edwardb

Looks like an app to get you to sign up for a black market (unregulated) online casino. "NonGamstop" is the giveaway here - that's how black market operators advertise. Very shady...

I'm 99% sure they use Pluto - I'll almost certainly see one of their coders at ICE in a few weeks, so will ask. Whilst I believe some early support for Pluto 5 was done in MFME, I don't believe it got any further? I did a few games on Pluto 5 so I'd be happy to release my FGPA security keys for that if someone can do a layout for my German games. Pluto 6 uses a 2-stage security system and so would need both a smartcard and CSD chip emulating. Both P5 and P6 are still in use today for new machines so there are some security and legal considerations here.

Aren't Fair Games machines on Heber Pluto 5/6 ? I know the guys there - they've been around the industry for a long long time. In theory you can brute force the encryption on Pluto 5 to get them to run, but that'd need some dev work...

Spot on. They were so much more efficient than Barcrest - and when Miami Dice/Red Hot Poker came out apparently Barcrest were astounded that they could get so much performance out of the hardware. The developer of those games was an ex-ZX Spectrum coder with a few well known games released - he really knew how to squeeze every last drop of performance from MPU4.

BWB had no Forth programmers, and everything on MPU4 from Barcrest was written in Forth. They were all ASM coders and got a hell of a lot more performance out of MPU4 than Barcrest did, on MPU4 Video in particular. - high speed ASM blitter routines that did what Barcrest couldn't.

No. Machines really aren't that intelligent, nor were most of the developers (in the nicest possible way - they aren't PhD level anyway!). There really is no mystery to them - sorry to burst many bubbles - but the aura, myth and legend that surrounds machines is almost entirely false. If anyone doesn't believe me, come and sit next to me in my office for a week or two and I'll show you the code from all the machines I've done, and those I have code for (which is quite a few!).

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.

You are imagining it Remember that most machines from the early 90s onwards were coded on PC and fast-played before the code got near the hardware. PCs have no concept of time spent doing attract modes when you're doing a 100K game stats run....

Mazooma certainly did, and I'm 95% sure BFG did too at some stage. I will point out that, given they are compensated games, the machine would eventually pay the money out, but the short-term mangle-the-gameplay was certainly a thing on Mazooma UK machines for a while.

I know I mentioned elsewhere that there was the odd thing put in on purpose. The one on an Ace machine was a good example of someone doing this, getting caught and going to prison for fraud. How to end your career (and freedom) in a few lines of code.

Yep, likewise. All of my games were legit - export games all had to be approved by the Govt in whichever country and so (in Holland, in particular) the source code was taken apart by a lab. In the UK the dodgy machines were always from two-bit outfits in a lock-up garage somewhere, knocking out crap copies of Bar-X or whatever. You know the types. It was never the big manufacturers - too much at stake.

Correct - even though machines only paid out £1s, a load of shrapnel (change from a pint!) went into them and so it never really happened......we metered all sorts and it just never happened.

We did all sorts, but in some of our games (from memory, and it has been a long time, but I think Disco Inferno, Wet n Wild, Top Gears and Pac Man Plus) we would just mess with whatever value we got from a chance table if we detected the last (IIRC) 100 coins being all £1s. It was only ever to mess with other manufacturers stats playing machines - it never really happened on site (we logged all that kind of data and I used to visit sites with a laptop or Psion - remember them? - and downloaded it via the infra-red transmitter LED in our machines. That's what the small black circle at the top of BFM cabinets was for, in case no-one knew....).

No it was extremely easy. Just keep a track of the last n coins inserted. If all £1s, then just set a flag "statsPlayDetected", and when you next look up a % chance of something happening e.g. holds, nudges, etc, just divide that chance by 2 or whatever. Literally 3 lines of code, a 5 min job. Fruit machine code really isn't as complex as people seem to think it is. One day I'll do a YouTube live stream and we can look over the code for some games together....

Yes...naming no names, but they were a bloody nightmare. Never paid their bills, and when they did, they always wanted much more in return next time. That's why I stopped doing machines - they had your hardware, and therefore by the proverbial balls. With online, if you don't get paid, you just switch the game off on their website, or replace the game with a message saying "this casino doesn't pay its bills - perhaps consider playing somewhere else?"