Chopaholic

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! )

Some M1ab nostalgia in the form of Eastenders. Timecodes below for those who don't wish to listen to the Jackanory section. 00:00 - 05:55 = Intro 05:55 - 19:34 = Jackanory with Degsy Degworth 19:34 - 42:58 = Machine commentary and gameplay

777 Heaven - The DX and the machine itself.

That's an interesting variant, I honestly don't remember seeing that one out in the wild, I'll have get the ROMs loaded in to take a look. Do you pay 30p per game or something? NOTE TO SELF - This is the point at which I should just load the ROMs into the layout and find out for myself

It's hard to say really, I think the only way to genuinely test how the emulated experience compares to the real hardware would be to get a trackball the same as used in the original machines and use that in MFME. I bought a trackball just for The Mating Game but it simply doesn't 'feel' the same as the original in use. I've tried mucking about with the 'Trackball Resolution' setting in MFME, along with the various Windows settings, and combinations of the two, but nothing seems to come out right. I did think I had it a couple of times in the games where more sensitive control is required, but then in a game where more movement is required it simply wasn't possible to achieve the necessary velocity - and vice versa. The original hardware's trackball was quite large and rather loose and 'fluid' so it managed to do sensitve/fast all in one package as it were. The way I look at it is the games are playable again - and that's the main thing

Just got around to trying this now, the good news is that it seems to work perfectly in the existing Pook DX layout and all the games are playable are far as I can tell. It is however the dirty 51 gold rechip version! I just got to the dome and immediately thought, 'That looks like 51 to me.....' True enough I managed to collect all but one of the gold tokens and the gold count went to 50! It doesn't really change anything in terms of getting a video made for it, and TBH there was no way I was going to be able to demonstrate it anything like seen in the previous video on the real hardware as the controls just aren't quite right in the emulator. (The correct sensitivity for one game is the wrong sensitivity for another game, and so on.) Plus I'm old and shit now, and not the spunky spunkmaster I used to be at the game So what I'll do is get it nice and fat like I did in the previous video, and then just bumble my way through it as best I can, to all but guarantee myself the fiver in the dome I'll give the Ocean Zone ROMs a try next, many thanks for posting these Reg

Here's something pretty cool If you watched the Crystal Maze video you'll have seen that the first few minutes were a Bandicam recording of footage of someone playing the real machine like a total pro. Well the chap has only gone and commented on the video! He says it's definitely 60 gold in the dome and not 59, and also that it was indeed rechipped to 51 gold later on (although he's managed to do it with 51 gold once). He also confirms that the third version was indeed not 'doable' as it could make it impossible when it wanted to. Finally, he mentions that he repairs and restores arcade machines (hence he's confident his Ocean Zone Crystal Maze will work if he brings it out of storage), so I've been a bit cheeky and asked him if he knows what he's got in storage and also given a link to the 'missing ROMs' thread here - hopefully he'll pop in and say 'Hello'

Yes I've no doubt there's a better method than bashing frantically and swearing a lot I never did get entirely comfortable with this version of Crystal Maze in terms of making consistent money out of it (but it was still profitable), it's very good fun though, the fact it still holds up in the emulator today as a genuinely entertaining game really says a lot about how imaginative game design in the SWP space used to be. (And AWPs too, where is the Screenplay of today?.....)

Cheers Reg I'll try and take a look at that tonight as well, didn't get chance for either last night as spent a chunk of it editing together the next video (online slots I'm afraid), and then just parked my arse on the couch to play Burnout Paradise Remastered on my One X Many thanks for posting the ROMs though, hopefully they'll both be playable in the existing layout

Oooh splendid Reg I'll take a look at that ASAP

Have some Crystal Maze SWP. Expect incompetence.

I made a point of sticking with W7 on my old PC (despite the free W10 upgrade offer), but when I got a new PC last September I didn't really have a lot of choice but to go W10, as I'm intending the PC to last way past W7's end of life in 2020. (Once MS drop critical security updates and patches for W7, I don't think it'll be viable to use as an OS any longer, unfortunately.) In fairness W10 has worked well enough and I'm largely ambivalent about it, although I'd be hard pushed to name a single thing about it that I like more than W7. Thanks for looking into it anyway It's no real hardship to move the MFME window to where I want it and then drag to maximise.

Yes but it automatically centres the MFME window when you maximise it like that, and then as soon as you move the window it snaps back to its smaller size. I generally have MFME offset from centre when I'm playing as I have other stuff open on my PC (unless I'm in Full Screen Max in which case it's a non-issue anyway). Also, I like to play with two layouts running at once as it feels more 'arcadey', and if you try to maximise two layouts using the maximise options you list there, obviously they just end up on top of each other

Ha! I dread to think how unreliable a machine with five of the fan flip reels in it must have been My abiding memory of the single flip reel used in the AWPs is that they were always, always, broken. They were a nice idea and they had a lovely mechanical look and feel to them, but bugger me they just didn't work properly.