Causing a bit of a stir.

[Projectgilda]

There's a chip somewhere, but it's not on my shoulder. I've told you my experiences, take it or leave it.

[thealteredemu]

Don’t get scared off, we are a fairly passionate bunch.

It’s great to see an ex game designer/coder on the forums.

J

Edited August 3 by thealteredemu

[MikeyMonster]

@Projectgilda I never saw a £6 Token, RC as per its original release, and never really played the £8 one. My experiences are really based on the £10 version.

I think its a distinct possibility, that on the original, the credit break was 50/50 max (and isnt there another JPM game - maybe one of the Popeyes, which has a similar feature?)

Its not the case on the £10 version though - so presumably changes were made on the upgrade - whether deliberately or in error we will never know. 

[vectra666]

Intentional or not we all make mistakes and slip up were human we make mistakes plenty of them throughout history 

also most companies are corrupt one way or another rhe gambling industry is no different probably worst now but done legally with the shitter machines where 90% of the time you win your money back on a board if you’re lucky

and the  machines were talking about are over 30 years old now so n point moaning about this n that and what a roller coaster did or didn’t do, you won you lost all part of gambling! If you knew back then the program may of been corrupted would you have still played it? Yes of course you would’ve as you’re gamblers plain n simple

[Road Hog Mad]

@Projectgildawhat Barcrest stuff do you have? Rainbow Riches?

[Boulderdash]

1 hour ago, vectra666 said:

Intentional or not we all make mistakes and slip up were human we make mistakes plenty of them throughout history 

also most companies are corrupt one way or another rhe gambling industry is no different probably worst now but done legally with the shitter machines where 90% of the time you win your money back on a board if you’re lucky

and the  machines were talking about are over 30 years old now so n point moaning about this n that and what a roller coaster did or didn’t do, you won you lost all part of gambling! If you knew back then the program may of been corrupted would you have still played it? Yes of course you would’ve as you’re gamblers plain n simple

I've got a couple of capital As and three full stops I'll trade you for a DX of Pinnacle...

Edited August 4 by Boulderdash

[vectra666]

4 minutes ago, Boulderdash said:

I've got a couple of capital As and three full stops I'll trade you for a DX of Pinnacle...

I ain’t got time for grammar and punctuation’s 

As for pinnacle wasn’t there a topic somewhere about that one? 
messing about with a full deck of cards, dean martin, Sinatra and co first, Vivid making a remake…

[slotsmagic]

If you boil it down, fruit machines we are discussing here really aren't much different to old video games.

I love Final Fantasy 7, it's a game from 1997.

Even now, people are finding new glitches and exploits on it to make speed running faster and faster. Finding new ways to break the game to allow them to skip certain things.

Not things that the programmers intentionally put in - rather things they never thought to protect against.

(I know, we are comparing a video game to a gambling machine, so you would think a gambling machine would be more protected - but as with video games they are both written by real people).

I'm sure that in fruit machines there will be some of the same. Oversights, mistakes, things that just hadn't been accounted for. There will have been some examples of honest oversights and I'm pretty sure anything left in by @Projectgilda would have fallen in to that category.

I'm absolutely no industry apologist - you all know my stance on it. But there will be times that things simply weren't considered during normal play. Not talking about the obvious shady stuff, but more nuanced things that players may have worked out as the best ways to extract value from machines.

I think the video of the Pie Factory that @Chopaholic put up recently is a good example. I'm not 100% convinced, in that example, that a coder said 'lets give people a method that can knacker the average player', more likely - as with something like Just The Ticket, it was a case of a flag staying on when it shouldn't have been cleared (allowing you to bank an invincible board, that sort of thing).

The fact the last chip on those made it obvious they had been chipped is definitely suspicious, but still hard to say if the original 'method' was definitely intentional, or if someone worked out an exploit.

 

Edited August 4 by slotsmagic

[vectra666]

19 minutes ago, slotsmagic said:

If you boil it down, fruit machines we are discussing here really aren't much different to old video games.

I love Final Fantasy 7, it's a game from 1997.

Even now, people are finding new glitches and exploits on it to make speed running faster and faster. Finding new ways to break the game to allow them to skip certain things.

Not things that the programmers intentionally put in - rather things they never thought to protect against.

(I know, we are comparing a video game to a gambling machine, so you would think a gambling machine would be more protected - but as with video games they are both written by real people).

I'm sure that in fruit machines there will be some of the same. Oversights, mistakes, things that just hadn't been accounted for. There will have been some examples of honest oversights and I'm pretty sure anything left in by @Projectgilda would have fallen in to that category.

I'm absolutely no industry apologist - you all know my stance on it. But there will be times that things simply weren't considered during normal play. Not talking about the obvious shady stuff, but more nuanced things that players may have worked out as the best ways to extract value from machines.

I think the video of the Pie Factory that @Chopaholic put up recently is a good example. I don't think a coder said 'lets give people a method that can knacker the average player', more likely - as with something like Just The Ticket, it was a case of a flag staying on when it shouldn't have been cleared (allowing you to bank an invincible board, that sort of thing).

The fact the last chip on those made it obvious they had been chipped is definitely suspicious, but still hard to say if the original 'method' was definitely intentional, or if someone worked out an exploit.

 

Exactly my point, I mentioned earlier in the topic about sonic for instance the up down left right ABC - infinite lives trick. People didn’t complain nor did the companies that made the game, infact they made more money from it by allowing the cheat/games magazines to publish such cheats. Probably selling more games in the long run.

you used to get “bonus tracks” on records and cds making the customer “think” they’re getting something for free or extra where infact these were already meant to be put in there, but made the customer think there a bonus.

same Is said for fruit machines, they’ve deliberately left the ‘cheats’ in, like the cancel slowing the bonus down or hold reels upto Respin! Even numbering reels to make the player think they’ve got an advantage over the game (As fruit machines are effectively a game, the jackpot meaning top level!).

The more people know these exploits like the partytime “tricks” the more people will play it m, the more played the arcade will get more of the same in, more money for the manufacturers as producing more then they make a clone like bullion bars, people think they’re different as different colours or names, and so the cycle continues 

same goes for computer games.

was there any glitches in pinball as still a games program

Edited August 4 by vectra666

[stevedude2]

The fucking state of some of you in this thread.  And people still wonder why industry ex-employees are reluctant to come to this site and engage with players...

You're just gathering statements so you can pick holes in them.  It's more an interrogation than a discussion.

[spa]

22 hours ago, Projectgilda said:

Thanks guys for the posts. Firstly, I didn't code Rollercoaster, I designed it and did the original control documents. When I say rape, I mean it was too easy to put the machine in a bad state by using roll up roll up and the skill features. I don't know why (or certainly can't remember) the point at which numbering was put in place but it was. I was playing it yesterday and got Nemesis without 1's or 12's showing in the base game or feature. So it's not 100% a tell but it certainly helps.

Surely it was numbers to give nemesis? Even with numbers it's not given on a plate.

[andy-1]

58 minutes ago, stevedude2 said:

The fucking state of some of you in this thread.  And people still wonder why industry ex-employees are reluctant to come to this site and engage with players...

You're just gathering statements so you can pick holes in them.  It's more an interrogation than a discussion

Well said, for all we know there could easily be other ex industry employees on here as members join all the time. 

For me it's been a great insight into some of the going's on, but mistakes are made, as humans we are not perfect.

As for numbering I don't know enough about it all, but I was watching cashmans video of the new Mr Ps arcade and he mentions this while playing roller coaster. But it's no wonder people love nemesis when you see the money they are pulling out of it.

[Chopaholic]

We need to delineate between mistakes and plain corruption.

Remember it was AW who told us in the first place about the Union Jackpot compensator tell, and also that it was put in there deliberately by the coder for monetary gain. There's a word for that, it's corruption. (AW also informs us that the same coder intended to put this into multiple other machines but then 'bottled it'.)

Literally in this thread he's said that there was 'a lot of dodgy code out there'.

I think we'd all be a lot more forgiving of all of this stuff if it was indeed just mistakes, but we know for a fact that it wasn't. We can debate the percentages until the cows come home, but of all the fuckery that existed on compensated machines over the decades, from the early days of solid-state control right through to the dying days of the £100 era (Powerplay/Batman Power Up, anyone?), some of it was incompetence, and some of it was corruption.

Fact. No debate. It's a fact.

(Some may object to my use of the word 'incompetence' but when Barcrest were kicking out machines in the £35 era that were vulnerable to plugging, something that had been a thing since the £4.80 era (or earlier!), I don't think it's unreasonable to call that incompetence.)

And it wasn't just the AWPs either, right up to and including the absolute daddy of them all, Casino Grandslam with a £1000 jackpot, someone at BFM apparently didn't think to have the learnable patterns on the top reels reset when stake switching, leading to machines that could be smashed into oblivion whilst others who were just expecting some sort of fair gamble, to be left in the hole to the tune of hundreds upon hundreds of pounds in a single session.

AW's input here is IMO both valued and welcome, but the truth of the situation is that a lot of us were hurt, in some cases very badly, by malfunctioning compensated fruit machines, and when poked those wounds can still be sore.

[Hamsun]

18 hours ago, MikeyMonster said:

I think SnS is true skill on the emulator - like you, I can't get anywhere near my hit rate from when i was young - I was reckon i was 90% plus back in the day, more like 40-50% now.

 

Something I'd almost forgotten on Casbuster - if you let it  time out  when you take SnS, it will stop on the symbol one below the win line. If it's the three cherries with the JP under the middle cherry it's an  easy £10 repeater.

I had to shovel well over £70 through it just to get it to gamble to SnS with the cherry over JP set-up and about the same amount for a seciond attempt (I got the set-up numerous times but it would rarely let me gamble to SnS). The first time it stopped on JP. The second time it stopped on blue bars.
When I played these in the wild I'm fairly certain that unchipped versions always stopped on the JP repeater when timing out from that set-up.
The emulated version I played also generallyly blocks SnS. I had to put £60 into it at one stage without it gambling to SnS once, even though it was numbering. Instead it threw the JP straight onto the win line - twice. The first one repeated once, the second four times for the full £50 (I don't think I have ever seen a Casbuster give more than 4 repeats on the £10).
So I think this one is on the nasty chip that blocks SnS and also slips. Rather than let you get to JP features it simply throws in JPs when way under percentage.
My memory is a little hazy after all these years but I think I'm right...

[I was playing the DX of Casbuster from the legacy layouts. The meters con't work (cash in is displayed as cash out) but that's probably irrelevant.]

[slotsmagic]

3 hours ago, Chopaholic said:

 

AW's input here is IMO both valued and welcome, but the truth of the situation is that a lot of us were hurt, in some cases very badly, by malfunctioning compensated fruit machines, and when poked those wounds can still be sore.

If anyone can hold that sort of opinion it is me - I never had methods, emptiers, and have lost over my lifetime an insane amount of money, filling machines up for the likes of forum members here who talk about their playing back in the day.

I was an addict who sometimes managed to get lucky with timing, or managed to force machines out cheaply, and would often pay myself to learn what features did what, and things to look out for. Nothing more, nothing less. I didn't learn about numbering until my first trip to Maidstone Reelfruits a few years back (reopening after the lockdowns) to give you some idea.

Some of the more vocal people in here are people who have admitted to being pro players, paying mortgages, paying their way through university and suchlike.

So as a former addict, who lost a fortune, blew my education, blew relationship with friends and family, I should be absolutely fuming, and don't get me wrong - I still have an intense 'hatred' of the industry - that is part of what keeps me off machines.

But in this instance I was excited that someone from the industry got involved here. Someone who seemed to genuinely care about players getting a fun game, or as much fun as you could have from an AWP.

We could have learned more information, gotten more insight to the industry.

Hopefully he stays about, but it would be hard to blame him if he didn't fancy it.

Edited August 4 by slotsmagic

[Projectgilda]

Well it started friendly enough. Then high horses got shipped out, bit disappointing. I'm not a guru with all the answers. Just a bloke who did a job he enjoyed and produced some things that not only people enjoyed but that I'm very proud of. It's rich people stating facts that I know aren't true but it's water off a ducks back as far as I'm concerned. I'll say it one more time. There was lots of dodgy stuff going on from other manufacturers: final credit perks, not collecting your bank, holding pots to name but a few. I didn't do a single one of those things and didn't need to, my games spoke for themselves. Only the chasers resorted to nefarious means to boost their test results. I've met hundreds of people's with theories about how best to play a machine, including mine, I take most with a pinch of salt. Here people seem more knowledgeable than most and it's always interesting to hear their views. But in a respectful manner.

[Boulderdash]

6 hours ago, vectra666 said:

I ain’t got time for grammar and punctuation’s 

As for pinnacle wasn’t there a topic somewhere about that one? 
messing about with a full deck of cards, dean martin, Sinatra and co first, Vivid making a remake…

Yeah, I thought you said you'd try to get to it, but you offered @Pook's services instead

 

 

[Boulderdash]

5 minutes ago, Projectgilda said:

Well it started friendly enough. Then high horses got shipped out, bit disappointing. I'm not a guru with all the answers. Just a bloke who did a job he enjoyed and produced some things that not only people enjoyed but that I'm very proud of. It's rich people stating facts that I know aren't true but it's water off a ducks back as far as I'm concerned. I'll say it one more time. There was lots of dodgy stuff going on from other manufacturers: final credit perks, not collecting your bank, holding pots to name but a few. I didn't do a single one of those things and didn't need to, my games spoke for themselves. Only the chasers resorted to nefarious means to boost their test results. I've met hundreds of people's with theories about how best to play a machine, including mine, I take most with a pinch of salt. Here people seem more knowledgeable than most and it's always interesting to hear their views. But in a respectful manner.

I don't think anyone here has accused you of anything nefarious. If you've taken anything I've said to be disrespectful then please be assured no offence was meant. Absolutely everyone here loves Rollercoaster and other games on your list. 

The point of the thread is crime in the industry and the pain it caused many on here, up to and including suicide attempts. 

Your Facebook post alerted @Chopaholicto the corruption in Union Jackpots, and now you're happily confirming all sorts of other dodginess, such as final credit perks, not collecting your bank etc that were manipulations deliberately put in by the developer, either for his own profit when playing or to sell to his favoured players. 

 

[Boulderdash]

5 hours ago, stevedude2 said:

 

You're just gathering statements so you can pick holes in them.  It's more an interrogation than a discussion.

That's not the case at all. People are genuinely fascinated by all the shenanigans, but because it cost them a lot of money and caused them personal pain, they are rightly angry too. 

That anger isn't directed at @Projectgildain anything I've read or written in this thread. It's at the bent industry. 

[Boulderdash]

6 hours ago, slotsmagic said:

If you boil it down, fruit machines we are discussing here really aren't much different to old video games.

I love Final Fantasy 7, it's a game from 1997.

Even now, people are finding new glitches and exploits on it to make speed running faster and faster. Finding new ways to break the game to allow them to skip certain things.

Not things that the programmers intentionally put in - rather things they never thought to protect against.

 

I think this is a false equivalence. Yes, there are some issues similar to the above, but this is about developers deliberately adding nefarious code into their machine from which they would profit at the expense of children and gambling addicts. 

I see zero harm in the video game thing, but the latter is wholly different. 

[slotsmagic]

1 hour ago, Boulderdash said:

I think this is a false equivalence. Yes, there are some issues similar to the above, but this is about developers deliberately adding nefarious code into their machine from which they would profit at the expense of children and gambling addicts. 

I see zero harm in the video game thing, but the latter is wholly different. 

OK it maybe, but what I was saying is that people will keep finding ways to break things, and come up with creative shortcuts. In a video game it saves time, or sets a high score. In fruit machines it saves time, or gives a quick (or bloody long winded) profit.

Sometimes these are intentionally left in, sometimes people find things out, through dedication, perseverance, or sheer fluke that they are then able to recreate.

There will be absolutely loads of dodgy shenanigans, but there will also be legit examples where certain things just weren't accounted for, or the player making certain decisions hadn't been considered.

As said before some people made a lot of money from machine info. You personally said machine exploits helped pay for your University education. Others on here have frequently said how well they did in certain eras. I know some people who became very wealthy from machines. I'm not talking a few grand. I'm talking paying for a house or more.

For me, machine playing cost me a bloody fortune, and resulted in me dropping out of college and giving up on any prospect of University education. I didn't have any methods or similar to help me. My machine addiction turned me into a shell of a person. If they had actually skinted me before I stopped, make no mistake I wouldn't have planned on still being here. It wouldn't be the financial loss alone, but the inescapable self hatred that would have done it.

I should be fuming at the industry. I am. It contributed to my downfall. But it also seems hypocritical when people here are blaming manufacturers for the very advice which gave them the upper hand over myself and many others. Like you are trying to blame an industry insider who may have industry insight and interesting stories to share. Making him a scapegoat for all the shady bollocks that went in over the past 40/50 years of microprocessor controlled fruit machines.

Quick conscience test - if you saw me balls deep into a machine you were clued up on, would you have :

a) Taken sympathy on my plight, charitably told me the method, and given me a chance to recover most of, if not all of my funds from the session.

Or b) Sat back, itching in anticipation of jumping on the machine as soon as that idiot fills it up. Stupid bastard doesn't realise you can trap that, it's got £140+ owing, just hurry up and lose your money so I can get it out.

 

 

Sorry, but I'm confident it's the latter. Probably down to addiction as I've seen in those with drink / drug dependency - good people who become total self-serving twats who would rob their own family.

So by all means give the industry a kicking, but at the same time you and plenty of others took advantage of the shenanigans yourself. Those who committed suicide e.t.c. - those ripping off the machines and leaving them for dead could also arguably be culpable in that. Laughing at the state machines could be left in when the next player is going to get eaten alive.

Or maybe exposing them to such bullshit helped them make the decision to quit.

We'll never know in either case unless the person leaves a note telling us.

 

Edited August 4 by slotsmagic

[Graham the goldfish]

5 hours ago, Chopaholic said:

We need to delineate between mistakes and plain corruption.

Remember it was AW who told us in the first place about the Union Jackpot compensator tell, and also that it was put in there deliberately by the coder for monetary gain. There's a word for that, it's corruption. (AW also informs us that the same coder intended to put this into multiple other machines but then 'bottled it'.)

Literally in this thread he's said that there was 'a lot of dodgy code out there'.

I think we'd all be a lot more forgiving of all of this stuff if it was indeed just mistakes, but we know for a fact that it wasn't. We can debate the percentages until the cows come home, but of all the fuckery that existed on compensated machines over the decades, from the early days of solid-state control right through to the dying days of the £100 era (Powerplay/Batman Power Up, anyone?), some of it was incompetence, and some of it was corruption.

Fact. No debate. It's a fact.

(Some may object to my use of the word 'incompetence' but when Barcrest were kicking out machines in the £35 era that were vulnerable to plugging, something that had been a thing since the £4.80 era (or earlier!), I don't think it's unreasonable to call that incompetence.)

And it wasn't just the AWPs either, right up to and including the absolute daddy of them all, Casino Grandslam with a £1000 jackpot, someone at BFM apparently didn't think to have the learnable patterns on the top reels reset when stake switching, leading to machines that could be smashed into oblivion whilst others who were just expecting some sort of fair gamble, to be left in the hole to the tune of hundreds upon hundreds of pounds in a single session.

AW's input here is IMO both valued and welcome, but the truth of the situation is that a lot of us were hurt, in some cases very badly, by malfunctioning compensated fruit machines, and when poked those wounds can still be sore.

I get where this hatred is coming from, but I don't really share this view. The machines I most had a problem with were the ones that had less on them of all of the machines i ever played. The £6 era, barcrests and jpms around the feature game era. I would play them from the moment the arcades opened sometimes until the second they closed. First in, last out and if i could id be back the next day. The truth is they were compelling games, with a unique cost and reward ratio that I think were both cheap to play and I could potentially win significant money (for teenage me).

I'm fairly sure that there was a mix of unintentional software faults and some back handed bits too. But if im honest they made the games less playable and therefore appealing for me and I know that's the case for others too. Take a look at the £6ers in the pubs. How busy were they? Now think of the £100ers. They could literally sit there all day without play sometimes.

Reflect that perhaps the reason you were able to break the cycle of addiction was ironically because of the opportunity you got to sit on the other side of the fence and spend a couple of years winning. I'm not doubting there's times you got stung because you follower a player, but would you not have just played anything anyway until you drove your finances into a wall? I know that's exactly what I did in my darkest addict days. I wasn't leaving with any money, it's just fact, whether I won or not. If I turned a profit I was so buzzed to seek out and play the next machine.

One other point -- plugging, sparking, strimming, etc, didn't really cost other players money, they cost operators money, with the exception that the machine you play might be a bit light on coins.

 

 

 

[Projectgilda]

A couple of good posts there

[stevedude2]

5 hours ago, Boulderdash said:

Your Facebook post alerted @Chopaholicto the corruption in Union Jackpots, and now you're happily confirming all sorts of other dodginess, such as final credit perks, not collecting your bank etc that were manipulations deliberately put in by the developer, either for his own profit when playing or to sell to his favoured players. 

 

Where in his post does Projectgilda say that individual developers put those things in themselves to profit directly from them?  He's talking about stuff that manufacturers introduced into their games to try and give their games an edge over the competition and increase VTP, stuff that the Gambling Commission eventually banned because they weren't in the spirit of the Gambling Act and the Technical Standards of the time.  Things like spinning 2 feature symbols on the line on your last credit to induce further play and so on.

 

5 hours ago, Boulderdash said:

That's not the case at all. People are genuinely fascinated by all the shenanigans, but because it cost them a lot of money and caused them personal pain, they are rightly angry too. 

That anger isn't directed at @Projectgildain anything I've read or written in this thread. It's at the bent industry. 

Yes, but now everyone is directing their accusations about the industry being bent at one person.  People are hooking onto certain phrases and trying to work an angle to bang the 'corruption' drum at every turn.  It's incessant.  Who the fuck would come here and want to put up with that shit when all they wanted to do was share a bit of chat about the games they worked on over the years?

Besides, I think the point of this thread in particular was to participate in some dialogue with an ex-industry employee and hear some stories.  There are a million threads on here that Chopley has hijacked with his 'the industry is bent and corrupt' narrative.  I was hoping that this wouldn't be one of them but alas, here we are yet a-fucking-gain.

He's so utterly deranged and hysterical with it that at this point I think the only solution that might work for him is to see a shrink about it, and I'm being completely straight-faced and sincere when I say that.  It's like he's preparing a dossier of evidence so he can go to 10 Downing Street, present it to Keir Starmer and demand answers as to why not every single fruit machine that has been produced in the last 40 years played a completely fair game for everyone.

I'm aware some people have suffered greatly from fruit machine addiction and I've certainly had my own trials and tribulations over the years but can we at least have one thread that doesn't get ruined by anti-industry rhetoric?  Maybe Chopley should start his own website up to keep all of this in one place?

 

 

Edited August 4 by stevedude2

[Hamsun]

I think it's worth reiterating that virtually all 'pro' players started out as addicts / obsessives. How else would they gain their  various playing skills and knowledge of features &c? 

It's not a very nice 'profession' nor is it eactly stable. Gambling tends to bring out the worst in people, whether it's becoming angry and depressed at losing or crowing about winning.

I'm sure there was corruption in the fruit machine business but I've always been sceptical of the idea that there was a direct line between some crooked industry insiders and 'top players' who only played machines on which they had been given inside info. I can't believe a non-player (ie, non-addict) would have had the motivation to get involved with travelling around looking for machines to empty.

I did know some 'pro players' years ago who desperately wanted to get jobs testing new machines in the hope they could work out emptiers and techniques.

If any of them managed to get into such positions I daresay they might be the sort to leak info for a price. As far as I know, none of them gained employment in the industry, even at low levels.

I guess it's possible that arcade owners and staff with access to new machines and some technical knowledge might have discovered emptiers and exploits. With the exception of true skill features that can be discovered purely through playing, it's always been a mystery to me where emptiers and the like originate.