Causing a bit of a stir.

[thealteredemu]

I’d love to see that video   I think 99% is highly unlikely.  I might play for 10 in the emulated version.

Do you know what revision the RC is running?  

J

[Chopaholic]

Here's what we have for Roller Coaster, it starts at Series 5 unfortunately.

[thealteredemu]

That’s not unfortunate. This tells us Version 5 was the initial £10 rom revision released.  Not sure if we have v5 in the archive, possibly.

J

 

Edited October 9 by thealteredemu

[thealteredemu]

You can also see in later revision they fixed the token sensor cockup that would prevent jackpot wins if token low, which it would have been.  I’ve seen this on a £10 Monopoly.  TT light was lit on all cash.

J

[Chopaholic]

9 minutes ago, thealteredemu said:

That’s not unfortunate. This tells us Version 5 was the initial £10 rom revision released.  Not sure if we have v5 in the archive, possibly.

J

 

Yes it's OK in that regard but it would have been since to see what earlier versions did as well  

For example any mention of changing feature behaviour like Test Your Strength not repeating any more and stuff.

[stevedude2]

I remember playing an £8 token jackpot version of RC which used to give Test Your Strength off Last Ride, and it would nearly always repeat afterwards (as long as you got the jackpot from it).  I would go as far as to say I never saw it not repeat.

And certainly there were versions of the £10 all-cash ROMs that near enough always gave the full £28.80 off Nemesis.  There was a 20p play £10 cash Roller Coaster in a complete dive of an arcade called Sunnyholt Amusements in Brean Sands back in the late 90's and it used to absolutely love a Nemesis to the top.  They had some good bits in there including a Wonderboy video-game on which I could make 20p last for half-an-hour.  Sadly it was one of those places that was owned and run by a family of wankers who would ban locals or anyone who looked like they knew what they were doing, and despite trying to blend in by playing pushers, video-games and even holding a seaside bucket and spade I was clocked before long and was banned by the woman sat in the change kiosk, a fat dreadnought who looked like Biffa Bacon's Mum.

The thing is, the idea of a guaranteed £28.80 Nemesis feature might be non-compliant as far as the technical standards go, but it made the feature much more attractive and the game more exciting.  Who the fuck wants to gamble Waltzers for Nemesis when it might stop at £5.80?  And besides, it was possible to get things like that past the Gambling Commission if you were clever enough and willing to think outside the box.  For a start, the fact that you could hi-lo against the numbers and fuck it up yourself meant that you could set up a soak test of the game that would, on a 50/50 chance, go the wrong way once per credit break, meaning when the GC look at the results the average win from the Nemesis feature would be more like a tenner.  But on-site the actual average would be close to £28.80 because of 'player skill'.  It's a bit 'grey area' - you're making the credit-breaks pass 100% of the time and then the player controls the rest of the feature.  You could squeeze that past the GC but then months later they'd tighten up the regs to stop people from doing it.  Half the fun with designing games back then was trying to find creative ways of interpreting the regs differently to how the other manufacturers were at the time, to try and gain an edge over the competition.

With the Test Your Strength 100% repeat chance, to get that past the GC you just show them the total number of TYS features won on the game overall, and the number of them that repeated - it's going to be way less than 50% because there was practically no chance of that feature repeating if you took it any other way.

Edited October 9 by stevedude2

[thealteredemu]

@ChopaholicI’m fairly certain we have earlier versions but they will be £8 tokens.  I’m sure I’ve seen v2 or v3.  I’ll take a look, they will be £8 tokens.

J

[Mort]

Yeah just looked at my RC DXs. I have £10 on Series 9, £8 on Series 2, £15 on Series 11A and £5 on Series 28!

I would think I set it up like this because we have no earlier £10 ROMs, but I will take a look later this evening just in case!

 

[thealteredemu]

Version 5 is the initial £10 release.  It states that in the info

J

[Mort]

Good news we do have Series 5, is this of interest ? If so, I can check DX is all OK and then upload ?

[Boulderdash]

6 hours ago, Chopaholic said:

Here's what we have for Roller Coaster, it starts at Series 5 unfortunately.

Lol. Took them three months after the £10 cash release to get the machine to stop looking at the token sensors

[Boulderdash]

1 hour ago, stevedude2 said:

 There was a 20p play £10 cash Roller Coaster in a complete dive of an arcade called Sunnyholt Amusements in Brean Sands back in the late 90's and it used to absolutely love a Nemesis to the top.  They had some good bits in there including a Wonderboy video-game on which I could make 20p last for half-an-hour.

That's a good discussion - how long have you managed to make a quid last?

In Keele services in the early 90s they had a Mario Bros pinball game that me and a mate were so good at we could basically last indefinitely. For whatever reason it didn't increase the replay score much, so we'd play as much sas we wanted and almost always got a replay and maybe even a match at the end, leaving it full of credits when we got bored. 

[Mort]

Ok in case this helps you guys find out some more info.

Here is a collection of RC DXs.

both £10s are now on Series 05 (the earliest for £10 by the looks of it) - Token sensors appear OK. The Alt DX just has pre-lit reels (for a nicer effect).

£8 is on Series 02

£15 on Series 11A

£5 on Series 28

A wonderful collection of DXs by @Tommy c who is very much missed, and I hope he is OK.

I may well have made some changes to these DXs over the years to upgrade them for the later MFMEs, can't remember changes made, it's been a long time.

Edit - I think multi coin inputs have been added to all (9,8,7 etc.) and also main RC lamp blended across all DXs, that's all I can recall briefly looking at them.

 

Edited October 10 by Mort

[Boulderdash]

On 09/10/2025 at 18:41, Mort said:

Ok in case this helps you guys find out some more info.

Here is a collection of RC DXs.

both £10s are now on Series 05 (the earliest for £10 by the looks of it) - Token sensors appear OK. The Alt DX just has pre-lit reels (for a nicer effect).

£8 is on Series 02

£15 on Series 11A

£5 on Series 28

A wonderful collection of DXs by @Tommy c who is very much missed, and I hope he is OK.

I may well have made some changes to these DXs over the years to upgrade them for the later MFMEs, can't remember changes made, it's been a long time.

Edit - I think multi coin inputs have been added to all (9,8,7 etc.) and also main RC lamp blended across all DXs, that's all I can recall briefly looking at them.

 

And Sidewinder in my experience almost never went to the top on Air Bomb

[Hamsun]

I don't quite understand the love for Rollercoaster that many profess. 

It's many years since I played one, either in the wild or on the emulator and it never appealed to me in the way that other JPMs from the £10 era did.

I dabbled on the £10 version trying to get nemesis but it wouldn't let me gamble up. It eventually gave it to me on 'last ride' and it went for the full £28.80 - awarding a big win like that on 'last ride' is similar to other late chip JPMs chucking the JP straight onto the winline. I hate they sort of 'gameplay'.

The £8 JP version gave me about the same amount on nemesis (I forgot to check exactly) plus a couple of JPs from TYS. Apart from £2 cash, it was about £50 all in tokens. I think that is one of the reasons I tended to avoid playing RC and most other AWPs back in the token days. Who wants to exchange real money for a bucketful of tokens other than an addict? Then again, I'm pretty sure the tokens con was one of the main ways they got us addicted in the first place

I managed to gamble up to nemesis fairly easily on the £15 JP ROM but it stopped at £8.80!

I also hit the Waltzers on the first win before the £15 JP and that's where it stopped - melons for £2! From what I remember the best place to hit Waltzers was the first win after the JP but I may be wrong about that. After that it gave me JP from TYS plus one repeat.

All of the versions of RC that I have played so far have (up to now) been paying out well above percentage but they haven't had a huge amount through them.

 

Edited October 12 by Hamsun
typos

[Projectgilda]

Rollercoaster was hugely successful in it's day selling over 3,000 units. The only AWP JPM to sell more was BIg Banker. Many games went over 2,500 but the 3,000 mark was hard to achieve. Monopoly and Cluedo SWP's sold over 3,000 units. I think it's appeal comes from the high frequency play and skill based feature games. It's my personal favourite, but then I'm biased.

[Hamsun]

RC was a good machine when compared to most of what was around at the time but I preferred the JPMs that gave more of a reward to players who built up familiarity with the features and mastered the skills.  All the features below test Your Strength were fairly useless so there wasn't much point in going for them and TYS wasn't exactly much of a challenge.

Also...tokens. Machines that effectively paid out most of their value in token streaks were hardlly good value.

I think the all-cash £10 JP ushered in a much fairer era for players. No more stupid tokens to fiddle with and good balance between playability and RTP.

[MikeyMonster]

1 hour ago, Hamsun said:

RC was a good machine when compared to most of what was around at the time but I preferred the JPMs that gave more of a reward to players who built up familiarity with the features and mastered the skills.  All the features below test Your Strength were fairly useless so there wasn't much point in going for them and TYS wasn't exactly much of a challenge.

Also...tokens. Machines that effectively paid out most of their value in token streaks were hardlly good value.

I think the all-cash £10 JP ushered in a much fairer era for players. No more stupid tokens to fiddle with and good balance between playability and RTP.

I think you will find with a lot of posters (and certainly from me), the love of RC is when it was upgraded to £10.

It was a players dream TBH, firstly it numbered, so if it didnt do so off £3 you just took a low feature or £2 and walked.

Secondly, you could play for Nemesis for that nice £28.80 - which you just couldn't do on most games

Thirdly, the public loved it, so it got LOTS of play, therefore lots of value to extract.

My big arcade had two £5 versions for the kids - you could easily make £30 - £40 off both of them on a Sunday in Summer - I don;t mean in one go - you could go back every 30 mins and take the calue.

 

@Projectgilda there has been a lot of talk about the regulation that banned credit breaks being more than 50/50 and i think the post earlier which mentioned that maybe this was just a programming error that allowed.... however, my question is, how long did that restriction last? Was it the £6t to £10 cash times? Or was it in theory in place for the £15 Era and was something Barcrest were manipulating with Party Animal / Temple of treasure and the like. Did this only apply to Hi tech machines, or were the lo techs similarly restricted? Again, things like Red hot Roll / Super Streak seemed designed to double / treble repeat, and as we went into the £15 era, for some machines, again this seemed the desired aim. What about the games like Big Top  (£15 era)- which had a sequence on the 3 red symbols which always paid £75 - so four credit breaks - and you knew after JP, then £10 next spin you were getting £75; or if it gave £10 then £15 - you were getting exactly £52. How do these fit into the max 50/50 chance break restrictions as these were clearly programmed sequences - and never mind that it could hold and do it again?  

(One thing that does make sense - is multiple invincible boards, given that machines were only allowed a 50/50 repeat, it would have to keep going invincible instead)

I in no way doubt your word - I am just really interested in how these mechanics were allowed given that you - and all other designers - were working to this restriction.

[Boulderdash]

12 hours ago, MikeyMonster said:

I think you will find with a lot of posters (and certainly from me), the love of RC is when it was upgraded to £10.

It was a players dream TBH, firstly it numbered, so if it didnt do so off £3 you just took a low feature or £2 and walked.

Secondly, you could play for Nemesis for that nice £28.80 - which you just couldn't do on most games

Thirdly, the public loved it, so it got LOTS of play, therefore lots of value to extract.

My big arcade had two £5 versions for the kids - you could easily make £30 - £40 off both of them on a Sunday in Summer - I don;t mean in one go - you could go back every 30 mins and take the calue.

 

@Projectgilda there has been a lot of talk about the regulation that banned credit breaks being more than 50/50 and i think the post earlier which mentioned that maybe this was just a programming error that allowed.... however, my question is, how long did that restriction last? Was it the £6t to £10 cash times? Or was it in theory in place for the £15 Era and was something Barcrest were manipulating with Party Animal / Temple of treasure and the like. Did this only apply to Hi tech machines, or were the lo techs similarly restricted? Again, things like Red hot Roll / Super Streak seemed designed to double / treble repeat, and as we went into the £15 era, for some machines, again this seemed the desired aim. What about the games like Big Top  (£15 era)- which had a sequence on the 3 red symbols which always paid £75 - so four credit breaks - and you knew after JP, then £10 next spin you were getting £75; or if it gave £10 then £15 - you were getting exactly £52. How do these fit into the max 50/50 chance break restrictions as these were clearly programmed sequences - and never mind that it could hold and do it again?  

(One thing that does make sense - is multiple invincible boards, given that machines were only allowed a 50/50 repeat, it would have to keep going invincible instead)

I in no way doubt your word - I am just really interested in how these mechanics were allowed given that you - and all other designers - were working to this restriction.

That was the strange thing about the £100 upgrade - the effective jackpot was reduced because they could only repeat once, whereas the £70s were allowed to pay £210

[Hamsun]

I've been having a play on various RC layouts and I'm still not sold on it. The £5 version went the whole way on Nemesis but even though it was still numbering I found it hard to squeeze any more profit out of it. It was almost impossible to stop the numbering (I've never played a £5 one in the wild).

The £10 and £15 versions are easier to kill off but one of the main reasons RC frustrated me back in the day is the fact that they can keep numbering for a long time without giving you the opportunities to take the full the value out.

Nemesis is also a bit of a puzzle. How is it possible that the 3rd feature from the top [almost] always gives more reward than the JP or top feature (on the £10 ROM we have, anyway)? From my few sessions, it also seems much harder to reach nemesis than the top feature itself on the £10 ROM.

Nemesis stopped at £8.80 for me on the £15 version and the top feature gave me £30 a few spins after that so later chips seem to have corrected[?] the anomaly.