Be Excellent To Each Other

They have plenty of money.

Well the developer of the game has an active rep on the forums and they confirmed it was a legit win and also replayed the bonus round to make the video, so there'd have to be a lot of folks in cahoots.....

As a multiplication of stake the win isn't off the scale ridiculous, it's the fact the guy was playing £20 spins that really sent it into the stratosphere.

As Grim... says, that sort of figure is pocket change to the casino, the fact that they've chosen to allow such big bets on a highly volatile slot says they're quite happy with that sort of potential exposure.

(For example there's a slot called Dead or Alive 2 which can hit for 110,000x stake, some casinos limit that to £3 spins at a maximum, whilst the developer allows for up to £18 spins.)

Like I said, I have no doubt it happened.

If it was me, and I wanted someone to win to get some visibility, and to get vulnerable people chucking in more money, I would choose an active forum member to win big..

But they can't 'choose' who wins, the games are totally and 100% random, by law.

Here's an interesting one, we've caught the Coral and Gala casinos advertising that they're running slots at 96% RTP, but analysis of the network traffic when the slot is loading shows that they're running the 94% maths model, that's a 50% increase in the house edge.

This has already been submitted to the UKGC as a formal complaint, we've also made Coral aware (and indeed gave them ample opportunity to respond before going public).

What the hell did you do to that poor image? It's simultaneously massive and unreadable, which is quite the achievement.

Sorry it's a still from my video and it was running at 480p.

It's the network trace that you can run in Chrome by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + I.

When loading in slots from a provider called Play 'N Go, you can see the server passes the value '94' for the RTP, the help files state they're running in the 96% maths model.

Here's a better pic.

While I agree it's dubious, it's not proof that's what it's doing unless you've got access to the rest of the code showing it doing something relevant with that value.

We tested it at a fuckton of casinos. Play 'N Go release their games with five different maths models, 96, 94, 91, 87 and 84. Everywhere else we tried the value in the network trace matched the help file.

However, the help files are ordinarily served up by Play 'N Go themselves, but Coral and Gala do their own help files.

It'll be a mistake rather than deliberate maleficence, but it's still ripping off their customers and in breach of their LCCP licence.

More info here - https://www.casinomeister.com/forums/th ... nse.90445/

I have code where the variable may say one thing, but what I choose to do with that variable is not necessarily the same thing...

Yes, quite. Or I don't even do anything with that variable any more, it's from 8 revs back.

Yes we have considered all those kinds of things, and indeed before going public I said to the guy I was working with that we don't actually have cast iron proof of what that value means.

However, if you look at the thread you'll see all the work that went into it, one really good 'tell' was a casino that recently changed from running the 96 maths model to the 94 maths model, and that value had changed to 94.

There's also a load of extra stuff from Russia that kicked all this off, but that's more detail that's not necessary here.

And we can certainly trust them not to break the law.

Oh.

The irony is not lost on me.

Oh yes and Coral have just pulled all Play 'N Go slots from their casino, so make of that what you will.

Just to catch me up, 96% RTP is over time, for every 100 you pop in, you get 96 of them back?

And now they're coming back with new help files.....

In simple terms, yes. Although to give you an idea, developers usually run simulations over some 5-10 billion spins before releasing a new slot, to make sure it's keeping to its RTP correctly.

And we've now had it confirmed by a representative from the casino group, they were indeed advertising the wrong RTPs, they are of course saying it was a mistake ('internal communication breakdown'), they removed all the games from their casinos and are bringing them back online with the correct help files.

Oh, well, that's fine then.

Well no, obviously not. That's what the official complaint to the UKGC is for.

Update.

Stu on the telly!

The subject of the video is the infamous 'Fairplay' campaign, which targeted cheating fruit machines.

The main video is not mine, but a chum of mine who goes by the name 'Fishsta'.



INTRO VIDEO:



MAIN VIDEO:

I didn't watch all of that (natch), but I hadn't realised you were such a "face" on the scene (the bit where he talks about being directed to Degsy's web hovel by Stuart Campbell).

Are you a fruitie influencer?

I realise it's not much of a claim to fame but I created and hosted the first fruit machine emulation site on the entire internet.

Going back to 2001, I had heard of the emulator via a small UK fruit machine Usenet group where the author was offering it for sale, but no one was really showing any interest. (Apparently he sold fewer than 10 copies.) I bought a copy myself for £50, not really believing it would be 'proper' emulation, and a CD duly arrived in the post with the emulator and layouts + ROMs for about 40 machines or so. Pretty much as soon as I loaded it in and started to play, I realised that there would be a considerable amount of interest in a genuine fruit machine emulator (because it was indeed the real deal).

As such I started up my site, the very first fruit machine emulation website, and it quickly generated quite a bit of traffic, turns out there were many people out there forlornly typing 'fruit machine emulation' into Google/Yahoo/etc search on a reasonably regular basis, and my site was the first site that ever generated any results.

It's still hosted by a current fruit machine emulation website, my site was last updated in 2002...... - http://dadsfme.co.uk/hovel/The%20Hovel/index.html

I made a video about it as well.

Haha first page is me, swearing and hollering as I used to do.

Cumtwatta!

Still one of our favourite insults that is.....

Poor Cavey

You dedicated an entire CD-R to Outlook Express??

I am a very diligent archivist. I can recover a copy of my 'My Documents' folder from mid-1999.

I assume that by "Outlook Express", it means the email data then rather than the program itself? Because if it's the program, then that's a bit further than "very diligent archivist".

It's the .dbx files (each of the folders in Outlook Express had its own .dbx file associated with it), which can be opened using a modern program, the name of which currently escapes me. I use it in the video linked above to restore emails from the very earliest days of the fruit machine emulation scene.

Hang on, SysTools DBX Converter, that's the fella.

Might be of interest to a couple of folks.

Here we have an old club machine (from 1993/1994) that never, ever, reaches its target percentage unless you play it a certain way.

Play it as some people played it back in the day, and it will permanently sit around 20% under its target percentage.

First video is me getting pissed off with it, second video is a fine fruit machine emulation community effort getting to the bottom of it.

Really sad news, the coder of MPU3/4, later known as MFME, has died at the age of 55

He went by the forum name of 'Wizard' but his real name was Chris Wren.

I made a couple of videos about this.

Fuck man that's really fucking shitty

I've not touched an emulator in 8 years but fuck that sucks

Paid my respects, if that is even possible.

Hi there JC, yes it's been totally shit and some of us have been hit really hard by it, but some positives have come out of a terrible event.

It turns out that none of Chris's family knew about his emulator. They knew that his house was full of old fruit machines and pinballs and all sorts of other gadgets and gizmos, that he'd maxed out his garage and converted his loft to get more stuff in, and spent a huge amount of time tinkering and on his computer, but they simply had no idea that he'd spent the last twenty years coding, developing and iterating an emulator that had brought so much joy into so many people's lives.

We've actually had two of his family sign up over at Desert Island Fruits, including one of his nieces, who has posted to say how much it means to the family to understand and appreciate what it was he had done. (A few people literally credit Chris with saving their lives, as his emulator was pivotal in them breaking the cycle of addiction.)

We're all annoyed on his behalf, because he was within shouting distance of accomplishing his goal, which was to basically have every known fruit machine that the ROMs were available for, running in his emulator, he'd even implemented electromechanical machines from the late 1970s that don't even have ROMs, and all told his one single emulator covered 40 years of fruit machines.

I reckon that given another five years or so, he'd have done it.

Gutted.

I walked in 2011, but those 11 years were the biggest roller coaster of my life really. My marriages didn't even last that long lol.

Yeah I saw his family posts. When I met up with Mike Stead down in Selsey a few years ago I left an open invitation for a meet with Chris, who apparently did pop down now and then. He flat out refused. I am glad I did that though. It was probably the last thing I had left to do with FME and then I could walk away.

I've lost a few online friends now. It's never easy really. I mean you can try and rationalise it in your head as "well I never knew him or her so it's less important" but that's bullshit. From the sound of Chris if you didn't know him online you didn't know him at all. I mean, we knew him better than his family. He was a complete hermit and I know how that is.

A few years back a fellow modder who I knew very well passed away. He was very young (early 30s). Literally found a lump on his neck and he was dead within a month. I was desolate. I'd never ever felt that way about someone I had never met dying before.

The older I get the less I engage with the world through traditional means.

TBH? my life is one big project and there is no way I can ever get everything done. You just have to do what you can whilst you have the chance tbh. I've known that a very long time. 40 years in fact since my father passed away at 35 and I have had every year since then (12) that he never got. So it's not something I ever forget. Time is the most incredibly valuable thing you ever have.

I figured I would post this. QXIR did one of his tales from the bottle last night about Paul Michael Larson. That name probably won't mean anything to you.

Back in 2003 whilst in the states I watched the documentary about how a man learned that a certain gameshow was skill based, and thus took them to the fuckin' cleaners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWX00C- ... annel=Qxir

Well last night's tale was about him. I know at the time (in 2003) I couldn't really do much to share the info, but I do remember posting about it. This was on Fruit Forums. Again I doubt any one but me would remember... Worth a watch though.

Luck be a Landlord - the second game featured in this article on Eurogamer, might be of interest.

Interesting to see the various proposed gambling restrictions. Given that some of them will involve changes to the casino software itself, I wonder if some more brands will just pull out of the UK altogether - not that my heart will bleed too much for them.

How I fucked up at Lancaster University.

Did everyone go to Lancaster uni?

Well I was only there for four months, and even then did very little academic study, so I'm not sure it really counts.

My Mrs did, and so did all her friends she met at Uni.

My cousin went to Lancaster

This seems to be the thread we had been putting all the dodgy stuff into for gambling so :

https://news.sky.com/story/william-hill ... s-12843929

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-65091257

Basically William Hill have just been fined £19.2 million for not carrying out any type of checks which allowed people who had self excluded to open new accounts and gamble , and also people were gambling eye watering amounts in very short periods of time , the examples given in the Sky News story above include :

Oh and for all the broken links above Hearthy has a different account :

https://www.youtube.com/@DegsyDegworth

(where he's reuploading lots of the older videos and adding some new ones)

What happened to the old channel?