Smash & Grab 1st gen rom

[Mort]

I spent a lot of time on some machines mapping the RAM, to find locations of variables such as amount of nudges, position on ladder etc.

One for way off in the future but it would be good to have some sort of cheat GUI on machines which we have mapped the RAM out for, so you can say add X nudges, X gold bars, at any time. I guess it would be just like the MAME cheat system. It does rely on a lot of hard work finding the locations, but as you say, some of the older techs, have so little RAM space, that it becomes fairly easy to watch it in real time and work it out!

Certainly one which would be considered as a cherry on the top, and nice to have, but far from essential!

I remember the Datel Action Replay, had a few of them for my C64, used to spend hours tinkering! Great times!

[Mort]

[Mort]

12 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

ritdav: "That was really interesting.First question coming up.Emptiers were they mainly badly written code or were they always deliberate.Reading the above they would have to be beyond the compensators to work .What were the legendry ones and were people fired over them.If you can't talk too much about them thats fair enough."
 
Almost always mistakes. Never intentional apart from one guy at Ace who decide to try and make a few quid by putting an emptier in. He got caught in a pub, fired and prosecuted. I think he got 2 years for fraud. That was on an old SP-Ace club machine.

There are lots of theories about at least some of the bugs being intentional, it sounds like that was actually quite unusual, if coders who got tempted to the dark side were getting hit for fraud, by including some spicy code, and then caught directly using it.  However, I could still imagine that a coder might include a spicy 'believable' (but still exploitable) bug, if he had connection in the players scene (so they'd buy the bug, and he'd never actually use the bug himself in real life).  The old adage of 'don't get your hands dirty'.  So those ones would fly under the radar as innocent bugs... so there's still life in the theory yet!

Fascinating stuff  

I recall the story about Donkey Kong and the unlimited nudges, was due to a works experience student at Maygay, who had the game for testing, with a portion of the debug code for testing things with unlimited nudges, and then the code base for that went back to the developers and got released official, with the oversight of not realising it was left in of course! I bet that was a stressful time for them!

[johnparker007]

3 hours ago, Mort said:

It's possible I could look at it from this angle, try to find where the 'virtual money' is stored in RAM, and then by raising this at any given point, it would have the impact of raising compensator and chance table(s).

You could use MAME's debugger to search for larger/smaller values (without needing to know precisely what they are).  So you'd guess at a value type (prob an 8 / 16 /32 bit int).  Start a search on a clean RAM on that value type.  Then feed money in the machine, and try to burn through credits while winning absolutely nothing.  After every say 10 credits, you'd then go into the debugger, and search for values of the value type that increased since your last search.  Keep repeating the process.  At some point if it then sprees (something like Sunset Boulevard I guess does that)... then take a few wins, and then continue the debug searches, but for values that have decreased, and do that.

Hopefully you will end up with 1 or just a few addresses that match the pattern.  Then you could try poking them with values, so see if it can control how 'ready' the machine is... might be a bit more to it, but prob worth a shot if you are interested in doing this sort of thing!  

Also - the values may instead decrease as the machine becomes more ready, rather than increase.

Have fun - there's a rough video here on how to do it in MAME, if you search 'mame debugger cheat' on youtube there's a few videos, some showing searching for floats as well, though the older machines like Smash & Grab probably worked in fixed point math: 

Also, you could probably also use MFME and Cheat Engine to achieve similar results.

[johnparker007]

3 hours ago, Mort said:

I spent a lot of time on some machines mapping the RAM, to find locations of variables such as amount of nudges, position on ladder etc.

One for way off in the future but it would be good to have some sort of cheat GUI on machines which we have mapped the RAM out for, so you can say add X nudges, X gold bars, at any time. I guess it would be just like the MAME cheat system.

I did plan to do something like that at some point, may end up being hybrid so it can use MAME's existing database of cheat locations at least, but perhaps Oasis RAM controller to manage the cheats, via the Oasis Lua library that we use currently to control inputs... one day  

[asfish]

Good find on the Roms they are very different. I got a £3 JP via a smash and grab, at the time the feature trail was 2 off. I exchanged to unlimited nudges\£1.50 and the trail held. On the next spin a 2 dropped in and it game me the unlimited nudges without the need for smash and grab.

[Player]

On 01/10/2024 at 11:19, stevedude2 said:

We've got these ROMs - as I recall someone on the Mecca, might even have been @Player, bought a SAG on eBay and when he booted it up it was running on 1.0 software.

I've zipped my copy of the layout up and attached

Nudges banked from the gamble carry over from game-to-game (you don't get forced to Break or Take on the next spin - they go into the Pig instead of the nudge gamble ladder), and you can Trade/Exchange a £3 win repeatedly.

Enjoy

 

Barcrest - Smash & Grab DX (1.0 ROMs).zip 3.96 MB · 32 downloads

Yes that was me

[edwardb]

On 03/10/2024 at 08:17, Mort said:

I recall the story about Donkey Kong and the unlimited nudges, was due to a works experience student at Maygay, who had the game for testing, with a portion of the debug code for testing things with unlimited nudges, and then the code base for that went back to the developers and got released official, with the oversight of not realising it was left in of course! I bet that was a stressful time for them!

Yeah, bit of a cock up, was that! The thing you need to remember - often forgotten in these days where an update is simple to roll out - but to send an engineer to every site with a new set of ROMs is VERY, VERY expensive - you pay for the ROMs (prob £6 a pair) and the time. You sold 2000 machines? Well that's £12k in parts, plus double the same again in paying someone to drive around to fit them all. You can bet the big breweries will be on the phone asking for a discount on their next purchase too....

So yeah - cock ups like this are an expensive pain and best avoided.

[Coskey Fruits]

On 01/10/2024 at 11:19, stevedude2 said:

We've got these ROMs - as I recall someone on the Mecca, might even have been @Player, bought a SAG on eBay and when he booted it up it was running on 1.0 software.

I've zipped my copy of the layout up and attached

Nudges banked from the gamble carry over from game-to-game (you don't get forced to Break or Take on the next spin - they go into the Pig instead of the nudge gamble ladder), and you can Trade/Exchange a £3 win repeatedly.

Enjoy

 

Barcrest - Smash & Grab DX (1.0 ROMs).zip 3.96 MB · 36 downloads

I had a go at this today.  Thank you.  In theory ready steady go and beat the clock should both do the same thing on 1.0 roms.  Was fun kicking )SAG) it's bum with virtual infinate jackpots on the emulator

[Altharic]

I think this must be one of those oh bugger moments just dumped these and there are only 3 roms these are marked SAG 1.1 never know it might work with the P4 of the other not tested it

SAG1.1.zip

[logopolis]

3 hours ago, Altharic said:

I think this must be one of those oh bugger moments just dumped these and there are only 3 roms these are marked SAG 1.1 never know it might work with the P4 of the other not tested it

SAG1.1.zip 17.18 kB · 1 download

I'm afraid they don't work with the existing p4 rom we have.

[thealteredemu]

Yeah, the code will definitely not match up with an alternative rom version, they aren’t interchangeable.

J

[Altharic]

Shame can't see the missing rom in the tub 

Just dumped a rom set marked fruit chaser yet it isn't in the room dat and doesn't run in mfme could some sick bastards have overwritten it with a random game?

[nails]

i remenber playing SAG just like this in the arcades on £3 jp. When the increase went to £4jp i played a SAG variant called crack the egg.

the sequence of payounts was shown as £1 £1.50 £2 and £ ??? though i always achieved £4.

 

in reference to the original post, i dont ever recall it being banned ?  rechip sounds more plausable.

[johnparker007]

15 hours ago, Altharic said:

Shame can't see the missing rom in the tub 

Just dumped a rom set marked fruit chaser yet it isn't in the room dat and doesn't run in mfme could some sick bastards have overwritten it with a random game?

You can usually find a bit of text if it's non-interleaved ROMs just by loading up the ROM in a hex editor or summats    If it's interleaved set, the bytes alternate between two ROMs - so you can still search for text you see on the alpha - say "BARCREST" appears on the alpha, you can search for either:

BRRS
or
ACET

As the bytes in each ROM look like:

ROM 1: B R R S
ROM 2:  A C E T

Hope that helps for some quick ROM identification, without needing to emulate first  

[Altharic]

These are the Fruit Chaser ones I am talking about they are not in the dat but equally do not run in MFME so could be a bad rom or someone has reused it to write something over it?

Fruit Chaser.zip

[johnparker007]

19 minutes ago, Altharic said:

These are the Fruit Chaser ones I am talking about they are not in the dat but equally do not run in MFME so could be a bad rom or someone has reused it to write something over it?

Fruit Chaser.zip 5 kB · 0 downloads

In p3 I see the text JPMNFC.  JPM Fruit Chaser perhaps?

They're tiny so prob sys 80 or something super early like that.  No messages, as too early for Alpha displays.  They are all different, so probably good dumps.  Prob worth some tinkering in MFME, swapping the order etc - probably a game in there.

[Altharic]

It's a system 80 see below

https://youtu.be/czKSEeHUrrA

[hitthesix]

4 hours ago, Altharic said:

These are the Fruit Chaser ones I am talking about they are not in the dat but equally do not run in MFME so could be a bad rom or someone has reused it to write something over it?

Fruit Chaser.zip 5 kB · 1 download

Just had a look at the roms, and they are the same as the original ones(we have)

but like you say they don't want to play ball.(strangely)

however i loaded them into the dx by pook

and used the first two roms from the game and added the 3rd from your upload, and it runs.

Edited June 18 by hitthesix
added image

[logopolis]

8 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

In p3 I see the text JPMNFC.  JPM Fruit Chaser perhaps?

They're tiny so prob sys 80 or something super early like that.  No messages, as too early for Alpha displays.  They are all different, so probably good dumps.  Prob worth some tinkering in MFME, swapping the order etc - probably a game in there.

Interestingly, the Fruit Chaser p3 rom we have in the rom dat is exactly the same rom as the Fruit Snappa 1_3 p3 rom we have in the dat.

[logopolis]

The Fruitchaser.p3 rom in your upload on this thread works with fruit31.p1 and fruit31.p2 which are the roms we already have.

But the Fruitchaser.p1 and Fruitchaser.p2 roms do not work with any p3 roms we have for this machine.

Edited June 18 by logopolis