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.
It even had a standard PC BIOS screen on it too, the BIOS was dated 2010.
