Chopaholic

The randoms will do it IF they can get the stakes/prizes/percentages correct. The £500 jackpot was a big draw here, and percentages were on a very respectable 94% (they have crept down a bit over the years to 92% and 90% in some places, but a lot remain on 94%). Once AWPs went up to £1 play with a £70 jackpot, and the randoms were on £2 play with a £500 jackpot, and people understood that the AWPs were bent as fuck and the randoms were fair, that was basically it for the AWP. I just wish we could have quiz machines and pinballs and stuff back.

The Death of the Fruit Machine ------------ I talk about the near-extinction of the traditional fruit machine on the Isle of Man. ------------

DOND - The Deal Wheel Just having a bit of fun with this one really.

Thanks Retro really interesting post, great to hear your thoughts and memories of the machines It was a shame I didn't get the Mystery Guest on Noel's House Party as it does tend to be where it goes bonkers, although I did directly reference this in its video. TBH all the videos are a trade-off between the amount of time I have to spend on them and what I want to get in them (which is mainly why Part Three of FME History hasn't been done yet, I just can't commit that much time to a single video at the moment), so compromises are necessarily made in terms of content. I do make a point in all the M1adness videos of imploring people to dig these layouts out and play them again, because not only do the layouts still really hold up fantastically well today, but the gameplay on the machines themselves is absolutely timeless.

Working my way through the M1ab list

I don't always post links to my online slots videos here, but this fucker has had enough time and money off me to warrant it! If you want to employ my amazing Photoshop skills by the way, just ask.

Split out to their own thread

Jesus I've already got that in my FME collection. Great researching skills there Degsy.....

You'll have to be of a 'certain age' to remember these things. PLEASE NOTE - If anyone has any other flyers/photos of these abominations, I'd be keen to do a follow-on video featuring them (I talk about this in the video).

No problem Reg no offence taken I appreciate this video goes somewhat darker than anything I've done before but it was a story I thought was worth telling, and to show that even the humble £6 AWP was capable of causing devastation if - (as I was) - someone was so consumed by addiction that they almost literally wanted to do nothing else but play them. IIRC I typed this one up on Fruit Forums back in the day, so this is basically the narrated version of that story. In my head are parts #2, #3 and #4 but I'm not in any particular hurry to get round to them for obvious reasons! The next thing I want to get done is finishing off the M1a/b series following on from Corrie/Eastenders/Noel, which hopefully I'll have some time for next week. TBH I'm just grateful I got through 92/93/94 alive, were it not for my family and some very good friends (perhaps most notably of course the friend in the video, who is coming over again this year in August or September!), and then Mrs Chopaholic entering my life in May 94, I'm pretty sure I'd have been pushing up daisies a long time ago. Anyway, I thought the 'My Tune' idea was quite amusing, and like I say, no offence taken

Thanks Wizard I appreciate the comment. I certainly won't be making a regular feature of these videos but there are a couple of others I'd like to get round to at some point. The drink and drugs didn't help, but TBH they were trivial sideshows compared to gambling, which was what really had me by the balls.

GAMBLING LOW EBBS #1: A sober recollection of a somewhat unedifying sequence of events from the early 90s. Please be advised this is not a happy tale and gets very sweary at one point. In all honesty I'm not entirely happy with how it's come together, even in the edit, but I'm not minded to record the whole thing again either. (Note that there is some extra info appended to the end of the video that I forgot to narrate as part of the main tale.) May be be part of a series if I'm ever in the mood to delve back into the memory banks again to tell the story of other similarly awful fuck-ups from the worst of my gambling addiction days.

Thanks guys I appreciate the support I've said this before but it's not about getting loads of subscribers or views (FME is, ultimately, a bit of a niche hobby), as long as a few folks are enjoying the content and finding it entertaining then it's worth the time it takes me to make the videos. TBH I wish I had more time to dedicate to making the videos, but for various reasons one per week is pretty much all I can manage at the moment. There should be sufficient topics to keep me going for a while, I've got a notepad file that I use as a 'scribble pad' for ideas of things I can make a video about, and there are plenty of entries in it I will say that I'm pretty much out of tricks/emptiers now (apart from re-hashes of ones I've already done, for example I don't see the point of doing any more plugging videos), so if anyone has one tucked away in their brain somewhere and doesn't mind relaying it over to me, I'll cheerfully do a video on it. (And a member here has been absolutely fantastic in passing over information about tricks/emptiers to me, including detailed descriptions and even little video tutorials, quite a few of the 'trick' videos on the channel wouldn't exist at all but for him )

An unexpected treat in the comments for The Crystal Maze video on the channel, only from the guy who originally programmed it

First trick/emptier video for a while, here we have the old BWB AWP 'Clownin Around' on a £5 jackpot.

Not sure if this is aimed at me or not but I haven't had chance to reply until now. Thanks for the further clarity (comments have been left by folks on the video as well explaining this), looking at the machine again it is now clearer how the reels map out to the arrow rows, but on the couple of occasions I played the real machine (admittedly rather drunk) I didn't cotton onto that, and it eluded both me and Reg in the emulator. I can now see however how the end of each reel translates to its corresponding arrow row. From the images available I can't work out if the arrow matrix lamps have inserts to show which reel they correspond to, i.e. 5-5-5-5-5 2-2-2-2-2 1-1-1-1-1 3-3-3-3-3 4-4-4-4-4 If those inserts are present then that would of course make it much clearer, (It looks like something is inserted into the lamps but I can't work out what). Anyway, glad it's cleared up now, and fundamentally we got to where we need to be, Reg produced a layout that worked properly but confused us both, and then from there we did at least satisfy ourselves that the matrix behaviour was consistent and not random, and that the layout was correct.

Latest video now live, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK by Red Gaming. Video is 50/50 between the machine itself, and chatting about the layout's evolution as Reg asked me to playtest and assist with it.

Yeah there were some bad times back then, 1991-1994 were my real hardcore addict days, from 1994 things slowly got better as me and Mrs Degsy were together from then, but there were still a bad few years to come. (My last proper blowout was the infamous 'destroying my own car with a rock' escapade.) Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of happy memories from that period too, but always against the awful backdrop of crushing addiction. I have got the Gambling Low Ebbs #1 video recorded and whilst it was really scrappy as recorded it's come together OK in the edit but I'm still not happy with it TBH, but not sure I fancy recording the fucking thing again, so it might just get the best tidy-up job I can do and go out in that state.

Latest video is now live and it's another awesome old Maygay - Noel's House Party. Enjoy the splendidly tidy beard of Mr Edmonds.

Cheers Reg, just a small change but worthwhile

I agree it's not the best way to do a jackpot at all but it seemed to be building up to the streak hence was playing really strange and rather foul too, it did start to come back to me just how brutal these were out in the wild if you caught them wrong. There was a Sky Sports version as well but same as you, I can't remember much in the way of details about it, somehow I've got it in my head it got to a £10 jackpot, could be wrong though. DXs for these would be nice, they were good looking machines, but at the end of the day the classics present the emulated experience and that's the main thing

An exciting face-off between The Big Match and Cup Final * * NOTE - Excitement may have been overstated.

You can use MFME V5.1 to load in older .DAT based layouts (compatibility for .DAT was dropped in V6 onwards). Where a layout exhibits specific problems even in V5.1 you do have the option to use an older version of MFME. (You can use V5.1 to load in a .DAT based layout, then save it out as a .FML based layout, which V6.1 will then load.) I still use MFME V3.2 for a lot of the original 'MFME era' layouts as a few of them present some gremlins in V5.1 This should work fine for that layout. dlver-mfme-32.zip

Not fruit machine emulation related but it is on the channel. (I don't generally link the non-FME videos on the channel in this thread.) However, this is perhaps one of the more 'persistent' efforts I made, trying to hit the modest 500x stake jackpot on the slot 'Starburst'. Over 300,000+ (!!) spins later - had I managed to hit the jackpot?

An IN-DEPTH INVESTIGATION (sort of) into ACE's short-lived experiment with a 'Fair Play' hi/lo reel.