well into pinball - real and emulated. I always assumed he named himself for The Who's song "Pinball Wizard"
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19 hours ago, MattyL said:
I can't find the page now and I'm after a look and some more for another clubber Money to burn. £3k in and no Jackpot!!!
Preparing a happy RAM for the £1,000 Club Money to Burn took a staggering £5,000+ of coin-in volume. Not sure what jackpot setting yours is on, but £3K definitely isn't out of the realms of possibility.
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Thanks, will check the vid out later
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3 hours ago, dondplayer said:
As I understand it Scorpion 6 is not emulated because the encryption has not been 'cracked'. If it were would it run on the latest MFME or would that need changes too (or in fact does that do the 'crack' itself so would deffo need changing) ?
Very unlikely to happen now, with Wizard no longer around. In any case, it's not just cracking encryption, it's also creating a programming environment that mimics all of the other hardware/software associated with Scorpion 6.
It is very likely we have seen the last ever update of MFME. Very few of the later AWPs are fun to play in the emulator anyway, so we won't be missing much in that sense.
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1 hour ago, Chopaholic said:
I've also linked this in the Overload thread, but here it is as well just to keep this thread up to date.
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Here's the video folks, the point isn't that I play it perfectly (I don't!), the point is to hopefully give you enough to go on to start getting a feel for the machine yourselves and get stuck into it, because this is genuinely one of the most interesting fruit machines I've ever played in terms of thinking your way around it.
I've got mine above 100% now and it's going further over percentage every time I play it, and every session I learn something new or see a new way to trap it.
Thanks to all who made it happen, all credits are in the video but particularly to Pootis for the layout, Dougsta for being very patient with me in PMs, and of course to our departed friend Chris for his amazing emulator.
Great video, well done. Glad you stuck with this one as you had some doubts at first, but you've really nailed the method. It's fun to do in the emulator as well, rather than Thunderbird for example, which gets old pretty much immediately.
You didn't do much wrong really (apart from the Hit The Top!) and the video does a great job of showing that the game can be emptied. Very sloppy programming from Barcrest on this one.
There's the one additional trick I mentioned, that comes in handy at times. Hi/Lo Continue will give you a hint on which way to gamble, except when it wants to kill you. Unfortunately in these kill scenarios it seems the machine has already pre-determined the result before the player choose Hi or Lo, so reversing almost always works. Higher than an 11 even works. You can use this to occasionally trap the machine, since the next spin cannot be a Power Check.
Thanks to you for this video, Pootis for the layout, and of course Wizard, without whom none of this would be possible.
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Does the streak pot actually go into the negative on these Maygays, or does it just get to zero and stay there when someone is doing the emptier? Probably at most 20p in the £1 goes towards the streak pot, so if it can go negative you could leave these thousands off a streak if emptied a few times in reasonably close succession.
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Autoplay is a brilliant addition to MFME. The simple ideas are always the best.
Did Chris ever mention what Autoplay uses as its RNG for the percentage chance settings? Just interested, that's all.
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Very nice Degsy, well done. You’ve been very respectful but managed to draw some positives from this awful situation.
One thing I’d love to see is a video that goes through the main milestones of MFME from the very beginning, with a focus on Chris’s work down the years. Chris was all about the task at hand, so it somehow seems appropriate to celebrate him that way. Also, many won’t understand the true scale of what he has achieved across 2 decades. 2 damn decades! I know this isn’t an easy task, so it’s something to consider if/when you are ready.
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It's lovely that Chris's family have seen the kind words about him. I've been through the untimely loss of a close family member, as no doubt have others on here. Hearing that your loved one was valued so highly by others takes away some of the emptiness of the loss, and is massively relieving at what is a dark time.
It's a great thing this community has done.
It looks like there wasn't mention of a preferred charity. I think this is something many would be keen to donate to still, but there will be plenty time to sort this out in the coming days. Those who had a closer connection with Chris can hopefully help guide this.
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I've been reflecting on this since the news yesterday. I never knew Wizard, and always gave him a respectful distance. He'd had a long time away from the scene, which was pretty much a shell of itself in his absence, and I didn't want anything to annoy him and see him driven away again.
One dealing I had with him sums him up perfectly for me though. With the new emu releases, many old Crystal games finally became possible. I was trying to create a classic of a game I loved but ran into trouble with the hoppers. Neither I or Reg could figure out what the problem was, and it went over to Wizard to take a look. Unsurprisingly, he diagnosed the problem pretty quickly. He said it would need an emu update, but this would have to wait a few weeks until after the release of 6.1, which was due within a few days. No problem, I thought. Then 6.1 arrived and he'd actually bundled the Crystal hopper fix in with it anyway!
How this sums it up for me is that this guy wasn't content to only have a "very good" emulator. He wasn't going to allow any kind of imperfection - not even on some niche Crystal game from 1997. He wanted a "perfect" emulator. And as far as I'm concerned, he was 100% successful. It's a truly brilliant piece of software, created by an obviously gifted individual. The effort that's gone into MFME shows commitment that's beyond most people, and the joy brought to others is obvious from this thread alone.
Rest easy sir.
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I'm shocked. RIP sir and thanks for all you've done for others. Clearly an exceptionally smart man, 55 is no age to go. Taken before his time - condolences to his family and friends.
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Unused sounds are probably just left over from the development process. Perhaps a gameplay element that was originally included in the design, but then removed because they felt it didn't work well, or chipped out because it was exploitable. Could also be that a certain sample was found to be annoying during testing, and replaced on that basis. There would be no need to bother removing the redundant sample, unless space was an issue.
There are some sounds that seem to be included as part of a manufacturer's default set as well. Most noticeable on Barcrest MPU4/5 games where the first 15 or so samples are identical on every machine. Maygay also seemed to have a lot of the same samples again and again on their machines, whether used or not.
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12 hours ago, slasher said:
I did a similar thing on the Reflex gaming app some time ago using a game hack memory editor. I'd fire up flaming 40k and set the cashpot to the max amount so every board meant jackpot. Do this a few times and have loads of credits.
Interesting. There were a few games on the app that were profitable if forced from a fresh install. So I was doing that to build credits, then uninstalling and reinstalling the app. This would allow you to keep your balance, but reset the RAM of the machines back to default. Rinse and repeat to have infinite credits. But your method sounds more elegant.
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55 minutes ago, Mort said:
So here is a video showing a very basic use of the powerful and often overlooked feature included in MFME, a complete machine debugger. (sorry no voice over on the video, I'm crap at that stuff)
In this example I use MFME's ability to use write break points and write/poke bytes (in hex) to a memory location which the machine uses to store the value attributed to the number reel. I use a write breakpoint on the number reel value, which means that when the game writes in the next value the execution of the game code is then halted, which then allows me to intercept and over-write, or poke, that value with an alternative. The game code is then resumed and it will read this value that I have changed instead.
In the case of Indy I tried to find a nicer more natural method than this one but I've spent far too much time on this already trying to hunt down the RAM locations for the gun code in particular, and just wanted to get this video out there.
Anyway what I do here is get on the board, set the write breakpoint, and then intercept it to move 2 places first, then get the first bullet, and then intercept again but to move 0 places each time and keep landing on the same safest! gun square. I have done this a few times and it will kill you before 5 bullets on occasion. This eventually fills up the feature to £6 and Win Series. Then I move around the board, intercepting values on the way to get to the square to collect Win Series.
The Win Series result is shocking in this video, but I have had higher values in testing around £12-£15 with a JP spinning in on occasion.
At the end I attempt to show how you can poke in the amount of nudges in reel play and was going to nudge in a JP but I messed it up lol.
Hope it makes sense. If anything this goes to show another side of MFME and also proves that the Indiana Jones game code at least supported the Win Series feature (it was not just a lamp on the glass) but alas it doesn't look like it was ever possible to get it within normal play anyway.
Just something different anyway:
That's cool. I'd always wondered if there was a way to do this, and now I know what all that stuff in the Debug area is for.
I've dug around before trying to find the locations for the compensators on various machines to try to figure out how they work e.g. proportion of each £1 assigned to different compensators, and how payouts are then deducted. I think I found them on some Maygay games, but was never sure, and gave up in the end.
I see no reason why it shouldn't then be possible to just overwrite the compensator value, and basically home bake a happy RAM file for example. The only difficulty is finding the location of the compensator values, it seems. Something to try on a rainy day.
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I'm happy to say I'm slightly too young to have been to many Spoons in the 90s but only just
I hate them anyway and haven't been in one for yonks. Last time was for a quick pint with my brother and we lost £20 in 2 minutes on some Blueprint garbage. Nearly left without finishing my pint. Imagine you were hooked on today's machines - you'd lose everything and more.
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I heard that Whitbread wanted flatter profiles, to reward casual punters more and discourage pros, and that is why they had their own ROM sets. They also preferred lower price of play.
I'd doubt that there was much concern around what ROMs/profile was in use from most establishments - it's something you'd trust the manufacturer on, and assume they'd always have optimal programs running. But we saw with the big chains that they took it more seriously - Whitbread favouring casual gaming, and latterly Wetherspoons wanting the lowest % payouts.
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1 hour ago, logopolis said:
Maygay Just The Ticket empty trick.
Good vid there, thanks. There were quite a few Maygays had this problem down the years it seems. It looks like lazy programming. The procedure for an invincible board is started, but it looks like it's not ended until a non-invincible board is started, which then overwrites the current state. It would save a programmer a bit of time doing it this way, but is lazy and careless and here we see the end result.
Think of it like opening your umbrella on a wet day, leaving it open once you get indoors, and then only closing it when you get up next morning and see the sun is shining. You wouldn't do it!
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20 hours ago, A:E said:
There is a Maygay machine called Cash Lines that is a clone of MMM, it was released a few years back now but it was a £10 version and was also emptiable. Worth trying that.
The layout is only on fruit-emu at the minute, though Vecs created it so he might upload here.
J
Yeah the trick is 100% working on that one, thanks. The others I tried on MMM just seemed to account the win properly, and would start blocking £4 wins, stop giving skill bonuses, and not spinning the boxed blue 7 on reel 2 during Reel Run. There was obviously a fix done by our careless friends over at Maygay at some point.
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1 hour ago, Chopaholic said:
Any details on that one Dougsta? I quite enjoy making the trick/emptier videos.
Cheers
I don't consider myself and Cheerful Pessimist to be in competition, we've both made videos about the same machines over the last 2-3 years and TBH I think that's fine, I like seeing his take on things.
Yeah, I'll write up the details for you later today.
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Brainwaves Problem
in Emulator Chat
Posted
It's happening because this one was made before MFME supported 4 colours/images per lamp. The method in use when this was made was to position 4 different lamps all on top of each other. The lamp in use would then jump to the front and be visible to the person playing the layout. That no longer works, because Wizard introduced support for 4 lamps.
It just needs a bit of tedious work to bring the 4 on images together into 1 lamp. One of the DXers may know a quick way to do this.