No1Stoney

Me too! Going on holiday soon so progress will be halted for 2 weeks. Oh and here is a pic of my first cab before I changed it slightly. notice its taller, no buttons above the monitor, and the rejected coins came out of the shoot on the right. This was terrible as coins just flew out across the room.

I've put some pics up now @Reg. Wired up all my buttons and lamps today so that's all working great. Tomorrow I'll work on the mech, then the next job will be to get hoppers working, which is going to be very tricky due to limited space and other constraints. There's a small chance I'll have to make it a 1 hopper cab (£1s only) but we will see. Then once its all together, I'll get the software side of things up and running properly.

As requested by @Reg, here is my first cab build (well kind of a v1.1 as it actually started taller and less refined and I modified it slightly to get it to what you see here.) . This cab pays out in 10ps and £1 coins and takes all coins. It was also the smallest I could get it as the coin mech takes up a lot of room. I still have this cab, but a friend of mine is buying it from me so we can play games with shared RAM files (As I built a new one:

Haha yes noted and actioned. that was because I was so eager to get the machine back together and wanted to see how it looked after painting, I forgot the original order of buttons. The button decals will be changed anyway at some point

Well I'm still not 100% sure on its implementation yet. Its a touch screen so originally I was thinking something like a controller for music, maybe linked to Spotify or something where I can choose a playlist tap for next/previous etc. If that doesn't work out or can't find a suitable add-on that works well then it will be another screen that shows some kind of info for the current machine such as jackpot amount like you mentioned. One issue I came across but didn't think about originally is tapping that screen takes focus away from MFME so I need to figure a way around that .

Quick update. Painted the cab outside today and then put the panels back inside. A quick wire up of the pc and monitors just to see it working. And this is the result. Still lots to do, wiring the buttons up properly , coin mech and hoppers to wire up. But I'm quite happy with the results so far.

By all means, create a Dropbox account for yourself as its really easy to do. I can't at the moment because I already have an account and can only use 1 at a time when they are free personal accounts. Then pop your roms in there. Any pc logged into that Dropbox will have access and as a result, will share the same rams

The idea is simple enough. Those who want to participate would all log into the same onedrive account on their pcs. Then simply load the roms from the ondrive folder as normal in MFME. The problem with this is that you can only log into 2 onedrive accounts if only 1 is a free personal account. Any more, and you have to pay. As my pcs are logged into my main account I can't add a throwaway account for mfme without paying. The reason why its good for mfme is that onedrive acts just the same as local storage on your pc so mfme finds and loads the files just like when on your pc.

Thanks! Yes sharing .RAM states in theory should be very simple to do on a larger scale. I did attempt such a program a while ago but I couldn't get the downloading and uploading on files to be stable enough to ever release openly. For this project it will be using a Onedrive account as that seems to work great in testing. For anyone else who has friends who enjoy playing MFME you could set up a personal account and all login to it on their pcs. Then have the mfme roms all on there. Granted there's a 5gb limit for a free account but thats still plenty of layouts to enjoy. @MPU_FIVE I did toy with that concept of bottom reels on bottom screen, but I decided it would be too much work to chop all the layouts around to make them stretch over the screens perfectly intersecting the top and bottom glasses. However its something I might look into again one day. The beauty of creating a cab of your own is you can customise it just how you want. i am looking to use the bottom screen for displaying the 'topbox' on multilayer games. But I first need to see if I can get a 2nd mfme screen to default to the 2nd screen and also whether it actually looks any good doing that. And yes cost does start adding up quickly but luckily for me over time I have a spare set of hoppers, buttons, coin mech, wiring and pc hardware to make a dent in that.

Hi everyone, For those that are interested in these cabs, I am starting work on my 2nd build. This time I am converting a real fruit machine cabinet (Barcrest genesis cab) and turning it into a multi-fruit machine. Seeing everyone's builds recently gave me the itch again to get stuck into another project and as I have a good friend who wants my old cab, I am selling him my old one and creating a new one for myself. These will be linked via the internet to share RAM states, so we never know what state a machine will be in. Seeing it's just between 2 friends, this will be done via a basic OneDrive account which will host the RAMs. I have not long started the project, but I thought I'd share my progress as I go along with you. This was my original cabinet (now sold) And now onto my new one.... (Please not machine was pretty beat up before this project and was not working before anyone moans about me breaking a cash beast) So onto removing the glass. I was totally winging it here as I had NO IDEA how to remove the glass and I knew that once I'd committed to stripping stuff out, there wasn't really any going back. Both glasses removed. Not too bad after all once you know how to remove the braces. So I want to use 2 screens in this machine, one on the top glass (portrait) showing the actual machine, and a bottom smaller screen in landscape showing info about the machine and also will be used to choose a machine to play. Then I tested that the panel I made would actually fit into the machine and also that it remained secure. Essentially it is 6mm hardboard supported by brackets all round, but it does have to support a fair bit of weight. I was pleasantly surprised that it felt very secure. This is what it would look like when closed, obviously buttons and painting needed to make this panel complete. Not to mention pacdrives and all the wiring. Top panel created in a similar way, this time housing a bigger monitor and also a touch screen mini monitor in the corner.. I'm hoping to be able to use this as some kind of touch screen music player of some type. Maybe linked to my spotify account. Original coin mech will remain but repainted black. The whole cab is getting resprayed black too. Top panel all drilled out. The bottom holes are for 2 speakers that sit either side of the monitor. Bottom panel all painted and buttons inserted. The pic makes the buttons look 'wonky' but they are in fact straight when secured properly. The break in the wood at the bottom is because of an obstruction in the cab. This is completely hidden when in place. Top panel pained along with several other bits from the cab. This is now ready to be filled with buttons and wiring. And that's where I am at the minute. I'll keep everyone updated, but I am fully respraying the cab in a few days, then putting the panels and cab all back together before wiring the whole thing up. It will take coins with the original coin mech and slot, and payout into the existing payout tray. I have to design a base for the hoppers to sit on and put some tubes in to direct coins to the new hoppers. I'm still yet to decide on the exact software for my front end. I did create my own for my original cab and I'm unsure yet whether I'll adapt that and use that again or use another like Fruitbar. Thanks for reading.

Haven't gone back to it just yet as haven't had the time. I will have a go at your suggestions and see how I get on. It looks really good and I'm hoping to use it in a new build I'm currently working on

First check with notepad that the 10p hopper is pressing the [ or ] key each time a coin passes the sensor. If it is, then if its a scorpion 4 machine, try a mpu5 machine and see what happens as some scorpion 4 machines don't work correctly with dual hoppers.

I think you need to look at the laptop cable like @cja272 has done. Under the metal sheaf in the laptops power cable should be the wires. Because you have used your laptop for usb and the separate psu for the hopper , it doesn't share a common ground. Remember its all about the hopper getting the signals to pay out and stop paying out. (Your test bulb will light as there is power going to your hopper) This is driven both by the pacdrive and the ipac so everything needs to be on the same circuit . To do this everything needs to share that common ground wire.

Take a ground from one of the black wires off the PCs PSU. Assuming of course that the PSU powers the PC which your USBs are on.

Could this be another issue with 'common ground' in other words is the hopper sharing the same ground as the ipac? The easy way to solve this if possible is splice into one of the ground wires from the pc the usbs are plugged into and use that for the hopper ground. If the hopper and ipac are connected on separate circuits then it won't work.

Still having no joy with this at all. I got the settings page up and located all the paths and imported the ROMs. All OK so far. Then fruitbar prompts to restart the app which I do. Upon restart, the settings page is back to default again (I've tried clicking the save button under MFME settings too) so nothing is getting saved. Trying to boot a machine results in the MFME loading bar appearing then nothing else. I'm not sure what I'm missing here.

Thanks @Zakkieboy44 shift was the key I needed. The manual says press Control. I'll have another tinker now. Cheers

I'm really keen to give this program a go to use in a new cab build I am planning. However I just can't seem to get ANYWHERE with the app. Not sure what I'm doing wrong, so hopefully you can help. But I copied fruitbar into a folder which contains a folder named "rom" and load the app. I get a splash screen with music then afterwards a line of blank cabs. Your manual says press Control to open the settings page, but all that happens is the app asks if I want to quit. The 'cog' icon only takes me to the website. I can't seem to get anywhere at all with it to set it up. Strangely, it does seem to pick up the roms folder as above the empty cabs, are the names of machines contained in that folder. If I click to play them, MFME loading bar shows, but the emulator doesn't load up. I'm really confused. Hopefully you are able to assist @appstrader Thanks.

The refill cash message on a real machine is when the 2 metal discs in the hopper aren't joined together by the metal of coins inside it. If this is the case, regardless of what the machine thinks is in the hoppers, if those 2 discs aren't joined to create a circuit then it assumes the hopper is low of coins. In a real machine you can bypass this by joining the 2 wires connecting those discs together. In mfme this circuit is emulated by way of a button (or checkbox 32 if I remember rightly??) And by adding said checkbook and ticking it, should get rid of the message. It has nothing to do with the amount of coins the machine thinks is in the hoppers

Looking really smart that. Nice job

This is where blended lamps can help. As you light up the whole image in photoshop and then MFME will split the image up by way of blending the lamps. You can create a 'mask' in MFME which acts as the place where the lamp would be positioned on the image and then assign it with a lamp number. Have a look at my King kebab layout and look at the king kebab logo between the reels and the trail to see how to set them up (There are 8 lamps on 1 image).

Yes, all correct. It doesn't matter what way round the microswitch wires go as the button press just completes the circuit back to the ipac

When the games load up, click the topbox and the click ESC. Then move the topbox where you want it. Do this for the other slave units if you want. Then on all but the topbox, press f2 (or f3?? Sorry not as pc at moment) to get rid of the top bar, then close the topbox. This should save where the windows should be. And next time you load them, they should load exactly where you left them . Hope that helps

Could you load winipac without the ipac connected. Find the output that uses '5' and disable that port completely. Then replug the ipac ?

I'm wondering if something has shorted while powered up . If that's the case I'd be concerned its unfixable but I really don't know. I just can't see how its something straightforward if its doing it in another pc with no wires except the USB plug inserted.