Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm sure I've done this before and precisely no one gave a shit, but I'm nothing if not mindlessly optimistic.

So then, real fruit machines, on your PC!

This is perfect emulation of the 'one armed bandits' that festoon seaside arcades and pubs and cafes and service stations and suchlike, they used to be everywhere but they're not quite as ubiquitous these days. Most pubs still have two or three of the buggers though.

The emulators available cover from the early 80s up to about 2006. (Captain Caveman likes the ancient shite machines, but then he is a strange old man.)

If you've played a fruit machine in that timespan, chances are it's been emulated with a lovely looking 'real DX' layout.

I've attached a couple of machines for folks to play with, just unzip the file, run the MFME executable, go File > Load Game, browse to the folder you've unzipped to (it should start in that location by default) and open the GAM file.

You can either click on the buttons with your mouse, or use what are generally the 'standard' shortcut keys, SPACE for start, 123 for holds/nudges, 0 to put a pound coin in, ` for cancel/collect, E for exchange, F for feature etc.

If there's any interest I can upload my complete collection to Usenet (runs to about 5GB), or sites such as Fruit-Emu provide a free download service. It's all non-commercial and completely 'for fun', no one's trying to make any money out of it.

http://www.fruit-emu.com/

Play the games with sound, as all modern machines (from the early 90s onwards) use funky samples stolen from all over the place.

Hmmm files are too large to attach here, I'll use our WoW guild's website instead -

Game #1 - http://files.enjin.com/62279/Wild%20Zone.zip

Game #2 - http://files.enjin.com/62279/Gladiators.zip

I've always been a little curious about these... I'll give them a download tonight and have a mess.

I go through phases with fruit machine emulation. I sometimes try it as something to help me with my addiction to them, but it only works for a short while before I end up playing the real thing.

While I used to prefer the feature style machines (Gladiators and Indiana Jones spring to mind), I usually play the straightforward stuff like Party Time (features where you just spin wins, rather than having to know the machine's ins and outs) which, last time I checked, wasn't emulated.

Favourite machine would probably be Kung-Fu though.

A question for you AE on another pointless emulator you know a lot about - Pinmame

I would love to do a 'Pinball' challenge on here where people could pick a few pinball tables and we play them one a week to see who could get the best scores - however Vpinmane is an absoloute mess to try and setup and I couldnt easily get a set of files for people to drop onto their machine and click to play.

Is it possible / have you see anyone else set it up ?

Party Time is done dude, Scorpion 1&2 emulation were added in MFME V3.0, replacing the functional but clunky BFMulator for Scorpion hardware. (At the other end of the spectrum, Scorpion 4 is done as well, which covers all BFM/Mazooma/QPS machines up to around 2006 or so.)

IIRC I got the crazy token streak out of Party Time the last time I played it, so you'll probably need to pump it a bit before it'll pay anything out as downloaded

Kung-Fu was done ages ago but I guess you've already got that?

http://files.enjin.com/62279/Party%20Time.zip

I haven't been able to get Visual Pinball running on Windows 7 at all, and it's still the utter fucking bastard it always used to be to get set up too, I spent an evening trying to get it running a few months ago and eventually gave up.

There is allegedly a 'simple' installer, but it doesn't appear to work.

Actually, fuck it, I'm on holiday, I'll have another go, I was drunk the last time I tried and found it all a bit confusing, I'm sure I can manage it sober.

http://www.pinballnirvana.com/forums/sh ... php?t=4293

Ah, excellent - I'll have to give it a go. I'd seen Simulators of that kind of thing (which seems even more pointless than emulation). Hopefully there are variants of the Party Time tech out there too.

And yes, I've already given Kung-Fu a fair old play in the past.

Cheers AE, many thanks for the info.

i like reading this thread, but i just can't imagine having fun with a fruit macvhine emulator... not liking fruit machines at all, and this seems like removing all points there would have been (money!)

so help me, why is this fun
(not to troll, genuine question)

Because the games are genuinely entertaining in their own right, think of them as games, not 'money machines that can't pay out money'.

Give Gladiators a try, that's a nice fun themed machine, with loads of great samples from 80s/90s bands.

If you're an ex-addict (as I am) then of course they have more spice about them, as I can now play the machines that used to rob me blind and destroyed years of my life from the safety of my PC, but even without that motivator I think they generally stand up as fun games to play - certainly the more modern ones with decent sounds and music.

Then you have machines like the casino £1000 psychotic 'Grandslam' (Cavey could telly you a few stories about that.....), 50p per go and it'll take hundreds of quid off you in the blink of an eye, as you play off the wins on the top reels at up to £10 per spin (!).

Here's a real one, but it's emulated perfectly, and yes the dude is playing at £10 per spin on the top reels, with the bank balance changing by hundreds of pounds per minute.



And Part 2, although it does get a bit samey, it finally does go for the £1000 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OinKSvZ8 ... re=related

I did get it going but there was so many faffs and moving files around - what i'd love is a simple way to get a set of files so we could do a challenge and get people playing stuff like The Adams Family and posting scores.

I may have another go at the weekend to get something usable.

Heh! The infamous Casino Grandslam. The last 'real' machine I ever played, actually. At its merciless hands, I took an £800 beating, as my old friend AE will certainly testify.

Kinda puts £400 for a nice PC into perspective, huh. There I was, knee deep in empty pound coin bags, thinking how I was ever going to tell poor Mrs Caveman, working her arse off and going without lunches at work for the sake of £2 that she didn't have, that I'd blown away the family holiday budget on a fucking fruit machine. What a twat.

Still, I suppose I should be grateful to this machine. That was way back in 2002 and I shudder to think how much I would've spunked away on machines in that time, if I was still playing them.

I did have to buy a real one, though; it is the pride of my personal collection, constrained as it is within my gamesroom. It's OK playing fruit machines when you have the door keys.

The mother-in-law works in a bookies, where they have one of those roulette machines, and the amount of cash that goes into that thing every day is scary. There are people who'll come in on payday, drop a couple of hundred quid in an hour and then come in next week and do exactly the same thing again. And those roulette casino machines don't even look like much fun.

'Gamblers' never appealed to me in the slightest. I'm shocked to hear how many BeeXers have been hooked on them and I'm really glad you all have it under control these days.

I'd be worried that these emulators would give me the urge again though.

It doesn't work like that Zarz, at least not in my experience.

One gets addicted to the 'risk factor' when gambling/risking money for real - I guess it comes down to chemicals that are produced in the brain at such times. If so, this is de facto drug addiction and explains how one can even become (chemically) addicted to something that is seemingly impossible so to do.

There is no risk factor to FME, any more than there is to having your own real, even fully cash floated machines. I found this out myself; after the initial flourish/interest, now my own machines simply gather dust, for 99.9% of the time. I now see them for what they truly are, as a non-gambler sees them. Same deal with 'nicotine free' cigarettes - even if these look and taste exactly the same, they will never scratch the itch for a (drug addicted) smoker.

Ok, that makes sense. Glad you have it under control these days.

Those are not technically fruit machines, they're known as FOBTs or Fixed Odds Betting Machines.

The key difference between fruit machines and FOBTs is that FOBTs are random whereas fruit machines are controlled.

So on a FOBT, you can lose £200 and it's still no closer to paying out, it doesn't 'have' to pay anything out, as it just picks a random number every time you press the button and displays the result.

Fruit machines have target percentages which the software actively works towards, so if you lose £100 on one (or £800 as Cavey did ), then it is actually closer to paying out, and eventually it will have to drop big wins.

This for me is why I found fruit machines so addictive but never gave a fuck about casino games or other random games, and also because a lot of fruit machines do genuinely respond to skilful play and/or knowledge of the features/reels etc, you get a feeling of control and that you can influence what happens.

Umm..yeah. *hides bank statements*

Whilst very broadly correct, that's a very risky assumption though, as we both know to our cost mate, and I'd never recommend anyone works on this basis, chasing their losses in the belief that the pre-determined code 'compensator' will come to their rescue.

It's a complex area and certainly not something I'm an expert in, but it is now widely known that many fruit machines had so-called 'exploits' and 'emptiers' whereby totally counter-intuitive strategies (like constantly refusing jackpots on certain machines in a very specific way, or only collecting one 'feature', or 'reversing' hi-lo gambles, in certain circumstances etc. etc.) always pay. So the player who happens to be 'in the know' isn't really 'gambling' at all; this is 'knowledge', not 'skill'. (Many old machines that AE scoffs at were largely based on true skill elements - stopping really fast skillstops, knowing the reels and features inside out etc., but these are long gone).

However, these 'guaranteed wins' are still usually accounted for, meaning that the hapless other players using this machine will always lose, as it 'catches up', ready for the next pasting.

In addition, as you know of course , many machines - especially clubbers and casino variants - have very long pay cycles, so they're not going to give back any value for a very, very long time, following a nasty 'suck period'. (If FME is to be believed - actual physical meters on some machines bought by FME scene members for graphics resources etc. come to that - there are machines that don't seem to make anything like percentage, too AFAIK?)

Ironically therefore, a random machine is a leveller and therefore much 'fairer' in these circumstances. (Such machines usually have a much higher payout percentage to boot).

Fuuuuuuuuck

Oh I'm not advocating it at as a strategy or anything Cavey, just trying to explain the difference between the two 'genres' if you will in layman's terms.

I have forced a few of the £70 AWPs, and they're fucking scary, I had one that cost £160 for a jackpot (and it was full from the off), which then proceeded to go on a £210 streak (a jackpot followed by a £140 mega streak) - a £210 bank on a pub AWP, how crackers is that?

Here's a pub AWP going on a £166 mega streak, that's £166 off a single top feature (obviously taking a credit for each £70). Needless to say if you catch these wrong they will absolutely take you to the cleaners. I've heard horror stories of £300+ going over the back without a jackpot.

I estimate my lifetime losses to be in the region of £40-£50K.

A lot of my late teens and twenties weren't much fun

That's a shitload of cash.

Thinking about it, that's probably why £610 for a gaming PC honestly doesn't seem like much money to me, when you've spent your wages and loans and overdrafts and sold your stuff and committed crimes* to feed an addiction, it kind of skews your opinion about money somewhat.

I still think I'm lucky not to have ended up dead or in prison, frankly.

* I've never committed a crime 'against a person' as it were, mugging or burglary or anything like that, more stuff like selling drugs at Uni and shit like that. And then gambling the proceeds in Manchester city centre arcades, to quote Cavey, what a twat!

Yeah, I've never felt so ashamed in all my life.

I've spent the last 10 years trying to make it up to both her and my girls, who found it in their hearts to forgive me, despite everything.

It's a real eye-opener this thread, good of you all to give us the insight.

Very much Well, without the crimes bit. My view on money is completely screwed up as a result of my gambling - when I get a pay rise at work for example, I don't see it as a good thing.. it's just more money to gamble with.

Get help mate. Give your missus all your cards and cash and be totally honest with her about your reasons, so you've never access to money. Set up a savings account and put all money saved in that (irrespective of what you owe), and reward you and her with a nice holiday with the proceeds.

Fruit machines are evil things and you'll be much happier without them. Note 'happier' - obviously you'll be richer too, but it's just so good to be able to walk into a pub or service station, knowing you don't *have* to play the fecking machines, ruining yet another night, you can be like other people and just enjoy the pint/meal whatever. Just to be free from the slavery of it feels so good, and you CAN do it mate, in the end it isn't even hard, once you get your head straight. In the final analysis, how hard can it be NOT to insert coins into a fruit machine? I did, and I was as hooked through the bag as it's surely possible for anyone to be.

Well said Cavey.

Compulsive/addictive gambling is a terrible burden for a person to carry, it genuinely degrades the life that's afflicted, not just in a financial sense either, it weighs heavy on a very human level, and affects the people around you as well.

When I think of some of the low points in my life thanks to gambling..... Horrible, horrible stuff. That crushing sense of disappointment in yourself, you've fucked it all up again, and you can see it in the faces of the people who care about you.

Forgive me if this sounds preachy devilman, but honestly dude, you'll be better off without, you really will.

Years ago, a friend was really into gambling in a big way (mostly fruit machines and bookies) and actually ran away to London because he had debts. I visited him, and he was living in a squat and well, life wasn't great.

I've not seen him for years, but he was happily married with several children when I last saw him. He still goes/went to the bookies, though.

I have to ask... do you think such a thing would have happened to you under a Conservative government?

I'm single and live alone so it's only affecting me which makes it a little harder. Plus my main vice is online slots now rather than the physical ones. If you've never played the likes of the Microgaming/Playtech slots online - they're far more addictive than physical machines, to me at least.

I appreciate the advice from you and AE though - I'm trying to sort myself out again at the moment. Currently I'm at the stage where I'm blogging my progress daily just to have an incrementing record of my thoughts at the time so that I'm not bottling stuff up. I'm on a whole 8 days without so far, so it's very early days yet though.

(I tend to keep all this crap out of the Nay thread)

@ Alberto obv.



Mock all you like - I deserve to be mocked in many ways and I accept that by posting what I did, it was inevitable, though I daresay addiction isn't a laughing matter, at least not in my book. However, at least I finally faced the issue and changed my behaviour, so I can take a little pride in that. Plus it's given you the opportunity of a cheap shot and a jolly good laugh, right?

I guess I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of this - self inflicted to be fair (although, playing those first few quid in a fruit machine, I wasn't to know I'd become almost instantly hooked for 20 years). I've seen the human misery it can cause. Let's hope you never have to find out.

@ Grim

Nah, not at all mate, at least not from me.

Good for you mate, you CAN do it! Get GAMCARE or whatever it is on your PC as well, it will block all gambling sites. Email all the online casinos that you use, telling them of your addiction issue and they are LEGALLY OBLIGED to strike you and your IP address etc. off their systems.

Don't ever forget, far from being some massive sacrifice on your part you aren't making any sacrifice at all, the rest of your life will be so much better as a result from this, right from Day One.

Cavey

Some of the Microgaming slots are like digital crack.

I binned about £3K on them over a few month period about three years ago

It didn't help that I got a few good wins early on, including an £1100 spin for a 90p stake on a Thunderstruck clone called Summertime, plus a couple of £450-£500 wins on the bonus round in Hitman.

Next thing I know I'm playing fucking low-techs at £5 per spin at 2am in the morning, lost £1000 in one night

I eventually packed them up by playing thousands of quid through in demo mode rather than with real money (they still have the same %age in demo mode), and keeping an accurate record of much money I was 'losing' - and fortunately that did the job. Quite a relapse for me really, I hadn't gambled like that for fucking years.

EDIT TO ADD - Yeah I guess this is why I say stuff like '£610 isn't a lot of money', it's not supposed to be blasé and it's not because I'm rich, the 'value' of money changes I think when you can see £1000 disappear in about three or four hours.

When I worked at the train station, the man who waved sticks at the trains would spend upwards of £200 every Saturday. We were taking about £700 per week per machine or so, in a comparatively quiet station.

I was always under the impression that the "70%" stickers, or whatever they are, meant that for every 10 £1 coins that you stick into it, three go into the hopper which any player will never see again, the remainder going into the prize hopper.

Without wishing to sound rude, I find the last part of your quote hard to genuinely believe to be true, it's too much like a Skinner box.

Honestly dude it's true, indeed, this is partly why me and Cavey well and truly lost our shirts back in the day, because unbeknown to us there was a whole raft of tricks/cheats/exploits/etc on virtually all fruit machines, and we were just the mugs filling them up for the clued up players.

A really simple example, for a period of a few years in the 90s, all machines made by a manufacturer called JPM did something called 'numbering' - whereby the player watched the hi/lo gamble reel (which runs from 1-12) during normal play. If the hi/lo reel ever span to a 1 or 12, the machine had a jackpot in it. The more often you saw 1 or 12, the closer it was and the more jackpots you'd be able to get out of it.

If you didn't see a 1 or 12 at all, the machine was dead and would not pay out a jackpot.

If the machine was happy, you'd see it showing 1 or 12 less often, and when it stopped showing 1 or 12, you'd taken all the jackpots out of it.

You can test this behaviour in the emulator on the machines that do numbering, if you don't see 1 or 12, you'll never ever gamble a win to the jackpot or get it off the feature.

Yeah, a lot of them have tells, especially if you got to the feature board. I recall that the Simpson's machine turned Homer red, and you couldn't die.

That's an invincible board, generally referred to as a 'red board'. I'd say about 99% of players know about that though

There was a way to manipulate the red boards on The Simpsons (which was actually a clone of a machine called The Great Escape), as the machine maintained two cashpots in the code (a normal pay pot and a streak pot), so you played it until it offered a red board, and then deliberately DIDN'T take the jackpot, instead just collecting £2 or £3 from the board.

You had to keep doing this until it paid a jackpot off a normal (non-red) board, and then the next board would be guaranteed red with two repeats on the jackpot.

On a £15 jackpot it made a total pay of at least £60, although sometimes the red board would repeat three times, to make £75.

The Great Escape and another clone called The Italian Job are both emulated, and that behaviour works on the emulators.

Maygay did rechip this behaviour (i.e. replacement code on a new program cartridge), so that the machine would do 'phantom red' boards instead, whereby the board was red but the logo didn't turn red, so the player had no way of knowing if they were being given the streak-beginning normal jackpot, or were actually knackering the streak pot. After the rechip they were dodgy and too dangerous to play for this reason.

I wrote the following words about ten - fifteen years ago:

Spook!

Sorry, I've phrased that really clumsily, and I'm aware this could be a potentially sensitive matter to some, and don't want to come across as belittling choices that other's have made/are making/will make in their lives. I'm naturally suspicious of gambling and things that take money away from people with the promise of returns (although, it has just come to my mind that the VC firm I'm currently working for does exactly that, and I've found that to be fascinating), and don't really partake in it, so it is all somewhat alien to me.

I'm happy to be educated (I've stuck money in a fruit machine about four times in my life, if that) on an anecdotal level, as I find things like that interesting, but my viewpoint is so far removed from the situation it's hard for me to make decent comment.

Well even that £1000 monster that Cavey got mullered by could be manipulated, indeed, the information on how to do this was worth huge amounts of cash in the day, and some folks got themselves barred from entire casino chains.

I never did get the full story on it, but it was something to do with how the machine maintained not entirely separate 'pots' for each of the stakes on the top reels, and therefore the player could take multiple jackpots out of it (i.e. walk away with £2000 or £3000), it also had a tell whereby it would show a certain win on one of the stakes to indicate it was in a 'doable state'.

Unfortunately the multiple jackpots were still properly accounted for by the code, so needless to say they went on the mother of pisstakes afterwards, which is where Cavey got twatted

Are you an ex-player then?

Yeah. Not to the same scale as the others in this thread (because I didn't have the money), but I remember once putting my weeks wages into Wipeout the day I got them and losing the lot, and deciding something had to change.

Wipeout had one fucker of an emptier for it on the original chip, by the time they turned up over here they'd all been rechipped so I never got to have a crack on one.

After the rechip it was just a straight force and hope for the streak.

Unfortunately Impulse (who made Wipeout) used the 'EPOCH' tech, which is one of the very few techs not emulated. (Well, it is emulated, but the emulator has not been publicly released.)

Did you maintain a fruit machine site then?

This is where being a geek goes against me. I actually bought some software - txnogam which very aggressively blocks anything gambling related. If I were to even click on the Poker thread on here for example, it would close the browser. If I were to listen to a song on Spotify with certain words in it (there's a White Zombie song which has 'poker' in the title for example) it would kill that off too. However, when I really had the urge to gamble, I figured a way around the software in the end - bypassing software I'd paid for

The other week I got myself excluded from the FortuneLounge group of online casinos which covers quite a few, so hopefully that'll help. It's annoying to still get offer emails from casinos (and their partners) I've excluded myself from though... I've noticed that unsubscribe options for casino emails are just useless.

Wrong Party Time by the way.

It's more this kinda thing ...

Ahhh right. Unfortunately the ASTRA tech isn't emulated, or rather, like EPOCH it is, but not publicly available.

Also, it's still a current and commercial tech, which muddies the water too.

Astra certainly hit the proverbial jackpot with Party Time, and they've been riffing on it ever since.

I've watched my pal gamble away a small fortune in that machine on more than one occasion. On the plus side I got to chat up the attendants & drink as much tea as I could manage while he did it

I hate gambling machines, the puggies here got rid of almost all their arcade machines & replaced them with this shite That & there's nothing worse than going for a pint with a friend and them spending the night transfixed by the flashy thieves in the corner, at least smokers are back within five or so minutes