Chopaholic
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Posts posted by Chopaholic
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I believe it was AC Games, I have a small amount of footage from back in the £35 jackpot days, (direct timestamped link below), you can see it uses the same jackpot symbols as Poker Face and also has the standard 'THATS YOUR LOT' (sic) at the end of the mega streak.
It'd be a nice one to see emulated, even though it is basically a standard Betcom.
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I covered this in a video, direct timestamped link.
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Thanks chaps that's all very useful, a screwed up CHR definitely makes sense for why the earlier ROMs have their lamps scrambled in Tommy's DX, I'd really hope that 0.3 (and certainly 0.2) would be workers. TBH I think it's still a decent machine to play even on the 0.5 ROMs (and probably made for a much better game for casuals, of which there were still plenty in the £15 era). but in terms of making a video about the machine and its method - having the earlier ROMs running would be a bonus.
We never had that many over here and they were all chipped by the time they arrived, a couple got upgraded to £25 before they finally disappeared.
Here's what the CMA put on their Golden Pages for it back in the day, for the method to have made it onto this page meant it was dead and well chipped out in the wild
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Hi folks, do we have anything earlier than 0.5 available for this? I was looking at the CMA Archive and it's talking about a rechip on 0.3 that removed the red ToT force and made the streak a lot more random, which says to me we'd need 0.2 (at least) for ROMs that responded to this playstyle.
Tommy's DX is running 0.5K (arcade) ROMs.
Reason I ask is it's one I want to do a video for. I can still do the video with the ROMs we have but it'd be more of a tell don't show
Also, were knockbacks a thing on the earlier ROMs for this, or was it just wait until it finally offered a red ToT?
Cheers!
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There are still a few of those on the IOM, running that game
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The new channel has hit the 'jackpot' number of subscribers.....
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44 minutes ago, MikeyMonster said:
Hahaha - its turned into a @Chopaholicshout out thread!
Shows how much we appreciate the Manx man.
Hello!
My channel is here @davew3
Plenty of tricks/emptiers/traps and other shenanigans on there
https://www.youtube.com/@DegsyDegworth
Stuff like this, for example.
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The original PvZ game is fantastic, I bought it back when it was new and still have it in my Steam library, and completely maxed it out. Unfortunately it only runs in full screen mode, which makes it incredibly hard work on a 32 inch screen you're sat quite close to, to the point of being pretty much unplayable, very tiring with the mouse. (There are some hacks out there to try and get it to work windowed but I didn't get very far with them.)
PvZ2 was a microtransaction filled travesty, as slotsmagic notes above.
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First off I'd say get a good chunk of cash through it from a factory reset using autoplay (video linked below), then learn which features can actually pay something decent. (I'm not being obtuse there, I genuinely don't know for this machine, and JPM had really gimped the skill aspect of their games by this point.)
Even on these later era JPMs, it was all about trying to drain the value from the machine by whatever means possible, rather than running all out for the jackpots.
I remember kicking these about a lot in the JPeMu era days (before autoplay in MFME was a thing), and their machines would generally play a bit 'weird' until they'd had about £1000 or more through them.
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10 hours ago, stevedude2 said:
AWP might have been Showtime Spectacular - had Roy Walker and Catchphrase samples in it and a few other things...
Ahhhh yes good shout, that got redone for MFME didn't it? It was definitely a thing on BFMulator.
Away from my main PC at the moment so can't check.
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The only match I have in my entire FME collection (i.e. from 2001 to the present day) is this old layout for Club Gameshow.
Modified date on the layout suggests it was released in 2006.
Have to be honest I can't remember who 'dB' was?
It's attached below, to get it over to the 'new world' of MFME you'll have load it into MFM£ V5.1, then close the emulator, and that'll update it to a V20.1 compatible version.
Optionally you could run it with the old V3.2 from back in the day.
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On 29/10/2022 at 07:55, johnparker007 said:
BTW if you still happen to have any Nokia SDKs and such laying around somewhere then it would be cool if they ended up on archive.org if not already there, don't want that stuff to be lost to time
I have a couple of old backups of the Gyrox source and perhaps biz emails on CDRW in the attic... It was a very long time ago, but I suspect I don't have any SDK downloads on there - hopefully they haven't been lost to time...
Compared to the other phone manufacturers in the early years, Nokia were a thing of beauty; they used to have a very active dev forum, whereas with say Sharp, they (at the time) used to have a top J2ME handset (in Europe) the GX10, but no documentation... and if you did a System.gc() at the wrong time/place, it would simply reset the entire handset
there were a bunch of gotchas like that at the time you could only really learn through testing, or if you were very lucky, an internet forum post.
It was a real wild west, depending on who had written the KVM, there was a pretty small crew of KVM writers back in the day, it was crazy. I remember SonyEriccson started off super terrible, it was infamously bad to try support..... then something happened (almost certainly a new freelance KVM coder, as they along with other manufacturers were slowly realizing that J2ME performance was a selling point, like megapixels, and just had a capex cost), and they went from the worst to rivalling/beating Nokia devices for J2ME performance. Motorola had a similar journey; they had crazily bad 'runtime stack management', so the memory fragmentation from the J2ME 'heap' memory would build up fast, so you could build a graphically rich game (but multiload) that'd run ok for one gameplay loop, but then it would die being unable to allocate memory (flat memory model worked, but didn't suit multiloads)... this was on the famous V3 aka RAZR, very sexy slim flip-phone, it was a very nice looking device compared to the clunkers of the day, I think the 'solution' in the end for those Motos was just to have very limited GFX RAM usage via hardly any gfx, so you'd delay the heap recycle limit crash for as long as possible, it was all so insanely mercurial back then lol, almost like the ZX Spectrum days (I was too young to be involved at the time, but have a 'fair' understanding now, though I realised it's a very limited number of people playing Speccy stuff these days, so I switched back to FME for hobby dev).
Typing this, I remember there were certain handsets recognised as 'reference' devices in the fledgling industry(obvs it/s worth many billions now, I didn't manage to cash in on the growth unfortunately lol), e.g: Nokia 3510i, Nokia 7210, Sharp GX10, SonyEricsson K800i, (these were very good for the time), Sharp GX20+, Motorola V3, Samsung D600... quite a few more, on a per manufacturer basis - so you'd make your game work on the ref devices, then pass over builds per handset family, and the content aggregators (that us indie devs released through, to get onto the WAP portals), would take those builds and have a compatibility list, of 'like' devices similarly/same screen resolution/KVM/softkey code. I should write this up somewhere, as I've seen hardly any mention of this in the modern day of the net, so it could end up lost - where I work now (Distinctive Games) after some N64 dalliances, went on to do some solid games initially in the monochrome J2ME era (before my time in the industry)... I spent (I think I can now say,. NDAs must've expired) a lot of time devving iterations of FIFA J"ME working with EA (yes that EA, the evil microtransaction guys now lol) - a great learning curve though; there were very specific optimisation strategies developed that only work for certain KVMs (which was another wild west, the majority of gaming handsets planet-wide ran J2ME KVMs written in the relevant assembler (it wasn't all nice AMR 7 back in those days!) by a very small (4-5) handful of people.
Man, I'm hungover, but that is a lot of text lol - I've got more tales like this, it was a smallish 'scene' globally... I failed to get rich out of it unfortunately, but definitely happy to have been involved (even earning probably at best min wages via my own game company!), having been too unknowledgeable to be involved with the earlier eras. But JP, I hear you cry, surely you made bank doing the original R-Type port for Irem via Elite (yes that Elite); nope, got pretty much robbed by Steve Wilcox, the original MD of Elite, a lot of people did around then and even back in the Speccy days; Elite's model was to pay devs far less than their dues after the source/binary was delivered, then threaten to sue on some aspect of abstract code delivery law upon request of payment. Sad but true...
This is a really long post ...but one more thought is that I have kept a box of old handsets from when I ran Gyrox (prob 30-40 devices).... the chips are probably very complex to extract (compared to say the TMS1000 doorbell) but I will continue to hold onto that box, and be happy to give them up for ripping once hobbyist chip extraction is at that level.
I really need to keep more up to date with this thread, an awesome read there JP, thanks for taking the time to post it
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On 23/12/2021 at 18:39, PACMANIA said:
Having been on site for a while been quite poorly. What happened to desgy desworth his youtube site down. Is he ok
Hi @PACMANIA new channel is here, it's mainly reuploads of old videos but there is a small amount of new content and re-edits (sorted into playlists).
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I've put 234 hours into the main game + DLCs - so yes, would definitely recommend
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17 minutes ago, serene02 said:
This was an issue with BWB, in fact Chris fixed a machine that was causing the machine to play incorrectly via the chr, I believe it was a BWB Bg Match, or Cup Final, incidentally I think it was specifically BWB machines that he had the issues with.
I think it was Chopley who raised the issue with Chris, who then did fix it. But it will still exhibit the same issue in older releases of mfme I imagine.
Might be worth looking for the thread that Choppers created. Think it was BWB Cup Final though. The gameplay was definitely affected
J
It was Cup Final, it was one of my FME Most Wanted Machines, but it just wasn't playing right. I made super sure of it before posting because Chris didn't suffer fools gladly, but I was convinced enough to say to him the machine wasn't working properly, and he tweaked something in MFME to make it work properly. (CHR related.)
I'll have a search and see if I can find the thread.
Chris was always so good at fixing anything and everything he could, R.I.P. fella, one of a kind.
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Hi @Levartemit - ESB has gone on the 'remake' list, I reviewed the original video a couple of weeks ago and wasn't happy with it at all, so my intention is to remake that as a new video. (Pie Factory + clones has gone in the same pile.)
What I can do is append the original video to the end of the new one, so it's there for people to watch if they want to.
My intention was to get ESB remade over this weekend, but I'm just recovering from Covid and my voice isn't up to it yet, plus I'm still feeling like shit on and off too
(And Mrs Chopaholic and Chopaholic Jnr have it now too, so we really are The Plague House.)
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I just installed the latest Arcade Simulator update on the oldest PC I have John, this is the one with the GTX960 in it, and that runs the new version absolutely fine with all the pretties turned on at 1080p, solid 60FPS.
That's a PC with 8GB RAM, quad core CPU and a 2GB GPU, so I honestly think you're in a very good spot in terms of system requirements, even the lowest end modern GPU will be kicking about as hard as a GTX960 I'd imagine. (If not substantially harder.)
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New video on the channel, covering the latest fantastic update to Arcade Simulator by @johnparker007
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I think rips and emptiers played a part in the demise of the AWP, in conjunction with the stakes and jackpots getting far too large.
In the Alien video I reuploaded the other week you can see one of its clones ( @spa's real machine in fact!) wanting over £70 just to get on the board. That's a terrible state for a machine to be in, and is only made possible by (a) The machine being so doable and (b) The jackpot being so large.
Yes machines were doable right back in the £4.80 and £6 days, but there was kind of a limit as to how bad they could get. As the jackpots got larger the 'debt' the machine could be left having to recoup also became larger, how many casual players are going to bother with machines once they've had £20 disappear in cold blood a couple of times and not even get a feature?
I remember when Pie Factory first turned up over here, there were a few of them around and to start with I didn't have the method, but I did know enough by then to know when a machine was being fucked, and quickly cottoned on it was blocking at £2 (someone else was doing them), so even though I didn't know how to do them myself, I knew they'd been done and to leave them alone. In due course I got the method and made some good money on them, they could be left bad enough on the £15 jackpot, on the £25 jackpot they could be left wanting over £50 to go through the £2 block - a terrible experience for a casual player.
The industry killed itself IMO, with a combination of incompetence/corruption when it came to the machines themselves, leaving them vulnerable to all kinds of fuckery that made them a miserable experience for anyone who didn't have 'the knowledge', and the constant pursuit of bigger and bigger and jackpots, at the expense of actual amusement and gameplay.
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Hmmm the forum has embedded the .wav file but it doesn't seem to play, here it is in a zip file.
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I am forlornly hoping that one day the sound ROMs for ACE's Money Mountain will turn up, we've got a Chloe classic for it but I can't play it without the sound. They had one in an arcade here for years and it was my go-to machine for lovely music when I was running out of money and wanted to at least hear something nice before becoming skint again.
It's very similar to Jurassic Trail, which we have a splendid Pook DX for along with sound ROMs (I play this layout a LOT), but I always preferred Money Mountain out of the two, and that was the one we had in an arcade here.
I think a lot of the samples were ripped from Amiga demos or something like that, as the music is VERY Amiga sounding.
This is the hi/lo win gamble sample from Jurassic Trail.
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8 hours ago, woodsy said:
Players guide. Pm if needed
I had a couple of videos about these on the old channel @woodsy, they'll be getting reuploaded at some point
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If it's from Season 1 then that was broadcast in 1975, which is before microprocessor control.
Season 2 was 1979 so there's a chance it could be microprocessor controlled, but it's unlikely.
Actually, having had a look at the picture again that's from the first episode of Season 1 (A Touch Of Class) which is when Lord Melbury came to stay at the hotel, so it'll definitely be electromechanical.
Therefore for it be emulated you'd need the schematics as slotsmagic notes above, so pretty much a 0% chance I'm afraid. (Electromechanical machines don't have ROMs.)
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Astra machines randomness
in Emulator Chat
Posted
There's always a video, and a story
Very much what's being described by BarXQueen, a near 'scripted' series of events from the same RAM reset position, that happened to me, (profitably!), on a real machine
(Spoiler alert, the battery for the battery backed RAM had gone flat, so if you were the first person to play it every day, you got it from a RAM reset, when it had a few quid profit in it on a repeatable cycle.)