WiltshireWizard

Thanks for all your replies! Yeah, I'm a sad old git. I'm in my 50s, live on my own, and still enjoy Christmas a lot. Though a good stock of whisky or gin also helps...

Were any fruit machines released with a specific Christmas theme ? Santa, elves, presents, whisky etc....

Hahaha - brilliant replies, both the serious ones and the funny ones! Unless they are all serious...

Yes, you read that correctly! It may be a bit of a random post but I am genuinely interested if it's a real machine and if so, is it by any chance emulated on this site somewhere! Thank you!

I've been slowly getting through the posts on this very long thread! But what I am reading is really interesting and I hope the project comes to fruit-ition! (bad pun intended!)

Well I finally gained the 4 reputation points needed (thanks to you members who got me there today) and so my first choice of machine was slightly random. I just went to the 'Highest Rated' category and downloaded the first in the queue - Psycho Cash Beast - and have been playing that for 20 minutes. Oh my god. Fruit machine emulation has come a long way since I first dabbled in it sometime around 2007-2008 at a guess! Also, the installation of MFME was straightforward. Not sure why I was expecting something more complex. But anyway, I am looking forward to building up a collection and then adding it to my Launchbox setup. A (very) long term project would be to also do the research regarding date of release, manufacturer, information about the game etc, screenshots of the original cabinet if possible, as data for the Launchbox community (and for this community too of course if people use some other frontends that I am not aware of that could benefit from it). It's something I have done for that community for the Amstrad CPC, Oric Atmos, Spectrum 48k and 80s DOS games - contributing to the databases on each. But I digress... Anyway - here's my history of fruit machine games for what it's worth. It's rather short. At Christmas 1984 I became the proud owner of an Amstrad CPC464 and one of the free games that came with it was the imaginatively titled Fruit Machine by Amsoft! Even for it's time it was incredibly basic and joyfully naff and I may have got a few hours of fun out of it before it went to the back of the cupboard. But then, some six years later in 1990 (by which time I had upgraded to the Amstrad CPC6128!), Codemasters released Fruit Machine Simulator 2. Now, THIS game I was hooked on for a long time. It didn't just have spinning wheels. It had 'hi and lo' sections, and bonus rounds, and everything you would find on a pub machine. Loved it! And now here I am, 32 years later, getting into fruit machines all over again...