Chopaholic

If you're subscribed to my channel and have notifications turned on you'll have had a bit of a blizzard of notifications about new videos over the last few days, (well, four notifications over four days, specifically), but they're all online slots videos. (I was trying to prove a point for the folks over at Casinomeister, it went rather better than I was expecting.....) However, I have not forgotten about my true love which is fruit machines and fruit machine emulation - so here's this week's new video Thanks to my 'mysterious benefactor' for sorting out the layout config so this would work in the emulator. (He doesn't want any limelight in particular, but a lot of my 'emptier' style videos wouldn't have happened but for his input, advice, explanations, and patience!) Also a bit a of FME history in this video

Splendid Electrocoin hi-techs for this week's video:

My second foray into the world of videogame content. (Choosing between FME and videogames would be a very close call.)

Holy shit is that you mort? Like, the original mort, from back in the day?

I think it's down to whether or not the channel is affiliated. The beef seems to be with folks who are effectively using YouTube as an advertising platform and making money off players who go on to lose, having seen the 'promotion' of gambling via the channel.Please note I'm not saying I support what's going on, but that's my read of it.

Cheers guys really appreciate the comments I realise these sorts of videos are a really niche interest (which is reflected in the number of views they get) so it's good to know that a few folks enjoy watching them at least!

More AWPs this week, specifically I have a good yap about the initial wave of £10 jackpot Empire machines.

Thanks for a long and detailed post there char very interesting read And the offer for the USB key with all the trance.fm stuff is always open to yourself or anyone here at DIF. I pretty much just have my entire trance collection on constant rotation in the car, (so that's not just the trance.fm stuff, but everything else as well), it takes over two years in normal usage for it to cycle around (1-2 hours per day). Just on the drive home this evening a hardcore trance section I'd forgotten about kicked in and I was grinning like a loon on the drive home. (The old MDMA-tuned synapses still kick in to an extent...... :D) Here's a reupload from my old channel (long deleted) back in 2012 when I liked to have trance overlaid on everything

After last week's excursion into the murky world of online slots here are a couple of classic old lo-techs for this week's video.

Awesome stuff char, I've always wondered what that track is called! (It didn't flag anything up on a YouTube content match, which is usually very good at recognising even very obscure tunes.) (I used the track at the end of the Gambling Low Ebbs video, but you'll also hear snippets of it in other videos.) I have several hundred hours of trance that I recorded off a now-defunct site called TRANCE.FM - it streamed trance 24 hours per day and had three different trance channels to choose from. I figured it might not last forever, so I set an old Windows XP up, and simply left it recording 24 hours per day for a few days at a time (using a program called All Sound Recorder XP), and repeated this several months apart. I then used a File Chopping utility to split the MASSIVE resulting MP3 files into 1 hour chunks, and renamed them all numerically. Of course, there are no tags or names or anything, so the whole thing is completely anonymous from an artist/track name perspective, which means I have no idea what anything is called! As such, it's great to finally solve one of the mysteries! TRANCE.FM closed down about three years ago, and doesn't exist anymore. However, contained within the hundreds of MP3 files I have is some of the nicest trance I've ever heard, and the vast majority is stuff I'd never heard before. (There's also a fair bit of sub-standard stuff in there as well, of course.) If anyone wants a copy it'll all fit on a 64GB USB key. Cheers char - very interesting post!

Back to the AWPs for this week's video

Something a bit different this week.....

Surprise Surprize and Party TIme by BFM. Sorry I didn't get chance to upload the RAM+GAM file before I set off, I'll do that this evening

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.