Chopaholic

Time for some hardcore 2p play machines, I do have a very big soft spot for these Big thanks to @Pook for all four layouts featured in this video!

I'm a moderate fan of Dr Who but not massively so, Tom Baker was 'my doctor' as he was the one on the telly when I was young. The Ecclestone revival was very good but I lost interest subsequently. @Reg are you aware of this series on YouTube? It really is excellent, there's an episode for every single doctor. Channel is here - Clever Dick Films - YouTube And so on.

Quite a rare £15 jackpot Barcrest for this video - Cash Run. Really good game! Thanks to @Tommy c for the layout and @Pook for Blue Streak whose role in this video was to sit there looking glamorous. (I will feature Blue Streak properly in a future video.)

Latest videos on the channel.

I have already linked this video in the relevant threads, but I'll put it here as well to keep this thread up to date

A (near) clone of Roller Coaster that was far less of a common sight.

I've replied to you on YouTube but I'll say again here, I'm definitely going to do more videos on these £4 era machines, Loads-A-Money in particular I really remember as being one of those early examples of how we all learned how rechips can totally change the nature of a machine. Have you got a link to the thread over at The Mecca @wearecity - I'd like to do a bit more of a deep dive into the earlier era of AWPs, when the stakes and jackpots were small. Barcrest churned out a lot of crap in the £4 era though, that I played in arcades in the early 90s, constant forced two of a kind wins, and those horrible 'nudge bank' things that could cost a fortune to finally get the nudge bank to pay something decent.

As per @wearecity's comments a week or so ago about £4 jackpot machines Thanks to @vectra666 @Pook and @Richy1976 for the layouts featured in this video!

Glad to have been able to introduce you to fruit machine emulation @CasinoFruits - it's always nice to see someone else discovering it after all these years My older videos are more trick/emptier focused and have horrible production values (including shit audio as I persisted with a dreadful headset for far too long), but hopefully you still find them enjoyable!

JPM's Arcadia, running the P9 ROMs (non-emptiable) which are the earliest ones we have. Thanks to @vectra666 and @Tommy c for the layouts featured

I've covered this subject in a couple of videos. Personally I'm not in favour of any real gambling devices being in pubs, be they random or compensated, but random is certainly fairer. The original AWP concept, small stakes and small jackpots I could get more onboard with, if the industry had ever demonstrated it was capable of making machines that weren't completely fuckable by those 'in the know'. Randoms have done really over here, and they've essentially killed the traditional fruit machine off, people understand random, and whilst they might not understand the ins and outs of compensated machines, they certainly came to understand that there was never a penny to be won on them for the vast majority of people.

That's a great long-term goal for the project John and if it comes to fruition it will be amazing to see, but I have to be honest that the arcade as it is now is fantastic, especially the Vogue cabinets with their pink JPM logo on them, that I spent so long stood in front of back in the day! Getting some more cabs in the arcade using your current build model would be more than good enough, but it's fascinating to be aware of your longer term aspirations too

I know, I'd like to say 'it's not addiction' but what other explanation is there for it, other than some vestigial remains of the bad old addict? In fairness to myself I have just completely ignored Reflexes since the four stories I tell in the video, not that I come across fruit machines very often these days but if it's a Reflex it doesn't get a penny off me.

There's certainly an argument that can be made in that direction @woodsy - that Reflex have actually managed to make what could almost be described as a 'fair' compensated machine. As far as I'm aware, these were never vulnerable to any kind of manipulation or methods, and it seems to me can defer meeting RTP for an extended period of time to drop in GATW boards pretty much at random on anyone who walks up to them. But then of course you're back to the fact that these are essentially £25 jackpot machines, advertising a £100 jackpot, and they can be legally set as low as 70% RTP, whilst also being able to move around their RTP target however they see fit. The £100 jackpot is simply far too big for an AWP, as was £70, £35 and £25, £15 was arguably pushing it - so whichever way the game gets sliced up it ends up being an awful proposition for the 'end user' as it were.

I can't think of any that are worse than these bloody things.

Some of the newer machines are pretty slow to boot up, how long are you giving them to get going? Browse to this folder location on your PC, the bit circled in green will be different on your PC. Do a Properties on the Arcade Simulator folder, how big is it? Also bring up Task Manager on your PC, what information do you have on this screen?

Hi @johnparker007 one thing you might not be aware of is that quite a few of the machines in the arcade have the wrong sound setting in the emulator. Club Lockbuster is one such machine. The layouts are actually released like this so it's something you've simply carried over into the arcade. As downloaded (and therefore in the arcade) the sound only plays through the right speaker as the machine is incorrectly set to 'stereo', the correct setting is as below. Just go up to Club Lockbuster in the arcade and put a couple of quid in to play it, you'll immediately notice the sound is only coming out of the right speaker on your laptop/PC. Note this only affects Scorp4/Scorp5 machines. Also note that for extra fun, some Scorp4 machines do actually feature genuine stereo hardware, so stereo is the correct setting in the emulator for these machines.

Yes Wild West was one of them, it was on the £10 to £15 upgrade they screwed up and you could get two lots of £7.60 on one of the features, which of course adds up to £15.20, the machine rounded it up to £16, added it to the bank, then realised £16 was an impossible win at which point the win became free. I can't even remember which feature it was now, but it was one of the barcode features and you had to get it super - which wasn't the easiest thing in the world to do. Actually had one in a pub here and made some decent money on it, alas one day I went to play it whilst still a bit mashed from the previous night's 'entertainments' and was drinking to try and get my head back together a bit, lost count of where I was up to and IOU-ed it by accident, only by about £7 IIRC. They paid me the short from behind the bar but the next time I visited it had gone. Was it Sharp Shooter or Rich Pickings? Think it was one of those two.

Many thanks for the updates and your continued efforts with this project @johnparker007 - it is very much appreciated

I believe that was on earlier ROMs @woodsy which was chipped out, the ones I had over here all needed the Out Of This World trap, you couldn't get them on the corners.

Not strictly emulation, but certainly interesting!

How spectacularly rude and ungrateful, John has painstakingly documented the hundreds of hours he's sunk into this project over the last year, not least including how he's worked on making it as accessible as possible to as many people as possible on even modest hardware. In one of my videos I demonstrate it working flawlessly on a midrange graphics card from early 2015, the only limitation it seems to have is running well on integrated graphics, which famously have the 3D grunt of a potato, so you can't blame Arcade Simulator for that. If anything, I'm amazed at how well it runs on even old and modest 3D hardware. Arcade Simulator is a fully rendered realtime 3D environment featuring a huge number of assets, and includes many niceties such as realtime lighting effects, that comes with a computational price. I for one am incredibly grateful for all the work you've done on this @johnparker007 - and I know many of us here feel the same way, please don't let one bad apple spoil the barrel for you here at DIF.

That is interesting, thanks wearecity. I still have the old versions of the emulator and the Winner Takes All layouts that run in them, I might give it a go and see what happens!

I wasn't aware of the even money thing not working on earlier versions of the emulator @wearecity - have you got any more information about that please?