Chopaholic

It's granny-tastic!

Your backup strategy (or lack thereof....) would like a word Only DX I seem to have for this is the old @wayfinder DX which in fairness still looks and plays fine. Attached below. Can't say for sure it's never been supplanted by a better one as MPU3 machines aren't really at the top of my most desirable list September 2003, bloody hell. Big Shot.zip

Ta-daaa!

I found it got more challenging in some regards but never in an unfair fashion, as you get more powers for your characters and new abilities to use and whatnot. You do need to work on your base as well though for the benefits it confers, so it's very much a game of two halves.

Loved this game Got a solid 30 hours out of it and basically maxed it all out, highly enjoyable. Had every building in the game in my base (whether I needed/wanted it or not), and effectively infinite resources too as my industries were so well organised (I don't have much gold in this screenshot because I'd just been splashing it around on anything and everything, but I could make thousands of gold from my mines whenever I wanted to.)

If you mean this one then no it was a different machine, but also had its own clones and semi-clones.

I covered this in a video on my channel a few years ago, as MFME emulates it. From a factory reset it wanted £124 before it finally offered a £20 jackpot board.

They do keep to percentage, the problem is with 'standard' percentages of the day they'll just grind you out against that 74% or whatever it is and make it borderline impossible to ever win. @Boulderdash has put some serious play into Top Tenner and outside of the (very!) rare big(ish) repeater on the £2, they're death by a thousand cuts. Well, probably not even that many cuts. Low RTPs and low volatility are a pretty toxic combination.

Aye that's the fella. Very boring game to play, but it looked splendid in a dark pub, that picture really doesn't do it justice. Like basically all late era Barcrests it was very flat profile and had nothing interesting or appealing about it as a game, take away the method and there was nothing there.

Red did a few half interesting machines on MPU6, that HOT HOT HOT and clones for example which had an actual sort of cashpot mechanic to them and a true skill feature that could pay £50 even on a mostly dead machine. In the Barcrest space they did a lovely looking Star Wars game with loads of super colourful LED lights and stuff that was marvellous to look at but basically just a TIOLI clone with non-upgradable boxes.

It's listed in the MAME build I use from 2015 as Top Of The Pops Cobra 3. Also has Maygay in the title

Yes you're quite right, the emulator has gone from the original location now. Would be interesting to know the reason why, did they remove it or did the author remove it? Hopefully nothing sinister going on.

The Phrase That Pays is a strange one, it hardly uses the FMV side of things at all. The CHD file is only 55MB and all it uses that for is the transition sequences between the rounds and stuff. It could pretty much just be a traditional SWP like anyone else made, except with all the added complication and cost of the CD-ROM hardware and associated gubbins. Very much a poor relation to the other games that are emulated.

It gets to the point where it really wants to give you the tenner Note I only even bothered trying to answer the questions for the last couple of rounds hence the shit amount of time, and it was desperate to give me bonus discs (as you can see I have seven). 50% RTP sounds shit but in reality it basically wants to give you a tenner for every £20 in. Fun game.

The thing with a lot of arcade games (i.e. MAME) is that they were designed as money-making schemes as much as actual games, and that really shows in the design of a lot of them. Also, and with the best will in the world, however 'classic' a game might have been back in the early 1980s, it's just not going to hold up in the modern day. Getting through the mid 1980s with Sega games such as Space Harrier and Out Run, there are games I can play and enjoy in the here and now. Also Sega 'solved' the money eating problem by just having the game last about five minutes if you completed it (in the case of Out Run.) When I got my complete MAME collection off that ROM burner back in 2015, I spent several days loading in every single unique game and playing it for a bit, and anything that I thought had a bit of replay value in it, I added to a Favourites list. The percentage of stuff that basically just went straight into the bin is massive. Chase HQ is an absolute timeless classic though

I suspect some folks might at some point have got a version of MAME that was 'complete' for them and left it there. I bought a full MAME set off a ROM burner on the web many years and decided that would just do for me going forward. (All ROMs and CHDs verified, all artwork and samples present etc.) I've had a look through the games and Top Of The Pops is in there, but in a totally busted state. It was always far too much of a ballache for me to keep up with everything being changed all the time in MAME, especially old ROMs being stopped from working in a new version when a few bytes were deemed to be 'wrong' or a workaround had been fixed or whatever, I get that the purity of the emulation is king and all but one always sort of got the impression that for some MAME devs, the fact people could actually use the emulator to, y'know, play old games on was more of a bug than a feature. This is my version of MAME, as you can see it's now ten years old

Sorry folks had a bit of IRL stuff going on recently so not been on top of things. Have downloaded the latest version of this and it's running fine, I remember these from in the pubs very clearly! All seems to run very nicely, although only buttons A-B-C seem to be defined, how do you select the fourth option on the category select page? I'm probably being dumb and haven't spent much time with it yet, will see if I can work it out. EDIT - I was being dumb, you need to use the right hand buttons There was a time when full motion video on a pub machine was a very impressive sight.

Slight consolation prize @Coskey Fruits but it does get quite a bit of coverage in this video, along with footage of the real machine. Started life on the £8 jackpot BTW, and was then upgraded to £10. Like you I have a real soft spot for the sample package on this one

Yes it's OK in that regard but it would have been since to see what earlier versions did as well For example any mention of changing feature behaviour like Test Your Strength not repeating any more and stuff.

Here's what we have for Roller Coaster, it starts at Series 5 unfortunately.

It's possible the emulated chip is a different £10 chip to ones that were out in the wild, as we know from that Hidden JPM Vault Of Rechip Information, they did a lot of software revisions to their machines for all kinds of reasons. I don't have it to hand but I know @Mort has posted it before.

I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I've never seen it Take Nemesis 100 times on the emulated chip and I guarantee that it'll go all the way 99% of the time (probably 100% TBH), which is way outside anything that could happen statistically on a 50/50. There was a £10 chip Roller Coaster here in an arcade for years, and years, and years, I'd periodically visit it and I never saw Nemesis fail to do the full £28.80p once.