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Re-Seeding Cash Pots


Mort
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A number of Club machines, normally only from an initial RAM reset, allow you to seed the Cash Pots.

Normally in the Test menu you can just use the Hold buttons to raise the value of both the Cash and Reserve Pots to a value of your choice.

Do you think this also actually raises the compensator and chance tables for winning the pots in line with the value you have seeded OR is this just a visual thing to entice the player and basically in reality the compensator (or chance of winning the Cash pot) is still at 0 ?

Hope this makes sense.

Edited by Mort
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I assume it may have been an option in case of say whereby a ROM on a machine is upgraded and after the upgrade the RAM has to be cleared. So before an upgrade the engineer would make a note of the pot values and then re-seed them after.

Of course, this re-seeding would then only be legitimate (in my mind) if the re-seeding actually raised the pot compensators in line with it. 

And no i'm not looking for Fairplay #2 ! Just generally interested in what happened in the game code for this.

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You can max them from reset, but that game will only pay one of those when the maths has been met and that fan cost literally thousands of pounds not plays. It will then eventually catch up and some times will pay two cashpots within a few quid.

Cops gold got a receipt so when the cashpot was won it auto reset to the jackpot value. Very tight game compared to the version that would reset to 000.

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I think a lot of machines could be set up to have a static maxed out cash pot.  If a club was manually doing this to their own machine, wouldn’t it result in a ram reset state, which would mess up all coin in and out and potentially leave the machine in a worse state than after a cashpot!!

J

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Yep @serene02 as far as I can see any alterations to the CP would require a RAM reset first, which would put the machine back in a dire state, especially the ones which start out life in a negative compensator / percentage level.

Some machines, such as Club Bullion, allow you to change the CP so it's behaviour is fixed and becomes Jackpot 2. This would be non-progressive and would always just display the JP amount on the 7 segs.

I wonder what the difference is though ? Why would an operator chose a fixed JP in place of a progressive CP ? Just to attract player attention at all times to a full pot ?

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22 minutes ago, Mort said:

Yep @serene02 as far as I can see any alterations to the CP would require a RAM reset first, which would put the machine back in a dire state, especially the ones which start out life in a negative compensator / percentage level.

Some machines, such as Club Bullion, allow you to change the CP so it's behaviour is fixed and becomes Jackpot 2. This would be non-progressive and would always just display the JP amount on the 7 segs.

I wonder what the difference is though ? Why would an operator chose a fixed JP in place of a progressive CP ? Just to attract player attention at all times to a full pot ?

Yeah, always maxed out cashpot is just potentially hiding how much the much the machine has been played, most players would give a low cashpot a swerve I’d imagine.  With a progressive you have decent info to look at, very high cash pot and a player is more likely to get involved, hiding this just puts off the seasoned player I guess, a regular punter might not care if they just play for the entertainment.

I do wonder if the static maxed out cashpot was to fend off those pros targeting the club machines? Sounds feesible ;)

J

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Hi 

 

Most club machines with a cash pot had some way of pushing the cash pot up after it has been won, i think the reason for this would have been at the time a club could only have 2 machines sited, so if the cash pot was showing had been won it would put people off playing it, so it would put all the pressure on the only other machine thus cutting take.

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1 hour ago, serene02 said:

Whichever way they did it it’s dodgy.  That feature to change them should never have been there in the first place.  I wonder if that’s still a thing.  Are there even reeL based clubbers released any more?

J

Reflex’s clubbers like Lady Luck etc the cashpot is built up don’t think there’s a way to override that via ram reset same goes for the awps with progressive pots, what about the likes of oldie rainbow riches 🌈

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1 hour ago, serene02 said:

Yeah, always maxed out cashpot is just potentially hiding how much the much the machine has been played, most players would give a low cashpot a swerve I’d imagine.  With a progressive you have decent info to look at, very high cash pot and a player is more likely to get involved, hiding this just puts off the seasoned player I guess, a regular punter might not care if they just play for the entertainment.

I do wonder if the static maxed out cashpot was to fend off those pros targeting the club machines? Sounds feesible ;)

J

This could well have been a reaction to players on ferries.

In the late 80s I caught a ferry to France and collected £75 from a club attraction on the cash trail exchange because the pots were low. 

Other machines were clearly being covered by players would pay something stupid like £1 for a return trip on foot and empty them. 

Didn't catch a ferry for a few years by which time the boats were full of Cops n Robbers all with maxxed pots at £200. Did my buttons on the way there and back believing they were winnable. 

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2 hours ago, Mort said:

Yep @serene02 as far as I can see any alterations to the CP would require a RAM reset first, which would put the machine back in a dire state, especially the ones which start out life in a negative compensator / percentage level.

Some machines, such as Club Bullion, allow you to change the CP so it's behaviour is fixed and becomes Jackpot 2. This would be non-progressive and would always just display the JP amount on the 7 segs.

I wonder what the difference is though ? Why would an operator chose a fixed JP in place of a progressive CP ? Just to attract player attention at all times to a full pot ?

I think that's short sighted by the operator.  A pro only falls for that once and doesn't come again. So you lose all the money he'd put through a machine on the times he didn't profit. 

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Indeed, almost like they didn’t want people who knew what they were doing playing them.

Like you said and it wasn’t even difficult to spot those settings.  Unless I’d been watching one progress I wouldn’t quite believe a max pot.

J

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5 hours ago, serene02 said:

Whichever way they did it it’s dodgy.  That feature to change them should never have been there in the first place.  I wonder if that’s still a thing.  Are there even reeL based clubbers released any more?

J

It was in recent years on a game called Jackpot King which is a £500 jackpot. There was one "dodgy" program where the player could set the cash pot amount after winning it.

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Theres an emulated barcrest cluber - take your pick i think, and from RAM  reset - every go the CP goes up by £25 so its full after 10 plays!

I always believed that for most CP machines, they worked similar to the way £1000 machines paid jackpots...... Say its 80%...... for every quid it takes 20p is profit, 79.5p can be won in normal play and 0.5p goes in the CP bank (or JP bank on a £1000) once the CP bank is higher than the CP itself..... it can pay it.... either by spinning in or off a feature. Obviously these figures would change from machine to machine - so some might put as much as 10% towards JP / CP wins.

This was almost definitely the case on Belfruit £1000's.... I mean it even had two hoppers - one which held £300 for normal wins and banks (and good luck trying to get more than £60-70 off the top features or maybe £100 on the cash trail) and once ready - it would give the JP. The machine is basically a £75 JP machine, with a once in a blue moon JP. Not only that, on the start of a JP board (IRL) you can hear the 2nd hopper with its £750 coin back up balance moving in some way inside the machine so its lined up to pay out.  The two hoppers even pay out at different speeds.

Whilst I may be wrong, this would explain why you cannot flat out force a huge number of clubbers.

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9 hours ago, MikeyMonster said:

Theres an emulated barcrest cluber - take your pick i think, and from RAM  reset - every go the CP goes up by £25 so its full after 10 plays!

I always believed that for most CP machines, they worked similar to the way £1000 machines paid jackpots...... Say its 80%...... for every quid it takes 20p is profit, 79.5p can be won in normal play and 0.5p goes in the CP bank (or JP bank on a £1000) once the CP bank is higher than the CP itself..... it can pay it.... either by spinning in or off a feature. Obviously these figures would change from machine to machine - so some might put as much as 10% towards JP / CP wins.

This was almost definitely the case on Belfruit £1000's.... I mean it even had two hoppers - one which held £300 for normal wins and banks (and good luck trying to get more than £60-70 off the top features or maybe £100 on the cash trail) and once ready - it would give the JP. The machine is basically a £75 JP machine, with a once in a blue moon JP. Not only that, on the start of a JP board (IRL) you can hear the 2nd hopper with its £750 coin back up balance moving in some way inside the machine so its lined up to pay out.  The two hoppers even pay out at different speeds.

Whilst I may be wrong, this would explain why you cannot flat out force a huge number of clubbers.

I don't understand why you would add mechanics like a moving hopper to a machine that gives something else to fail.

I would imagine the second hopper would always be screwed firmly into the cabinet and the sound you hear is a safety door that was being removed when it was about to pay out. Said door could prevent theft by people sticking things up into the hopper, or some disastrous failure causing all the coins to fall out. 

Your logic for cashpots is sound, however.

On 80s and 90s BFM and Barcrest machines the pot could be taken at any value (unless seeded) as it was a paid for win. On most BFMs until Clubwise you could take both the pot and the reserve, but after that they wouldn't pay both. I guess they worked out the machine gets less play when there isn't the illusion of a jackpot available from the cashpot.

Barcrests wouldn't generally pay the pot until the reserve was about three quarters of the jackpot, so the pot itself was almost always jackpot. Earlier machines like Blackjack club would climb out - you'll see the block at 'Notation' where you'll always have a 7 or 8 to gamble from so there's the illusion of fair odds but when it's taken enough you can gamble up to the top. The pot on later Blackjack programs and almost all subsequent Barcrests could only be won when the machine span the win in on the reels once it has taken enough money. 

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44 minutes ago, Boulderdash said:

I don't understand why you would add mechanics like a moving hopper to a machine that gives something else to fail.

I would imagine the second hopper would always be screwed firmly into the cabinet and the sound you hear is a safety door that was being removed when it was about to pay out. Said door could prevent theft by people sticking things up into the hopper, or some disastrous failure causing all the coins to fall out. 

 

Either way, there was a clear mechanical sound inside the machine. I was chatting to a casino fruit machine player who thought it was due.... but had given up and taken a couple of £50 wins. He got a board on his last credit..... i was nattering - he told me to shut up - then said did you hear that - its a JP. It was as well..... board went to the super feature and then to top of the trail.

I was lucky enough to experience it myself - some sort of grinding whirring noise when i had put £6 in it once. On the board it gave me a skill stop off a question mark when the JP was 2 nudges away. It pays the first £750 in three lots of £250 at about a pound a second - takes ages! Then speeed pays the last £250....

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Maybe it's a little off topic, but the progressive pots on the T7 - I'm sure there is an option to 'back up' and 'restore' the pots within the service menu. I've only ever clicked on it once and it asked for a USB key - never went further as didn't want to cock something up!

I assume you would save out the pots (and/or game state? It doesn't make it clear) to USB and then import them back in.

I guess the option is there so that in the event of a drive swap or similar you can get the games back to how they were. Useful for the operator as players do love chasing higher value pots. Then again if the PC (for example) is knackered, I'm not sure how you would get in to the menu to save the pots anyway?!

Edited by slotsmagic

Currently owned digitals : T7 Encore, T7 Original, Astra iPub and Storm Street Casino.

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