My online slots videos (plus UK AWPs)

[ChopleyIOM]

Poker Face was definetely one where Betcom (or Games Media or whatever they were known as back then!) were still finding their feet with the paint by numbers profile, I remember it doing some very odd things on 70 presumably because they did a rush job on upgrading it from 35!

The 70 era of Bank Job and the million clones of that (some having such good quality control they still said 'B A N K J O B' for the top feature on the alpha even if the machine was themed something else entirely!) were definetely where the money was, not as many players going round forcing them for the sake of it and also you could often watch someone with perhaps slightly less knowledge force one, get a flat then just walk away and then you could jump on for an after board which loved to give a game for either 50 quid or another B A N K J O B

The early 100 era was an interesting one as you could trap them into giving you the top feature via add again / extra life and then just taking a risk on hi/lo when landing on the required square so you essentially didn't want to force them as it was more profitable trying for a trap (you could trap the 70 ones in the same way but it wasn't worth it as much considering the fairly often 140 potential of the top feature) but at least if the trap didn't come in you were still putting money towards the force if that makes any sense at all!

Then they just started releasing stuff like Oliver's Twist which is just a straight out force and you're probably not going to be making any money although I have had some go in amazingly cheaply (I think £3 is my record!), although that leads me to my next point it was probably because some poor punter had experienced the dreaded NOTE MECH ERROR the night before

Also they did try a machine profile that did a 200 top feature once (Bank Job The Getaway or something like that!), it was bloody awful so I can see why they stuck with 150!

There was also that 'Immortal 300' release which you always wonder if they were anticipating a jump up from a 100 jackpot at some point and it would have had the potential to do a 300 quid top feature!

My best ever Betcom result is stuck in my mind forever, Slug and Lettuce in Durham, 50p in Bank Job for a board, first move ?, credit broke for the 140!

The thing with the Betcoms - (even before they were Betcom, their first one was AC Games with Poker Face, but then AC Games was ex-Global employees who made Jackpots That Rock 'N Roll, you can trace the profile back to the £25 jackpot days!) - is that they just kind of worked, they weren't really fuckable with in the traditional compensated machines sense, not withstanding the modest trap you mention there.

Certainly they couldn't be left in the state that (for example) DONDs could, which would never open the game, ever, if they were being kept on top of by players. The Betcoms always controlled their DOND games so tightly that they could at least offer it to normal players.

The blocks were insane though, as hangovers from old code became increasingly apparent as the jackpot increased, so we ended up with the Crown Jewels era of £70 jackpot machines, that would block at £4 (!) when dead - although at least that made them easy to read

I can't match your best ever result there, but I did have one go in once for under a tenner that did the £140

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Latest couple of reuploads.

The Manic Money Monster one highlights the kinds of ways that compensated machines can get themselves into all sorts of trouble with when the code doesn't look ahead properly, particularly the 'notes rip' which it completely blunders into. The thing is the machine does then account for the jackpot pay, and this thing can block at £4 all day when it knows it needs to catch up. (For those who still try to insist Bonanza is 'compensated', it really isn't, this is what a compensated machine looks like.)

The Big Match video is about a cool football themed machine from 1993/1994, that I was slightly terrified of back in the day, as it'd rip you a new arsehole if the mood took it, but very nice if you could catch the streak.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Latest two reuploads.

£100 JACKPOT FRUIT MACHINES ARE TERRIBLE - Very much says it all in the title. How do you make a compensated machine that can be set as low as 70% RTP (generally set to 74-76%) where your stake to prize value is 100x (on the maximum £1 play) or 400x on 25p play? SPOILER ALERT - You can't, they're fucking shite.

ACE'S CAESARS PALACE - Harking back to a better era when a compensated fruit machine genuinely rewarded the skilful player and NOT necessarily the player who was just clued up with the tricks, although there was an element of that, fundamentally this is a fruit machine you could win on simply be being 'good'.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Just a couple of reuploads for the weekend.

SPIN ON IT - One from @trancemonkey 's old house of Impulse! One of the best AWP music and sound packages ever, rather let down by the INCREDIBLY CHEAP speaker that was used in the Maygay/Impulse cabinet of the era, it actually sounds a lot better than the real machine did when played through decent modern speakers. Not a huge amount to say about the machine itself as it was basically a force for the streak type affair, but could be a decent earner if you got your timing right.

ARCADIA - This on the other hand is a really skilful AWP and not necessarily in a terrible cheaty sort of way (although it did numbering, which is a bit dirty), the crux of the machine is learning which features can award a jackpot, and making sure you're good enough to take those opportunities when they come around. Also you simply take the value the machine has in it, there's no point going for dodgy gambles. This is a 'crossover' machine for me, when I started to learn that there was more about winning out of AWPs than just dumb forcing.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Another couple of videos, the pub video has never been online before so is not a reupload, the footage was recorded back in March 2018 but I never put it on my old channel as it has other people in it who probably didn't/don't want to be on YouTube, however what I've done is blur out all sections that have faces in them so it can go up as a video. It's basically me forcing a Betcom in a local pub and ending up reasonably deep into it.

Amazingly, this fruit machine survived onsite until early this year, finally being replaced by a random £500 machine in around May-June 2022. Overall I made quite a lot of money out of it, although I only ever played it if I was out at the pub anyway, I couldn't be arsed going out just to play one machine.

This was the very last traditional reel-based AWP left in my home town of Ramsey (and possibly on the Isle of Man!), I've had nights out in Douglas and Peel recently, and I didn't see a single AWP in any pub. The random £500ers have completed their takeover.

The other one is a reupload, and is me playing five classic JPM System-5 machines. all on a £6 jackpot, from back in the days when AWPs did actually have some amusement to them.

 

[pinnit2014]

Jesus, there's a blast from the past. Didn't remember Fairground until i seen it there....Hagar as well, takes me back to playing them home, seaside town, with a few funny smelling cigarettes

 

[Jono777]

Made a tidy profit from Fairground back in the day as it was mostly skill based so the giro day punters would regularly fill it for me, used it mostly to convert tokens and then at the end it would pay more tokens back.

Did not know about the Coconut Shy trick until well, well after the event.

*Not watched video yet.

 

[pinnit2014]

Did you play Rollercoaster much?

It was in our local nightclub so, come 1.50am, it was time to pay for the taxi/entrance fee once the piss heads had filled her up

 

[Jono777]

Did you play Rollercoaster much?

It was in our local nightclub so, come 1.50am, it was time to pay for the taxi/entrance fee once the piss heads had filled her up

Yeah, Roller's were pretty widespread in Wolverhampton

Local arcade had one in which at first for a few month's was great value for similar reasons as you mention. Once casual players got better at skills and knew to look for numbering it became a lot harder to catch it right.

Had my fair share of Nemesis to the top and multi repeats on the Roller Coaster top feature

My preferred machine though was JPM's Snakes and Ladders, whether I was just too spawny who knows but I seemed to catch that just right virtually every time I went in the arcade. Was on £10/20p play and had a good few £50's / £60's back in the day which was a good raise back then!

 

[TheAddict]

Used to run around my old local arcade on the seaside hitting the rollup rollups for various local friends on Roller, often running across a massive arcade while leaving my own game mid board, hitting the rollup before it times out, then runnng back to my own session b4 someone tries to steal it.

We had something like 10 rollers on the seafront big arcade for a fair while in Kent. Prob hit more rollup rollup's than all players combined, lol. Was only a teen but woud find myself faling asleep with the board entry theme tune repeatig in my head many a night. For 2 or 3 years It's all i ever heard for 5-10 hours per day, 7 days a week, that damn board entry tune.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Nice to see there's still some love for these old fruity classics (as ever folks, do remember you can play them, perfectly emulated, for free on your PC/laptop as long as you've got Windows 10/11).

I never knew about numbering back in the day, just that one piece of information could have saved me an absolute fortune, but alas I was the mug filling them up for the clued-up players to come along and reap the rewards....

As for Roller Coaster, that got a video all of its own It may actually be the best AWP ever made.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Another couple of reuploads/re-edits, I've been on annual leave from work the last week which has given me some spare time to rework the old real fruit machine session videos, it's quite a time consuming process to go through the entire video and then apply blur affects to all the bits that have faces in them, but it's done now and doesn't need to be done again.

As such the DOND video is me getting a bit too into a fruit machine on a works night out, featuring extra random shouts of DEAL and NO DEAL from my trusty cameraman (we were both a bit pissed). NOTE - DOND Double Chance doesn't at any point get turned off and on by me because that would be naughty. (Sometimes a plugging is the only option left.)

The Thriller/Mouse Trap video covers a great old JPM AWP (Mouse Trap) and a somewhat rare one called Thriller.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Two reuploads for the weekend:

THE BIG PEEL PUB SESSION is exactly what it sounds like. Originally recorded and edited together in April 2018, this was never uploaded to the old channel so has never been seen before. It basically involved eight hours of drinking across four pubs, during which time I lost a chunk of cash in the random £500ers and got quite drunk to the point of reviewing the toilets in the pubs.

TRAIL BLAZER/THE HEAT IS ON is covering a couple of great old AWPs, Trail Blazer hails from the £15 era (don't know if @trancemonkey had anything to do with this one), and The Heat Is On from the £6 era, but being played here on an £8 jackpot.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Three reuploads for the run-up to Christmas, two of them are about the truly amazing Arcade Simulator project which combines the 100% accuracy of emulation, with the 'virtual world' aspect of being able to walk around a simulated arcade environment and choose any machine you can see in there to play, with perfect emulation.

The £4.80 jackpot video covers five machines from the early 90s when AWPs actually meant Amusement With Prizes, Manhattan Skylines in particular is bloody awesome.

(Once more for the record, all this stuff is completely free, you can get the emulator and the Arcade Simulator for literally zero pounds and zero pence, no one is making a single penny off this, it's all for the love of it.)

 

[TheAddict]

Just had a beer after a fat bifter while watching most of that vid Chops, but never did hear you say what happens when you light up the 4 segments of Taverner. Can you release me from my curiosity please?

 

[Kroffe]

I become gooder at English every time i learn a new word.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Just had a beer after a fat bifter while watching most of that vid Chops, but never did hear you say what happens when you light up the 4 segments of Taverner. Can you release me from my curiosity please?

I never got it! I think someone said over at Desert Island Fruits it just spins the jackpot in and that's it.

Awful flat profile machines really, impossible to win on, all you'll ever do is just slowly lose on them.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Appropriately for Christmas, here is me playing a DOND The Next Level fruit machine in the pub on our works Christmas do in December 2017. This hasn't been online for a few years as I removed all the 'real fruit machine' content from my old channel in mid-2018.

 

[trancemonkey]

Two reuploads for the weekend:

THE BIG PEEL PUB SESSION is exactly what it sounds like. Originally recorded and edited together in April 2018, this was never uploaded to the old channel so has never been seen before. It basically involved eight hours of drinking across four pubs, during which time I lost a chunk of cash in the random £500ers and got quite drunk to the point of reviewing the toilets in the pubs.

TRAIL BLAZER/THE HEAT IS ON is covering a couple of great old AWPs, Trail Blazer hails from the £15 era (don't know if @trancemonkey had anything to do with this one), and The Heat Is On from the £6 era, but being played here on an £8 jackpot.

Trailblazer was just before I joined... Reactor was my first game for Impulse (which failed!)

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Trailblazer was just before I joined... Reactor was my first game for Impulse (which failed!)

The program ROMs were at least preserved at some stage so it's emulated, but no artwork was ever found so it's a 'classic' style layout, the game is playable though (The sound ROMs are lost to the sands of time too, so it's mute, unfortunately.)

EDIT - Don't suppose you've got a picture of it have you?

 

[dunover]

I become gooder at English every time i learn a new word.

View attachment 177514

Well, as an Englishman of Scots descent I can honestly say I never heard of 'bifter' before. I thought it was a large industrial rubbish bin like a Scots version of 'Biffa'.

 

[Kroffe]

Well, as an Englishman of Scots descent I can honestly say I never heard of 'bifter' before. I thought it was a large industrial rubbish bin like a Scots version of 'Biffa'.

As a Swedish Englishman of Swedish descent i thought it was something food related, like maybe a burger or something.
But now we are both gooder at English and know betterer.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Here's something moderately interesting, if you're interested in this sort of thing

The 'Deal Or No Deal' fruit machines were incredibly popular for years, the company that made them, BFM, sold bazillions of them all the way from the £25 era, right through to the £100 era. The traditional reel based AWP has effectively died now, to be replaced by digital units running random games (less susceptible to fuckery than compensated machines, and can be updated remotely as they're internet connected).

However, whilst, they were still a thing, loads of other companies tried to make their own sort of 'DOND variants' to cash in on the craze.

One of the most successful were Betcom, who basically took their existing machine template and stuck a DOND style game on it, but because they were doing it on the cheap, they eschewed the actual physical mirrored reel and box arrangement of the proper DOND machines, and did the whole thing just with lamps instead.

On the proper DOND machines, the DOND game couldn't cheat you, the DOND reel would spin to a value which would be your 'box' (like on the TV show), and it would move a mirrored reel to cover the box so you couldn't see what was in there, you would then play a Deal Or No Deal game, either taking the banker's offer at some point, or No Dealing all the way down to reveal the contents of your box, which it would do by moving the mirror element of the reel off to one side.

This meant that if you Dealed at any point, and the box was revealed to you, that was what had been in the box all along, and similarly if you No Dealed all the way down, the box reveal at the end was genuine.

The Betcoms didn't have the reel, mirror and box, so they did their 'box reveal' just by flashing a value lamp, which was intended to be the reveal of your 'box' after you'd Dealed or No Dealed.

Now, it has long been suspected that this arrangement allowed the Betcom machines to cheat, by changing the 'box' reveal based on player actions, to make it look like there had been a better option available.

So say for example you No Dealed all the way down to £1 and £100 as the only two values left, and your offer from the banker was £40. Let's say you took the £40 offer but the machine then flashed the £100 at you, i.e. YOUR BOX WAS £100, YOU JUST MISSED OUT ON £60. Kick in the nuts right?

But what if we could rewind time and repeat that final offer, and if you decided to reject the £40 offer, the machine then reveals your box as the £1, and gives you £1. That'd be pretty shitty right?

But without a time machine, how do you ever prove it?

Step in emulation, virtualisation, and snapshot technology. Just something I've been playing around with

These videos are unlisted for now, I'll be gathering some more footage and making them into a proper video for the channel.

(And yes I know this is how pick me bonus rounds work with online slots, but remember we're talking about compensated machines here where the operations of these rounds had been well established by the proper DOND machines.)

The videos are only 2-3 minutes long each.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Latest reuploads, two videos about JPM's Indiana Jones (arguably the best AWP ever made). The first is basically saying how ace it is, whilst also lamenting the fact that the WIN SERIES feature seems to be impossible to get. (This was backed up by comments left on the original upload, with loads of people saying they'd never, ever seen it.)

At this point an industrious member of the FME scene started playing around with the emulator's debug feature and its ability to POKE values into a memory location whilst the machine was running. Did the WIN SERIES feature even exist? Was it in the code? What would happen if we forced the machine to award it?....

Finally we have the Fairplay campaign video, this was a campaign from back in 2003/2004 when a couple of us made complaints against the gambling industry, accusing their fruit machines of offering illegal, unwinnable, alleged hi/lo gambles....

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Latest couple of reuploads, the Cash Attack video is about a remarkable fuck-up Barcrest made in the £35 jackpot era (so very late in the piece), whereby a machine was vulnerable to 'plugging' and could be emptied. I never had an unchipped one over here and TBH I was never a big fan of plugging anyway, as that could get you into trouble. I'd do it in extremis, but it wasn't something I wanted to be doing regularly.

Barcrest's code was so shonky by this point that they had to put an 'overwatch' function in, whereby if the machine got too far over percentage it would literally break itself and refuse to do anything, waving the white flag and simply displaying CRITICAL ERROR - CONTACT BARCREST on its display whilst making a horrible noise. I demonstrate this in the video. (Turning it on and off again didn't help, as the error would come straight back, the machine would basically commit suicide.)

The Untouchable video is about a straight clone of Indiana Jones that JPM made, it wasn't a bad machine as Indy is one of the best fruities ever, but Untouchable was basically just a slightly worse version of it.