Retrofruit

Of course physical buttons add to the experience but would have to be generic which particularly on Maygay is not ideal as from Vision cabinets onwards they were all individually designed. A touch panel is probably the only way around that unless there are literally tiny square screens available. I have some vague recollection about a machine or two that used LCD screens inside buttons but buttons need decent backlighting. The top screen can also then be an issue because how could something like the Epoch "The Simpsons" or Impact "Club Casino Crazy" be done so that the player can click one of the four corner buttons unless the whole thing is touchable? I could live with graphical buttons for sure but would have to be looking for a 4k panel for a vertical build. I also like RHM's build above (looks like a SWP cabinet), looks good horizontal. Going forward I want to produce 4k layouts by default so would obviously want something decent to display them on. Does anyone here have a handle on production costs for cabinets? For example the one Reg used above obviously has an initial design and build cost. I assume it could be prohibitive in small volume but if enough people were willing to commit to buying one is it feasible to produce for say under £2k a cabinet? I assume that is probably the top end of what people would be willing to pay for one? I am talking fully commercial build custom setup designed specifically for MFME so the right sizes. What's the production cost to SG for a Barcrest Triple 7 for example?

Wow not sure how I missed this but what an incredible thread. Fantastic work, both of you. It's my dream to one day build something similar with two screens inside a Maygay Vision cabinet. Don't know how, don't know when, may need lots of third party help, but one day. One stumbling block of course is finding screens the size of machine glass to use. Is there such a thing as a company that can make custom display screens of any size? I imagine the costs would be prohibitive. What screen resolutions are you running? Reg, the monitor you bought is it fine for both horizontal and vertical operation? How in gods name do I wire a coin mech and payouts to MFME? So many questions for the future. With so many manufacturers going to the wall and the old technology a lot of real machines are running now 30 years old I have often wondered how feasible it would be to replace the internal motherboards with a small PC running MFME with strobes/payouts etc controlled by plug in USB modules.

Yes I saw those roms also, the Copyright Maygay messages have been removed from the end of the rom.

Like this. I think Maygay still did the roms for it, if you look at the BWB Pink Panther set it has Copyright Maygay inside but does also mention BWB.

If you look on your top glass of Pink Panther you should see BWB and Maygay shaking hands.

No it doesn't and no mention of BWB in the roms either. I have tried every set. I am hoping to get confirmation from someone who has access to an actual machine.

I have been spending a lot of time over the last couple of weeks going through all the stuff I accumulated in the 2000's and have located glass for the red edition. I would like to couple this with some proper known BWB roms, see the other thread I have been posting on today as it doesn't actually look like any of the roms available specifically mention BWB unlike other machines like the BWB/Maygay Pink Panther.

Just to update on this MrPillze I have located a top glass for this but do not have a bottom glass. I have asked on fruitemu if anyone has the machine or knows where there is one.

I was around from the very early days in FME including the Nifty Fifty demo and needed a forum username. I try and stay unique on different forums I have signed up for so selected something that reflected the fact I was here to find and play old (retro) machines (fruits) so became Retrofruit. Little did I know at the start what was to come and how overwhelming it would be. Just for the record I am not responsible for any channels or users on YouTube using similar names so if you have a beef with any of them don't look in this direction!

Wow, having watched this I am glad I didn't complete most of them! You reached the end, cheers, back to start. How spoilt we were!

It was released in classic form but I never managed to obtain any access to glass resources for this IIRC.

It was a pleasure to work on it but it took a while due to the number of seven segs. This was created in the days before the emulator had built in seven segs for anything other than MPU (only with black backgrounds!) so it took some hours to build this. Luckily I had access to a large seven seg board which I think originally came from Monopoly green. I was able to flatbed scan this at a good resolution and fill in the segments at larger scale for shrinking down for layouts. Unfortunately once shrunk each of the segments and the decimal point needed to be cut and masked individually. I can tell you that there was a lot of time spent on that particular aspect. For those interested in attention to detail all the house lights are also in their correct positions and if you leave the machine in attract mode you will see them turn on and off at regular intervals. It's been a while and I might be wrong but I think the bottom left house isn't lit, the manual mentions the lamp position but the real machine didn't have a lamp in this position on the loom and it isn't active on the lamp board. This wasn't the first machine I saw this on, Gladiators also had a lamp allocated for the "whistle" but again the actual physical machine had no such lamp position on the loom. Special thanks on this layout have to go to RussDX. The day before he sold this machine I drove a 300 mile round trip with a small PC and scanner and dismantled the machine in his front hall for scanning, including all the buttons. As is often the case but particularly in those days the quality of a DX is highly dependent on the quality of the source material and we were very lucky that Russ was willing to take a chance and let me take the machine apart. Although I thanked Russ at the time on the forum release I was rushing to get it out before a summer holiday so I unfortunately missed this off of the layout notes. I will address this at a future date when I update all my previous layouts for the new emulator.

AK45 in addition to what Reg said above a good rule of thumb is that club machines usually had four reels on the bottom glass whereas non-club machines only had 3. Although of course there were a few exceptions to this with machines like 65 Special/Grand Slam for clubs and a lot of more recent non-club stuff has four reels like numerous Deal or No Deal variants. When I first started playing clubbers the general rule was that a 5p stake got you a £50/60 JP, a 10p stake a £100 JP and a 20p stake a £150/200 JP. Later on clubs moved to £250 JP for 20p/25p a spin. So if you are playing a four reeler £100 JP on 10p a spin it is 99.99% likely it's a clubber. Anything like that is also most likely to be Barcrest/Bell Fruit/JPM and have synthesised/bleepy sound rather than samples. Likewise if it has the word "Club" somewhere in the name it's a giveaway! Anything with both a cashpot and reserve cashpot is most likely a club machine also. Certainly the lines are blurred for more recent machines and it doesn't help when you see an old club machine like Casino Crazy in Mr P's on £100 JP! Naturally if there are any machines you are unsure of post the names on this forum and it's a dead cert that someone will know the answer.

Choppers just to comment that your recent spawn has been ridiculous! You should be buying lottery tickets not online slotting! Thanks for the ongoing content.

Good question! I find I am pretty useless at skills on the emulator. Was pretty good in real life, things like Cash Explosion I would hardly ever miss, even hit the skill on Labyrinth for castles occasionally (probably because it was blocking the rest of the time!) On the emulator I can't hit anything with any consistency!

Great stuff. One of the machines I was desperate to see again when I first got involved with FME. My local Quicksilver had both of these, Surprise Surprize and Party Time. Surprise Surprize was the more foreboding machine for us. Speed of play (as you show in the video) was unreal and a real balance eater if caught wrong. The machine (at least in my memory) seemed bigger, darker and more menacing than Party Time. What you are seeing on this video is the feature streak. Surprise Surprize had two types of streak, one feature and one Jackpot. Back in the day when being a fruit machine addict usually meant spending quite a few hours in the same arcade (sometimes playing sometimes watching, getting to know staff and fellow hopelessly addicted players, playing just about anything regardless of whether we hated it or not, consuming those hideous freeze dried cup tomato soups) we used to see 2 or 3 Jackpot streaks then a Feature Streak. Feature Streak would spin in a random feature every few spins, but sometimes up to £2 apart. Jackpot streak would do up to 6 JP's on successive credits. They seemed to save separately and trigger when ready with a definite bias towards the JP streak (no doubt because it was tokens so better for the owner). However this did mean it was perfectly possible to trigger both in quick succession. Obviously if regularly forcing it (madness, but hey we were addicts) the more likely of the two was JP streak which of course was the machines USP and unlike anything we had ever seen before. The excitement/adrenaline the first time I got it was incredible! JP after JP, all in tokens, an age to payout. You felt like the King of the amusements whilst it took several minutes to thump out all the tokens with numerous jealous eyes watching you. The Quicksilver was usually busy and you would see a JP streak every £60-100 or so depending on what wins had been collected and recycled (and how often it had forced a silver bells multiple repeat on you, as you see in this video). So the streaks would often be seen several times a day which caused some annoyance to the staff who had to keep refilling the tokens. Probably one reason for their demise. Sometimes the feature streak would "show" it was ready as it got happier by spinning in a few random features sporadically for £10 or so before dropping the full streak. So if we had seen the tell and then got the JP streak we would stay on it and recycle the tokens, taking all cash wins with the feature streak. I don't remember the streak having to finish on a JP or anything like that, it would just stop spinning them in once exhausted. Unfortunately much of the excitement of many AWP's from that era is lost on successive chips which start watering things down to placate pissed off operators who don't want to keep refilling the tokens. Streak values tumble, small wins get forced on you more often, little tricks like Hi on 12 or Lo on 1 get removed. I have played a good few sessions on the emulator with this all cash ROM and have never had the same level of streaks that we used to see. Maybe some of that is addicts selective memory at play with the mind exaggerating the good times whilst burying the bad times - who knows. Another great video Choppers, thanks!

Part 2 - Wild Zone Machine design: To a historical player like me the overall design of a fruit machine didn't change much. Designers were constrained to a particular cabinet size, button location, trim etc and further constrained by the limitation of the technology platform. Anything out of the ordinary adds cost. It may need special interface design, moulded parts, logic etc. Historically there have been machines where the designers seemed desperate to break out of that vanilla specification. Who could forget Barcrest Gamball with it's ball launchers, BGT who had a win repeater using a mini bagatelle in the top glass, Chase Invaders with it's dual purpose number reel and rapid switching lighting, the very first multiplayer machines, huge imposing Party Times with moulded plastic balloons, the list goes on. Wildzone is Maygays contribution. A design where theme authenticity and attention to detail was paramount. It wasn't enough to just follow the usual scheme, print some graphics and add some buttons. There have been other pinball themed AWP's. A Maygay pinball themed machine needed an edge, something to standout and cross boundaries between AWP and pinball players. Of course as usual you can go mad on the sample package and fill it with authentic pinball sounds but the machine needs that visual hook that makes someone walking past do a double take and think "WTF?!" - so why not put some real pinball bumpers inside the machine? Better still let's have them inside a mirrored box and just for good measure let's have them light up as well. Then have them flash like they are being hit by a pinball whilst some authentic pinball bumper sounds play! A personal doff of the cap to the design team. Outstanding work. Gameplay: The sound and vision experience is outstanding of course, so much so that (sad as it sounds) for several years I had an mp3 of the feature entry and board samples as my mobile ringtone! Now unfortunately although the gameplay is good it doesn't quite reach the same standards. There are a few reasons for this but primarily it's the excessive use of "TILT" on the feature which really starts to grate. Not surprising as there is no other way for the machine to bin you off without a win. It's not that difficult to overcome, just put a "LOST BALL" or something for a bit of variety! It is also far too difficult to get some things on the machine, such as 1,000,000 nudges. The fact this is 1,000,000 is of course a nice pinball touch and you could of course argue that it is as rare as obtaining the elusive 1,000,000 bonus on a pinball, so could well be designed that way, however it is also difficult to get to Shoot to Win which is a bog standard stopper also seen on a few other Maygay machines. Thankfully the feature is reasonably frequent just a tad frustrating as it can be too difficult to get past the bottom left hand TILT. It's not all negative of course. There are no obvious blocks on the machine and the Score meter is happy to exceed 300 regularly. Crazy Cash is a good achievement for the player particularly from a visual perspective although somewhat the £6 era equivalent of a Raging Rhino feature. Low win guaranteed with a rarer chance of hitting big. It is often a credit breaker if just a bit too obvious as it stutters slightly whilst it takes one so you already know if you are going to get another win or not. Layout creation: The difference between Wild Zone and the layouts that came before it is pretty obvious. First the lighting is more suited to the theme, the darker corner of the arcade where the pinballs usually are. Also my creation techniques had come on leaps and bounds since I started. There were a number of challenges at the time. First the emulator still only supported a red seven seg on a black background with the segments square. That was a big no-no for machines like this, 7 seg boards have the numbers tilted slightly and are all red. Thankfully Maygay drive the individual segments as lamps, therefore like EastEnders the 7 segs were lamped from a real large size 7 seg board that I scanned in, lit then shrunk down, with each individual segment cut out and a transparency applied around it. The effect is not always perfect and it took a long time to do but was always the chosen method given the alternative at the time. The images were created by scanning machine glass. This was also a challenge given the targets in the top left and those pinball bumpers in the bottom right! As I mentioned in another post on here it requires a scanner that has a very decent light source that can cope with images beyond 1mm of the glass which rules out the majority of scanners you can buy now. It also required back lighting of the targets and rescanning in multiple positions. Overall I was very happy with the result and consider it my best work from that era.

Hello Vectra I will be doing an assessment of what I do or do not have shortly as to be honest I just cannot remember, it is literally years since I touched anything. I remember that Manhattan Skylines was quite advanced development wise but whether that was a releasable state I don't know. Clearly if I do look at anything there is some familiarisation with new tools required and MS may be too small for current standards. I may also need some new hardware.

Great video Choppers. I'll post some personal thoughts on these machines if I may as time allows. For this post Inferno - This is definitely the most brutal of the three machines you reviewed in terms of feature frequency and bad mood but certainly not the most brutal Maygay by any stretch - there are some real horrors like Instant Win where it can take £20 to land on anything. Inferno is also up there with the best Maygays of this era in terms of a large win dump. Big Money can indeed go big, £20+ when it wants from a single feature which at the time when you were on a £3/£6 win selector was very satisfying! Definitely not as satisfying as Super Jackpot from Mystery Guest on Noels House Party which was probably the biggest successive credit dump there was during the Maygay £6 era - JP + 5 repeats being my personal record for £36. I am sure others may have done even better. The best way to Big Money is to high/low up the middle as there is probably only about a 5-10% chance of getting past the top corner naturally. When it's in a good mood you can high low up the middle practically every feature until the value is taken. I have high-low gambled all the way from Step to nearest win many times. Also the gamble on reel wins doesn't cheat. The number appears predetermined and if you choose right it won't reverse it. So if it is behind percentage or in a bad mood you can second guess it and go higher on 11 for JP for example. My most ridiculous high low was going from cherries up to JP where I went higher than 9 on bells to 10, higher than 10 on single bars to double, and higher than 11 on double bars to JP. I don't know if it is predetermined on the high-low climb to Big Money as well, I could test this in a virtual machine with saved state but know from gameplay that the reel wins high-low is good. I always take the cashpot if on £3. It doesn't appear to affect the value or feature frequency. If a JP is offered anywhere on the board I always take it because if I don't it's almost certain to bin me off. I don't think this was around on 20p/£6 for long. Every machine I ever saw in the wild was on 5p play and even then I didn't see many at all. Interestingly this machine is one of the few times I have had a fruit machine confuse itself and get into an unresolvable programmatic state. The situation in question was a skill stop "matrix add" on a bonus where I only needed one extra fireball to fill the matrix. Unfortunately the machine decided that my bonus was two symbols to add to the matrix but after the first one couldn't see that the matrix was already full and tried to force the second symbol on me which was impossible. Cue the ringing matrix add sample playing indefinitely with the matrix full and no way to proceed. Called the arcade engineer over, all they could do was turn it off and on. Of course when it came back on, no feature. Quite annoying as I remember it took about £12 to get to that state on 5p play! In terms of the layout for those with an interest in FME history this machine was originally completed from some flash burned photos of a 5p machine hence all the trail values had to be changed as they were incorrect. Think difference between a blue and red Pink Panther and you will get the idea. Each incorrect trail number was rebuilt from scratch using the original font (which I think was "Machine" as used on Gladiators) and colour gradient matched using either Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop, can't remember which. Now that I have told you that you can probably see a slight quality difference between the numbers on the trail and the rest of the trail. On later layouts if a small replacement or new decal had to be created I learned to use the "add grain" function which makes the object look less drawn and more natural scan/pic like. In fact thinking about I *think* this was only my second ever DX and I had zero graphic experience when I started out so I was quite pleased with the outcome at the time - but clearly Wild Zone after five years practice was immeasurably better! Some horrors on this layout as well like the bent red bars on the Gladiators machine to the side - still we all started somewhere! What happened to the right hand machines in your video? Does the new emulator cut these off or did you trim yourself? Nice you touched on the 1280 debate in the video. Going to 1280 was certainly controversial at the time but absolutely the right decision. 1024 was just too restricting and lacking in detail. Still it seems to be the right decision now given that many years later there are now 4K layouts being released!

Great work on this layout! Just wanted to add my 2p in relation to glass scans. In my experience unfortunately the current cheap LED scanners just are not up to the job of scanning glass because there isn't enough light. Insufficient light = blur/lack of detail, the same way that detail is lost in dark images on a DVD. For M1Adness layouts where glass was available I used a Xenon gas based scanner that I already had. The scanning surface still wasn't completely flat because like scanners now there was/is a small lip for you to line your document up with the edge so for glass edges a slight overlap is inevitable to keep the glass level. This wasn't really a problem as the edge of the glass is within the cabinet anyway and is usually the bit where there are small chips/blemishes in the edge finish. However it is A4 sized so typically for a Maygay top glass I had six to eight images to combine. Later layouts I built a small rig using a PSU from Argos that powered a string of lights taken from a real machine complete with proper bulb holders. So I was able to scan the image with lights off, then flick a switch and scan the same image with lights on. About 25% of normal power was ideal. The issue with Xenon gas based scanners is that you need to wait an hour or so with the light on to allow it to warm up properly. Otherwise as you are scanning sections of the glass you will notice that the contrast changes slightly between parts as the bulb warms up which makes the overall stitching more challenging as you have to perform manual adjustments. However the results speak for themselves. For anyone watching todays Degsy video, Inferno wasn't glass, Wild Zone and Gladiators were. You can see the difference quite easily, although there was of course 5 years gap and my technique had improved somewhat! What may interest you on Wild Zone is the four targets in the top left and the pinball bumpers in the bottom right. These were all scanned via that Xenon gas based scanner which gives a nice depth to them. There is no way on earth I would have been able to scan those with the kind of cheap LED based scanner you get now. For another great example look at the layout I did of Spectre (BFM). That has dual layer glass! So I was actually scanning two pieces of glass on top of each other. The end layout result is incredible with great depth to the top glass. Now bear in mind this was in the days where a 2 megapixel camera was cutting edge so for detailed images a scanner was the only way to go. Phone cameras now are incredible in comparison. Any paint package that allows skew adjustment can be used to straighten a camera image but the trick will be lighting. As much natural light as possible, avoid flash and no bright spots. Capturing in a single image will definitely help. No doubt others will be more skilled than me in regards to advice for this.

An incredible project, well done. I was wondering, as part of your original thought process did you give any consideration to mounting two screens in the cabinet, one for lower glass and one for upper. Do you think that is technically possible or are the available screen sizes now unsuitable?