Chopaholic

edwardb literally said they put stats play code in some of their machines, and also that they found Red machines that would go into stats play mode when they were dissecting them.

That's not what he said!

In his posts on Fruit-Emu about it the words edwardb used were 'it was very rare', not that it never happened. (i.e. Machines had been found on site that had gone into stats play mode.) I'd also question how much data they had on it too, since this was before the days of remote diagnostic data collection, so unless a machine had the data dumped from it onsite, they would have been in the 'unknown' column. There's every chance a machine was in a remote pub in Scotland that had gone into stats play mode that they never knew about. Either way it's just not on anyway, deliberately coding in behaviour that dynamically changes a compensated machine's play profile into 'garbled bag of shit' mode as part of manufacturers having a willy waving competition with each other, that absolutely could (and did) catch normal players in the crossfire, is just yet another nail in the coffin of compensated machines and their unacceptable behaviour.

Well, I mean apart from the deliberately coded-in compensator attract mode tell in Union Jackpot which was made by JPM and went on general release, and the guy would have done plenty more except for the fact he 'bottled it'.

Exactly what I said in the video, that was basically all taken from @edwardb's posts over the years here and at Fruit-Emu

Not quite sure what you mean by the bit I've highlighted in bold there Andrew, any chance you could explain a bit more please? If you've watched some of my videos by this point, hopefully you'll have gathered that I really do have a lot of fondness for AWPs, especially the classics from the £4.80/£6 era. However at the same time, like a lot of other folks here, I also want to understand what went on more, especially as the jackpots got bigger and the industry seemed to lose its way IMO. I mean, it's completely impossible to defend on any level the state Barcrest got themselves into in the £70 era, or BFM who chucked out so many DONDs that had stuff on them. I never had too much of a problem with Reds myself, they were generally safe on a force, although they did a few dodgy things like fake backing, or deliberately messing with folks like on Sub Zero, which actively fought against the 'standard' Red play technique, and required a very specific play style to get the value out of it. Cheers

Just giving this post a highlight as it's a very good summary IMO. Decent AWPs clearly were possible. One I've been thinking about recently as part of a series of videos I'd like to make (and am intending to), is Barcrest's Luxor in its original £6 token jackpot incarnation. This was decent enough even on pub/arcade percentages, but chuck it up to 84% and you've got yourself a really nice little game, that had, as far as I'm aware, nothing on it. There were lots of AWPs that managed to do it right. No one who played machines, either as an addict or a casual player or a pro player, or anything in-between, or some or all of them at different times - ever asked the industry to make fuckable machines, and the regulator to be asleep on the job. As I've said many times in my videos, I don't blame the players at all, the blame has to be laid at the feet of the industry and the regulator.

The main thing in the £70 era was Barcrest's consistent and fucking up of the £35>£70 upgrades, I think it'd be easier to find ones they didn't fuck up, rather than ones they did. Loads of DONDs had stuff on them too, although we never had huge numbers of those over here. Also the Electrocoin hi-techs, which were the last gasp of actual skill features on AWPs, although this made them as dire as you'd expect if someone had done them before you got to them. I could never do the reel skill, but I could do the steppers which was half the battle won. Also of course you had Betcoms for the duration. Reds were good on a force. Some people will speak fondly of the £70 era but the machines themselves were absolutely dire, it's only because there was so much on them that it's considered a 'good' era. Try playing an Alien 'normally' and see how long you last before falling asleep.

I only went down the virtual machine route to test a specific hypothesis - (that Betcoms cheat on the 'box reveal' on their DOND games, spoiler alert, they do!) - day to day I just run the emulator normally and accept that some machines take a little while to boot up. The worst I can think of off the top of my head is the EPOCH tech iteration of Poker Face which is literally several minutes. Mind you, we have to keep virtualisation in mind as one day it might become necessary, for now MFME works on Windows 11, but at some point a version of Windows might come along, or some sort of update for Windows 11, that breaks MFME, at which point virtualising an OS just for MFME will become necessary. Already we're seeing some people get a few weird errors with MFME on Windows 11.

I replied specifically to slotsmagic's post earlier in the thread (linked below). As someone who spent a decade losing, and then a decade 'winning', I've seen it from both sides of the equation, and as I've repeatedly noted both here at DIF and in my videos, winning comes with its own costs too. I am very much of the opinion that most 'players' are, like me, ex-addicts who managed to get a bit of a clue one way or another, and were so far down the rabbit hole of addiction by that point, that the exultation of winning overruled all other priorities.

I've uploaded them before to various threads here at DIF over the years but I see @Mort has done the honours already One of these nice little circumstances where my digital hoarder instincts paid off many years later All kinds of stuff in there!

It had an entry on the CMA list back in the day.

It wasn't a big thing, the machine would only offer it when it could afford it, TBH I think it was in there as an intentional sort of cheat, almost like an evolved version of a let 'em spin. As @Levartemit suggests above, there was something sort of semi-official about it, it was mentioned on the JPM website in a cheats section or something like that. I played about with it a lot in JPeMu (or might have been MFME when IMPACT was first added as a tech) back in the early days of FME and it's a little bit of extra value extraction at best.

Bloody hell not them again!

I concede defeat.

That totally isn't a real thing, BTW, and isn't something that LLMs (which is what underpins all so-called 'artificial intelligence') are capable of doing. The AI bubble will start popping within the next 6-12 months, it's a nonsensical hype machine about a pretty cool tech that has some uses but is absolutely not going to take over the world. At all. LLMs are a technological evolutionary dead-end and will not develop into AGI. It's like having a car and saying that if you just strap enough rockets to it, you'll be able to fly to the next solar system.

I was on that one months ago @Mort

That's a wholly unsatisfactory situation as well though, and in that case I guess the people to blame are the leadership at the companies who are pushing a limited number of staff too hard, to get fresh products out of the door. Whichever 'era' you're talking about, be it the earlier days of AWPs when children could play the bloody things, to the £25 era and later when they were 18s and over gambling devices (which also still maintained the £5 kiddy market!), it's just not good enough that time and space wasn't afforded to make sure the machines worked properly! You've got a handful of overworked folks doing their best in the companies making these things, versus an army of skilled players who are already well versed in knowing exactly what weak spots to start looking for and where they're likely to find them. That said though, I refuse to believe that Barcrest's Supercharged wasn't bent, despite some of the more..... 'creative' explanations we've seen suggested for how it could happen innocently. (Or the way they put tells like the COLLECT button flash behaviour changing, always on the exact ROM revision where the method was chipped out. The stories I've heard are that by that point Barcrest were a pretty dodgy shop.) (And of course Union Jackpot's attract mode compensator tell, which absolutely was bent. And you yourself have said that BFM used 'illegal code' in their DONDs, I'd be super interested to hear any details on that.)

Did you get up and running OK?

Easiest way to get going, download the attachments on this post. Unzip 'MFME_DOWNLOAD' and you'll have a folder that looks like this. Double click on MFME to load the emulator. Windows might complain about untrusted publishers and whatnot, tell it to piss off. EDIT - there are two MFME folders, use the one called MFMEV20_1 Also unzip 'BIG DRIFT', this is Fast Trak where it owes the player loads of money so it'll give you a good game. Go to File > Load in MFME and point it at the .GAM file in the 'BIG DRIFT' folder, and Fast Trak will load in. Off you go! MFME_DOWNLOAD.zip BIG DRIFT.zip

All I would say is don't force it, there are some videos on hypalinx's channel of him absolutely doing his plums in it on the force. It seems to be one of those that's just a £25 jackpot machine most of the time. Batman Power Up is the one you need to be really careful of, as that was a clone of Powerplay, and Powerplay was one of the most famously fuckable machines of the £100 era. BFM keeping it all screwed up like absolute champs right into the death throes of the compensated fruit machine era.

Gives a whole new meaning to the 'Log Flume' feature.

I think it's fair to say that the fun has stopped for him.

You can only deplete the current pot so much whilst playing it down from taking the wins through the block, so to get it back to £50 happy won't be too ruinous, however the machine won't pay anything that'd be above the block for an awfully long time. Once I'd finished doing the emptier for the video, I got hundreds and hundreds back into it without it naturally offering anything through the block, so anyone trying to force anything out of it would have been massacred. Of course it's possible they rejigged things around on the compensators with the rechip but then it was still vulnerable to the method you described above. Barcrest taking many attempts to fix things (and in some cases never managing to do so) wasn't exactly a rare occurrence. From Lotta Luck through to Alien methods would survive multiple fumbling efforts to chip them out. Of course in the end they just gave up completely, and put in the famous CRITICAL ERROR - CONTACT BARCREST message whereby the machine basically committed suicide if it got too far over percentage.

On some chips it didn't see Step To Nearest Win properly (no, really....) and it was possible to set it up for wins through the block. (Although it wasn't always easy to do.) Once you'd taken as many of those wins as you wanted to, you could then wind down the current pot and leave that in a really foul mood, as well as the 'future' big win/jackpot compensator that was of course completely smashed. If you came across one that'd been done, you were stumbling into a real world of pain. (I was intending to do a follow-on video for this but never got around to it, but basically it plays as awful a game as you'd expect.) Direct timestamped link to the machine blundering into a STNW jackpot set up: