Chopaholic

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.

It's time for more drunken Crystal Maze SWP - this time playing the original 'first release' ROMs kindly provided by Reg a little earlier in the thread.

As I understand it though, a good player would take all the free wins from above the block, and then play the machine down by taking loads of £4 repeater wins and suchlike, leaving it nearly empty and on its arse, and miles away from doing anything. I definitely remember getting absolutely fucked on £8 jackpot Maygays time and time again, whereas the £6 'Eastenders' generation seemed a lot fairer.

Well I'd say they were 'good' for players who knew how to nobble them, but for everyone else all that was left was machines that were constantly in the world's worst suck mode! The 'block everything above a certain point' system was bad enough, (especially if you didn't understand the system and were expecting hi/lo gambles and suchlike to remain relatively fair), but add in the fact that the blocks could be beaten and the results were awful for normal players.

I can't say for sure that they didn't start on a £6 jackpot, although I've got in my head they were £8 native machines, but I could be wrong. Either way they very much had the new 'feel' of shit Maygays (see also, It's A Knockout) and I really didn't enjoy playing them at all.

Yes I've deliberately left those out vectra (not that they don't deserve some coverage of their own in the future), but as you say they all started on £4.80 and didn't have a sample package either as they used earlier synth sounds. (Well technically 'Green' Monopoly was an inbetweener as it used synth and samples, and started off on £4.80, but I'm counting it in). I'm very narrowly targeting the '£6 Golden Era' of Maygay AWPs

So here's the list of Maygay £6 AWPs that haven't been covered on the channel and we have a layout for, this is from a trawl through my FME collection. Please note I'm specifically avoiding stuff from the £8 era onward (It's A Knockout and later), because I think their machines went to shit with the horrible blocks and the fact they were all well and truly doable and I have endless memories of taking dreadful beatings on them. Think I've got them all, I imagine this'll be a two-part video with maybe 5-10 minutes per machine, or more of course, if I get my twittering head on..... One horrible gap in here of course is the £6 James Bond machine they did, AFAIK there's never been a layout for that I do recall the machine was available at one time and I have memories of liaising with Retrofruit to try and secure the ROMs/resources but it never quite happened. Cluedo Gladiators Inferno Noel's House Party Pink Panther Return of the Pink Panther That's Life The Simpsons (£3 BWB joint venture, not the Great Escape version) Albert Square Monopoly Wild Zone

Not at all Tommy, it's not off-topic, it's 100% on-topic - one of the best things historically about the fruit machine emulation scene has been its ability to give us somewhere to talk about things we never had space to do previously, not least because so many of us had thought 'It's just me' and it turned out that it wasn't at all, there were loads of us who'd gone through the same wringer. When I made the Eastenders video with the 'Jackanory' section part of me was thinking back to the early Fruit Forums days, when many of us were able to talk for the first time about addiction, I still remember the thread there started by 'nestoman' called' The real price of fruit machines', which opened the floodgates for many of us to say, 'Yeah, me too, here's my tale'. It was really quite the eye-opener. So please post all you want Tommy, I know how horrible addiction is, and as wearecity says above, I hope you can kick this bastard to the curb. And many thanks for all the layouts you've released for MFME, they're always a joy to play

I'd go along with this to a point wearecity, yes we've all (hopefully!) moved on but some of the shit I got up to 'under the influence' of gambling addiction still makes my skin crawl TBH. What I can do now is separate the machines from the addict, so I can review machines like Eastenders and Coronation Street, and appreciate them as really well designed AWPs, because addiction was my fault, not Maygay's. (Where I do still get angry with the manufacturers though, is all the 'doable' machines they produced which unless you were in the minority of clued up 'pros', would absolutely take you to the cleaners. Thinking back, a lot of my worst reactions to fruit machines were when I got absolutely smacked in the face by a fruit machine that, with the benefit of hindsight, had clearly been 'done'.) TBH I'm just grateful I survived, many times in my twenties I honestly didn't think I'd live to see my 30th birthday, and I didn't particularly want to either. (Without the family and friends I was so lucky to have, those who stuck with me through the absolute worst of it, and of course Mrs Degsy, I'd have been pushing up daisies a long time ago.) I'll get to this stuff in the Gambling Low Ebbs videos. SPOILER ALERT - They will not be feelgood stories.

The memory is still incredibly vivid even today. I was so addicted that it was a genuine internal struggle to not lose every penny I had, and force myself to walk out of the arcade with at least enough money to get us both to the cinema on our planned date. It's scary to remember how utterly consuming my addiction was. I have nothing but sympathy for folks who've been snared by the FOBTS and suchlike, and their ability to take money far outstrips anything the old AWPs were capable of. The response to the Eastenders video has been really positive (loads of nice comments on the video, including about the Jackanory section), so I've decided to go ahead with a few videos I've been thinking about making for a while now. They'll probably be called Gambling Low Ebbs - Part 1, Gambling Low Ebbs - Part 2 and so on, and they'll be exactly what it says on the tin. Folks from back in the day at Fruit Forums will have probably read a couple of them before. Smashing my own car up with a rock, anyone?.......

And here's Coronation Street

Cheers Ploggy The videos are my way of trying to create something for the scene since I can't code, I have zero artistic skills and my fumbling around with the emulator's tools could be eclipsed by a moderately trained guinea pig. As long as a few folks are happy to watch them, I'm happy to make them. (Like Reg said in his Zero Poster thread, it's not about the numbers, so I'm not fussed about getting MEGA VIEWS or MEGA SUBSCRIBER NUMBERS, just the knowledge that folks are enjoying them, particularly within FME.) There seems to be a lot of love for this generation of Maygays so thinking about it some sort of 'compendium' video where I spend a few minutes on each seems like it would work. Coronation Street will get a full video as that's already done, but I'm not sure each individual machine could carry a 30-40 minute video, so maybe a two-parter with 5-10 minutes on each machine. I'll go through my FME folders and pull out a list of likely candidates.

Cheers guys These machines really are timeless, genuinely fun and entertaining to play even 25 years after their original run in the arcades and pubs. Glad the little Jackanory section appears to have been well received (the comments on the video have been positive too), wasn't entirely sure whether or not to add that in. The follow-on Coronation Street video is already recorded so should be edited together and uploaded before the end of the weekend. wearecity mentioned Noel's House Party in his YouTube comment which is another fantastic machine from this era, I might do something on that as well. (Somehow I managed to forget about it when recording these two, for shame! )