Chopaholic

A new series dawns, FME QUICK HITS, which ended up not being as quick as I intended. Thanks to @Tommy c for the layouts featured

This is the best of the three, if you can stretch your budget to this, you'll get a superb Arcade Simulator experience and also a laptop that can kick games around alright too, for more recent games you'll have to be sensible with the detail settings and general graphical finery, but it's a good spec overall. Purely for Arcade Simulator, any of them would be more than adequate.

@logopolis Both already done

This video is Unlisted, if features me getting the £70 trap on Star Wars and a £28.80 Nemesis on Roller Coaster (£10 jackppot). The cafe/arcade got rid of most of their machines as it wasn't worth paying the licence on them, it's still there but they only have a handful of machines, mostly £500 randoms - and the place only opens in the evenings. The Roller Coaster and Star Wars went in the culling unfortunately, although TBH once I'd done the Star Wars about three times it was permanently on its arse so I don't think anyone else was playing it https://youtu.be/wuAtxWNl35w

Yes we had a £15er here in an arcade, right up until the arcade shut down in, oooohhhhh, maybe 2004/2005, something like that. Could go absolutely crackers if you caught it right (sure I remember it doing a £90 once), but on the flipside they could stay dead for a looooooong time before starting to show 1/12, so it needed leaving for a while after having been done! Completely different game to the £6/£8 versions, and the £10 versions for that matter. On the £15 jackpot Roller Coaster was a pretty hardcore proposition.

Well here's someone to get a comment left by! (I figured I'd chance my arm with the numbering question.....)

I'm not sure who has the skillset to convert a schematic into a layout @Fishsta,and of course Wizard is no longer with us, but hopefully this will prove to be of use to someone! I wonder if there's a picture of the real machine in existence?

That actually gives me a decent lead-in to this video, where I talk about 'The Butterfly Effect isn't a real thing' when it comes to thinking back through these things.

The thing is @serene02 they fucked them up absolutely all the time, which is the core problem with compensated machines, unless they are perfectly coded (which they almost never are), they are vulnerable to manipulation. One of the starkest examples I can think of if Maygay's Just The Ticket with the invincible 'holdover' trick, where I got the machine into the state where it wanted OVER THREE HUNDRED POUNDS (on a £15 jackpot) to go through the £5 block, yes it was 'compensating' itself but it was also paying jackpot after jackpot that it shouldn't have been as the code was completely incapable of protecting itself from what was happening. Fine for the person who 'did it', not so good for the poor fucker who walks up to the thing next. Compensated machines are better off dead, they were never done properly, people got hurt, let them live on via emulation and a few decently run retro arcades such as Mr P's.

@Fishsta references that in his (excellent!) Fairplay video.

It always seemed to me that it 'sees' the blasts and the nudges if the block is on, although it's entirely plausible that I just wasn't good enough at manipulating it of course Did you observe the 'dual block' behaviour I talk about? i.e. On the £15 jackpot just get through £5 and it'll progress out, whereas on the £25 'upgrades' it blocks at £5 and then at £10.

Thanks for the layout @vectra666 and also @Tommy cfor his older Lock Buster layout

I'm not even sure it's as complicated as that, I think it might literally just be a single RNG pick and you get one of the 1.2m possible outcomes, some of which will include a bonus round. i.e. Once you press the 'START' button everything after that is entirely pre-determined from a single RNG pick.

Not quite the case on Jammin' Jars, it has a pool of (IIRC) 1.2 million results in the RNG table and each game round it basically just picks a result out of the pool and plays out the sequence, so how much a bonus round paid isn't random once it actually starts, the pick itself at the start of the game round is fair and random though.

Well, not if you kept running out of money.

I made another one of these.

That's a good point wearecity, and hopefully that much is clear from the Development Updates thread and also the videos I made about it Would I recommend buying a whole new machine just for AS given where it is now? No, probably not, and I basically said as much in one of the videos. However, if you're in the market for a new machine and AS is on your 'something you'd really like to have a go of' list, then it definitely makes sense to factor in the critical difference between a nice new laptop, and a nice new laptop that has the heft to run AS properly, which is a discrete GPU. (And will give you plenty of other benefits, as listed above.) That said, I can imagine some people looking at AS and thinking, 'That is so cool, and even though I know it's the early stages I'm going into it with my eyes open, and I want a new machine that can let me experience it', and that's fine too.

Also please note I can't personally endorse those exact machines as I haven't used any of them, so before committing funds check out user reviews on Ebuyer (if there are any), and have a Google to see if they've been reviewed elsewhere, look at picture/videos to see if you like the aesthetics, does it have the ports you need and stuff like that. There are load of alternatives in the same sort of price range at each spec level. The recommendations above are based more around the spec level and what sort of price you'd expect to pay at the moment, as Ebuyer's stock changes all the time, as does their pricing - and other online retailers are available! A key point here is spending £300-£350 on a used machine makes precious little sense when you can get a far better, brand new for one for £580, which I appreciate is a chunk more cash but you're getting a far more modern machine with a guarantee and a proper amount of horsepower to it. If anyone is seriously considering buying a specific model please do as suggested above (Google for reviews, search YouTube for reviews etc), but do feel free to give me a shout here if you still have a question.

OK then here are three options that I'd consider to be LOW / MEDIUM / HIGH for anyone buying a new laptop, with consideration given to it running AS nicely, but also being useful for other things, because it's a lot of cash to drop on a machine that will only do one thing well! At the LOW end there's something like this, which is actually the cheapest machine in the 'gaming laptop' category on Ebuyer. This is plenty good enough to run AS lovely and smoothly, will make a very useable daily driver for everything else, and also has enough grunt to run PC games at reasonable detail settings and framerates. Limitations are (1) Not much storage space if you're planning to start installing several games on it (2) 8GB of RAM can be limiting these days when gaming (plenty for AS though) and (3) The GPU doesn't have massive reserves of horsepower or RAM, so manage your expectations if you're wanting to play modern games on it. However, if you want a 'nice laptop to use' that will also make a really good job of AS, this is a pretty good deal at the current price of £580. Medion Erazer Crawler E10 Core i5 8GB 256GB SSD GTX 1650 15.6" Win10 Home Gaming Laptop | Ebuyer.com Moving up to the MEDIUM category and you have something like this. You're not actually going to see any benefit to AS here (certainly as things currently stand with the demands AS places on your system), what you are getting is more gaming grunt and nicer specs all round, basically eliminating all the limitations with the LOW end laptop, if you're wanting to do some proper gaming on the laptop, I'd step up to this one if you can, at £1000 it's a reasonable price for what you're getting. (This has an 8 core CPU as opposed to 4 core, 16GB of RAM as opposed to 8GB, twice the SSD capacity and a substantially more powerful GPU.) Also note there is a degree of future-proofing here, maybe John will add features to AS in the future that place more demands on your machine, the ability to design your own massive arcade with loads of machines in it, more advanced lighting effects etc - you've got more room to grow, basically. Acer Nitro 5 AN515 Core i7 16GB 512GB SSD RTX 3060 15.6" Win10 Home Gaming Laptop | Ebuyer.com Finally the HIGH category and honestly the sky is the limit here, again, no direct benefits to AS in its current incarnation, and you'd really have to be a serious gamer to consider this. (And honestly, I'd be thinking about buying a normal PC with a keyboard and mouse at this point, as laptops do have their limitations when it comes to gaming, not least in terms of noise and heat output.) But still, if you've got £1600 to spend, this is a nice laptop. Gigabyte Aorus 15G Core i7 32GB 512GB SSD RTX 3070 MaxQ 15.6" Win10 Home Gaming Laptop | Ebuyer.com

I'm a bit of a PC hardware nerd so I'm happy to help on this, I'll keep an eye on this thread and assist where I can @woodsy Happy to pick up the conversation again here.

I'd hesitate to recommend it woodsy, that GPU should have enough grunt for AS but it won't be capable of much else in terms of modern games or anything, it's got an old mechanical hard drive which is painful on Windows 10, and that's an old laptop, hailing back to 2014/2015, so no guarantees on how much life it'll have left in it. -------------------- The problem with that is the integrated graphics don't actually have as much horsepower as the 860M in the one woodsy linked above (although there isn't much in it), it's hard to stress how weak integrated laptop graphics actually are, they really aren't designed for any sort of proper 3D acceleration tasks at all. Also I'm thinking maybe we should have another thread for stuff like this 'Arcade Simulator Requirements and Tech Specs' in the main Arcade Simulator sub-forum, something like that rather than cluttering up the main Development Updates thread? NOTE - There are actually two replies there, the quote went wonky, the first is to woodsy and the second is to shaun.

Nope, for starters that's describing a range of specs and even if it comes in at the top end you're still on old integrated Intel graphics and a low resolution screen. It also doesn't even seem to say it's got Windows 10 on it.

I'll have a look for you tomorrow woodsy, although TBH I still think you'll struggle at that price point, the graphics card market is all kind of screwed up at the moment thanks to the global chip shortage and crypto miners bulk buying new cards before they even get into the regular supply chain, plus increased demand for graphics hardware in general, which has caused used prices to rocket. As such any machine (including laptops) that has any kind of gaming credentials is costing far more than it should do, be it used or new. I've just had a look on eBay and used GTX1080s have buy it now prices of around £400, which is bonkers money for the card in 2021, I didn't pay that much more for mine when I bought it brand new just over three years ago!

Yes as per the video I did a couple of weeks ago, the key factor seems to be having a proper discrete GPU, even a relatively old one will do the job. Mrs Chopley's old PC which got repurposed as a media centre/MAME/Pinball Arcade PC for the big telly has a 2GB GTX960 in it, which was only a midrange card even in its day, and that pushes AS around perfectly at 1080p. Once you get into the realm of integrated graphics (which a lot of laptops/all-in-ones have), AS will either run poorly, or not at all depending on the feature set it supports. (As I found out in the video trying it on a modern laptop that uses Intel integrated graphics.) The good news is AS doesn't need much horsepower to run well, but you will want to be getting out of the realm of integrated graphics. So in DAD's example above, a GTX1050 is plenty good enough for the task.

Thanks John I was wanting to find a straightforward 'good news item' as it were to put something positive and uplifting into the video whilst also explaining why there'd been nothing new on the channel for 11 days, but also not stretch myself too much in terms of doing a method or an online slots session or something like that (which really isn't in me at the moment), so I hope you don't mind me featuring the update to Arcade Simulator in the video as an entirely positive development in the context of what's a very sad time with us here at the moment. I will parse this thread and get as much information as I can out of it, and then I will reach out to you for some specifics and some more personal input from yourself if that's OK, to try and do my little bit to give your work the credit it deserves. I still feel really sad about the loss of Chris, I have three instances of MFME running on my PC at this moment in time (currently the DAD Star Wars collection as all three of them run side by side on a 4K monitor), just because I like to see fruit machine emulation 'in action' and I still find it magical every single day, and seeing the work you've done with Arcade Simulator is incredible, whilst also acknowledging the brilliance of Chris and what he did with MFME. If you walked way from this today I would simply thank you for all you have already done, but I would also be thrilled to see what you can achieve in the future.