My online slots videos (plus UK AWPs)

[ChopleyIOM]

I never knew any of the "cheats" existed on the old ACE machines - many a cigarette smoke-infused spanking was had in the arcades of Sheffield, back in the day...

Unfortunately yes, one of the most fuckable families of machines ever. Like you, I had no idea back in the day, the drubbings I had handed to me by those things....

ACE were so bad for this stuff that one of their coders was actually sent to prison for deliberately coding shit into his machines, selling the details to a select few, and also doing the machines himself with the bent shit he'd coded into them!

We've talked about it over at Desert Island Fruits at some length, and those who know a bit about coding (we can get into the code pretty well using the emulator and its debugger features, as well as decompiling the ROMS) are left with no doubt whatsoever that most of the nonsense on ACE machines was purposely coded in for the purposes of corruption, rather than oversights or mistakes.

 

[Jono777]

Video jogged a memory, well I think it did!

Most ACE machines had 2 streaks, tokens and cash. Once ready it would do, lets say the token streak, Once it had taken enough back after streak, next time it would be the cash streak and so on.

Quicksilver in Queen Street Wolverhampton had Play it Again for ages, reasonably often saw some of the "addicts" feed a complete token streak back in, plus a good portion of their benefits on top in an attempt to trigger the cash streak.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Ace Emptiers were my first ever exploit and what a beauty it was. Not Play it Again but the later machines with the 'free' lines wins.

Downside was so many jammed token mechs, a lot of scrutiny from fellow pub go-ers and "Mug punters" and drinking and smoking away most of our profits.

We committed so many hours and drove here there and everywhere doing these, at one point, I had about 12 pint glasses on my window sill full to the top with £1 coins, along with bags of tokens which I made mental notes where they could be used. In the end could empty cash tubes without needing money, just the tokens we'd accrued.

If I'd been older and wiser and more restrained at the time, could have got rich from these as they were literally everywhere.

Even most pubs to start with were 'happy' to pay out a £50 IOU lol.

The money I could have made back in the early 90s if I'd have had just had a few of the cheats and methods that prevailed at the time. Back in those days, as I'm sure UK folks of the same vintage as me will remember ( ), there were pubs absolutely everywhere, open all day, and all of them having one, or two, or three fruit machines (sometimes more!). Plus the machines got a lot of casual play back then, so they were getting money through them all the time, meaning a clued-up player would have been able to visit them regularly.

I do slightly wonder if a younger version of me would have just spunked all the money away anyway on all sorts of hedonistic nonsense, but it still would have been better than being a permanently skint addict!

 

[ChopleyIOM]

On this day last year my dad was in a medically induced coma, slowly deteriorating towards his eventual death on the 27th.

Some thoughts about the process of grief, and also a series I'll make about possibly the worst year of my fruit machine addiction, 1994, with reference to my diary from that year, which I still have.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Out at the pub with a couple of mates enjoying some responsible gambling. When the fun stops, stop! And all that.

I haven't made a single deposit at any online casino in 2024, so I'll allow myself a bit of a punt at the pub from time to time.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

This is not a new video, it's a re-edit and reupload of the video I made documenting the decline and death of my dad last year. I kept the project 'live' on my editing laptop after the original upload 'cause I felt it could use a few tweaks and improvements, which is what this version represents.

Please note it is substantially the same video as the original, but it is my preferred version of it.

I published the video yesterday, which was the first anniversary of my dad's death.

 

[dealer wins]

This is a sort of follow-on video to the previous video on my channel, where I have a deeper dive into the MYSTERY MACHINE that could be seen in the background of me and Mrs Chopley playing pool.

So I talk a bit about Hot Rod and its proper physical bagatelle game that was incorporated into the cabinet, and also take a look right back into the early 90s for a machine with a similar sort of gimmick made by Barcrest, called Gamball.



View attachment 190336

That Gamball had the craziest emptier ever, where you needed to get the £2.40 + repeat chance and hold down every single button. You either needed 2 people or a plank of wood to do it lol

 

[ChopleyIOM]

How far wrong can a compensated machine go?

You might be surprised.....

 

[Reelsoffun]

I totally get what you’re saying about this, but in the real world it was never going to get to that severe point, no one would have played it that bad for anywhere near as long. There were probably dozens if not hundreds that could go behind if played badly on purpose long enough.

As you mentioned later games did force jackpots in if they got too far behind.

This sort of thing was fundamentally the problem for most coders they just didn’t see the point coding for each senario or they just weren’t up to the job. Let’s be honest here they would have been far more focused on protecting the compensator being manipulated to pay too much rather than forced to not pay enough.

Even compensated machines have/ had decisions that were still random given some parameters, which is why even tho it’s so far behind can still kill you off etc.

Compensators often had several “pots” or controls, and didn’t just look at overall % or drift, which is a big problem in this particular case.

As you also state another problem, most likely the biggest was there wasn’t really any standard for how the compensators had to work, so many coders had there own style and some were better than others.

If you think big wheel was bad you should see how far some clubbers could go behind if forced badly, they can go in well excess of £10k drift behind. “Money to burn club” is a good example.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

I totally get what you’re saying about this, but in the real world it was never going to get to that severe point, no one would have played it that bad for anywhere near as long. There were probably dozens if not hundreds that could go behind if played badly on purpose long enough.

As you mentioned later games did force jackpots in if they got too far behind.

This sort of thing was fundamentally the problem for most coders they just didn’t see the point coding for each senario or they just weren’t up to the job. Let’s be honest here they would have been far more focused on protecting the compensator being manipulated to pay too much rather than forced to not pay enough.

Even compensated machines have/ had decisions that were still random given some parameters, which is why even tho it’s so far behind can still kill you off etc.

Compensators often had several “pots” or controls, and didn’t just look at overall % or drift, which is a big problem in this particular case.

As you also state another problem, most likely the biggest was there wasn’t really any standard for how the compensators had to work, so many coders had there own style and some were better than others.

If you think big wheel was bad you should see how far some clubbers could go behind if forced badly, they can go in well excess of £10k drift behind. “Money to burn club” is a good example.

Yes we did a really deep dive into a machine called Super Blackjack Club by Barcrest (one I'm sure you remember as it was one of your original MPU3/4 classic layouts that Wizard supplied me with on CD back in 2001!), using autoplay and manual play we eventually sussed out that it basically locked 20% of RTP into feature ladder wins that were below the block, if you constantly forced it for the jackpot, or through the block wins, it would pay out 20% below target, permanently.

Getting it back to percentage was as simple as letting 'G FOR GEORGE' take the strain (Albeit for a very long time....) It turned into a really interesting deep dive and a great group effort over at Desert Island Fruits.

So yes, I totally get what you're saying in your post there, the compensation of UK fruit and club machines was a total wild west. It was ostensibly regulated but in reality, you had small teams of coders, or indeed just individuals at all the different companies, writing their own versions of 'the truth' that worked, or more often didn't work, in all kinds of ridiculous ways. I mean, the evidence of that is right there on my channel with all the emptier and method videos, these things have been fundamentally broken for decades.

Even speaking as someone who was able to consistently win out of compensated machines from the year 2001 forward, I can't even remotely defend them and I'm glad they're basically extinct, the simple truth of the matter is that random machines are a far fairer proposition. (Although even there, especially in the online space, we see many providers trying to stretch the limits of the definition with things like stored value and suchlike.)

 

[Jono777]

Ah Yes Super BlackJack Club

I remember you sending me those ROM's that were WAAYYY behind percentage.

Played it manually (No G for George) but also using "best strategy"

Short summary, I simply did not lose and won almost every time over a lengthy period and even then it was still very slightly adrift.

Also IIRC, in all this play (100K spins+??) it still did not drop a Cashpot or Jackpot.

Glad this thread got bumped with this machine as I had totally forgot about it, may revisit the emu a few nights this week.

 

[slot_zombie]

And yet... Compensation is alive and well in 2024 - not at all as pervasive as back in the day, but I give you:

Exhibit A, Light & Wonder Cat C community video slots - £100 jackpot with 1 repeat chance possible, can take £1000 to pop on a really bad day.

These are examples of games that can drift very badly behind for no reason at all, and it's not as if there is any "playing style" fault here due to their simplistic 3 reel nature -they are simply pure evil compensators but the grannies sit rowing the Black Knights day in day out at my local arcade.

 

[Reelsoffun]

Like most club machines of the time you had to learn to play them in a way that they didn’t fight you against forcing them, I used to just always go for nudges, £10 was the target to then gamble out.

Using George for the first £10 would often give you an indication of any value in the machine from the off if you hadn’t got any recent info, eg by watching some mug doing a brute force and getting shafted.

The only way I had Cashpots was the usual roll in, you know straight away as it spins slower the same as the hold after nudge type spin.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Like most club machines of the time you had to learn to play them in a way that they didn’t fight you against forcing them, I used to just always go for nudges, £10 was the target to then gamble out.

Using George for the first £10 would often give you an indication of any value in the machine from the off if you hadn’t got any recent info, eg by watching some mug doing a brute force and getting shafted.

The only way I had Cashpots was the usual roll in, you know straight away as it spins slower the same as the hold after nudge type spin.

IMO this is where compensated machines fall into the 'should never have existed' category, they only managed to proliferate in the first place by skirting around gambling regulations by (somehow!) achieving the arcane classification of 'AMUSEMENTS WITH PRIZES', and yet as we all know, even by the £4.80p token jackpot era (1990), there were machines that could save for streaks of £50-£60 (the original ACE Hidden Treasures machines, for example), which in today's money is £143, is that really just 'amusement with prizes'?

I mean, it's all very well for us to sit here in the year 2024, with decades of accumulated knowledge, and also the ability to dissect machines in the emulator in a way that was never possible on the real thing, including doing stuff like 'rewinding time' with VM snapshots to prove certain cheating/dishonest behaviour, like I did with the Betcoms 'switching the box' on the player on their DOND style game.

However, back in the day it was basically just the wild west, with the manufacturers of these machines essentially able to do pretty much whatever they wanted, with all sorts of bonkers compensators, pots, saved for value, anti-force code and all the rest of it.

Specifically in the case of Super Blackjack Club, the original 'correct' way to play this, on earlier chips, was the straight gamble force technique, and then Barcrest pushed out a ROM revision that categorically fought against that behaviour, essentially turning it into an entirely different machine, and reducing its payout by 20% if played in that manner, and there was no requirement whatsoever to inform the player of this. (And of course, when the new ROMs were put in the machine, it'd reset all its internal meters, so anything owed to the player at that point was just lost forever.)

For my money, there's no 'good' way to do compensation, some methods are fairer than others, but fundamentally it's a shit idea and I'm glad it's now dead in the real world, but that it can live on through emulation.

 

[dealer wins]

How far wrong can a compensated machine go?

You might be surprised.....

I remember playing JPMs Rollercoaster on the emulator, must have put £500 in it and refused all wins and features (Busting out of the trail using the hi low gamble). It never once brought in the jackpot I gave up on it in the end. I might try that again one day if I have the time!

 

[dealer wins]

Yes we did a really deep dive into a machine called Super Blackjack Club by Barcrest (one I'm sure you remember as it was one of your original MPU3/4 classic layouts that Wizard supplied me with on CD back in 2001!), using autoplay and manual play we eventually sussed out that it basically locked 20% of RTP into feature ladder wins that were below the block, if you constantly forced it for the jackpot, or through the block wins, it would pay out 20% below target, permanently.

Getting it back to percentage was as simple as letting 'G FOR GEORGE' take the strain (Albeit for a very long time....) It turned into a really interesting deep dive and a great group effort over at Desert Island Fruits.

So yes, I totally get what you're saying in your post there, the compensation of UK fruit and club machines was a total wild west. It was ostensibly regulated but in reality, you had small teams of coders, or indeed just individuals at all the different companies, writing their own versions of 'the truth' that worked, or more often didn't work, in all kinds of ridiculous ways. I mean, the evidence of that is right there on my channel with all the emptier and method videos, these things have been fundamentally broken for decades.

Even speaking as someone who was able to consistently win out of compensated machines from the year 2001 forward, I can't even remotely defend them and I'm glad they're basically extinct, the simple truth of the matter is that random machines are a far fairer proposition. (Although even there, especially in the online space, we see many providers trying to stretch the limits of the definition with things like stored value and suchlike.)

There was a cheat/tell on this machine that I never found out, even to this day. Someone who knew could literally walk into a club back in the day, and tell instantly if this machine was ready to go beyond the block and how to make it if it was ready. I would love to know what it was.

I made a fortune from emptiers/skill for 20 years back in the 80s and 90s but never found this one out, it bugs me to this day lol

 

[ChopleyIOM]

There was a cheat/tell on this machine that I never found out, even to this day. Someone who knew could literally walk into a club back in the day, and tell instantly if this machine was ready to go beyond the block and how to make it if it was ready. I would love to know what it was.

I made a fortune from emptiers/skill for 20 years back in the 80s and 90s but never found this one out, it bugs me to this day lol

He wasn't just trying to look inside the machine at the tubes or something was he?

It wouldn't surprise me if there was something coded in for those in 'the know' to quickly identify. Barcrest themselves changed how the 'COLLECT' button flashed on rechips of their £70 machines where the method had been removed, so you only needed to get a couple of quid in the bank, collect it, and then depending on if the collect button flashed when the bank was being paid out, you could tell if it was chipped or not, and they specifically did this on the rechips where the methods were removed.

Vivid changed how the machine looked in attract mode when they rechipped all their Pie Factory + clones machines, with the bank display periodically flashing CASH instead of 25.00, so you just needed to watch it for a minute or two in attract mode, and could tell if it was one that had the method chipped out, didn't even need to put a credit in.

Totally bent 'industry', pitifully regulated and woefully corrupt and incompetent.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

'£70 compensated fruit machine in vulnerable to fuckery that could leave it wanting nearly £50 for a single feature or £1 win shocker'.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Having a crack at the £500 Blueprints in the pub, includes a brief foray into the world of MAX STAKE (£2 per spin) which is usually a bit rich for my blood.

There's a really nice win in here (I posted pictures in the Winners Screenshot thread earlier in the week), and also includes a few closing thoughts of where I'm at with online slots. (Quit, basically.)

 

[dunover]

Having a crack at the £500 Blueprints in the pub, includes a brief foray into the world of MAX STAKE (£2 per spin) which is usually a bit rich for my blood.

There's a really nice win in here (I posted pictures in the Winners Screenshot thread earlier in the week), and also includes a few closing thoughts of where I'm at with online slots. (Quit, basically.)

Good video, enjoyed that one.

 

[incrediblestuff]

Good video, enjoyed that one.

What he said

 

[ChopleyIOM]

A bit of history around a Barcrest AWP from the year 2000, the interesting thing here is that the internet was really starting to become a mass-adoption sort of proposition at this time, much to the chagrin of the professional fruity brigade, who suddenly found their coveted methods, emptiers and tricks being sprayed all over the internet....

 

[slot_zombie]

Good little earner that was. I never received any methods on it but quickly worked out that forcing it for a red TOT was the way to go.

 

[Reelsoffun]

@ChopleyIOM Sent you PM when ya get a min

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Celebrate the general election result with a machine sporting a nifty quad-lamped central kebab feature.

Red, blue, yellow, green - it's all in there.

Also, a proper clanger of an emptier that Barcrest once again 'accidentally' left in the code.

 

[Jono777]

Ooh, never knew this had a emptier, another one I sadly didn't get to take advantage of

Will take a full watch after work.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Latest pub session, recorded last Friday at the pub so we were all in election results high spirits.

Also I had a partner in crime this time around, or a co-investor, if you prefer. Hence we went in on BIG £2 SPINS right from the off and stayed there.

 

[PMKFRUITPRO]

I haven’t watched yet, but if you got away with anything else other than a monkey loss sessioning that shite all day on the piss then u must be luckier than Daz Watts.

 

[PMKFRUITPRO]

Ahh a one hit wonder with the usual spawn.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Ahh a one hit wonder with the usual spawn.

I think when you're kicking against an 8% house edge the only viable course of action is to attempt a quick smash and grab on large stakes. Getting involved in a war of attrition when nearly 10% of your stake is disappearing down the drain every spin is almost certainly going to end in tears!

I'm going to come unstuck at some point, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it

 

[PMKFRUITPRO]

Oh a wise decision indeed!!

I just know if you were in 50/50 with me on that crap at £2 a spin ur video is lasting 5 mins max!!

 

[ChopleyIOM]

The secret is to play the super high RTP IOM £500 versions

(True story, back in the days of token payouts on fruit machines, the IOM Government refused to allow tokens because they were like, 'You're asking people to gamble real money to win tokens? You taking the piss mate? Not going to be a thing here, your machines have to pay out cash only' - so the fruit machine manufacturers had to make special IOM 'ALL CASH' ROMs to put in fruit machines here, I made a whole video about it.)

 

[ChopleyIOM]

In fact here they are booting up in an £8 jackpot Maygay machine called 'It's A Knockout', on the UK ROMs only wins up to £4 were cash, any wins over £4 (which of course included the £8 jackpot) were paid out in crappy 20p tokens.

IOM got special all-cash payout ROMs that are designated as such when the machine starts up. These ROMs would have been illegal to run in the UK at the time.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

What do you do when the law says the maximum cash prize on a fruit machine is £25, but you want to entice players in with the prospect of bigger prizes?

You just make a £25 jackpot machine that can give three repeats on the jackpot for a total of £100, and put a really obvious money belt of wins at the top of the machine that conveniently adds up to £100 - job done!

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Take your mind off the chaos of right-wing riots - (sorry, I mean 'entirely legitimate worries of concerned citizens') - with a magnificent new video by your dapper host, notorious Soy Boy ChopleyIOM.

This time covering a machine so extreme, JPM only marketed it as being for use in arcades, as gentle bitter drinking locals at The Dog And Duck might be traumatised by its incredibly streaky behaviour, and thus start a riot to voice their concerns.

Won't someone think of the children!

 

[ChopleyIOM]

This is a newly recorded intro (about 14 minutes) and then four videos, back to back, from October 2018 when the whole Jammin' Jars kerfuffle kicked off.

With the traditional fruit machine having now basically vanished from UK pubs, a refresher on how random games work seemed like a decent idea.

Watch on YT rather than embedded for the timecodes.

 

[slot_zombie]

A slightly flimsy excuse to recycle old material there but at least it was good quality the first time around.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

A slightly flimsy excuse to recycle old material there but at least it was good quality the first time around.

I recorded a whole new intro!

Anyway it does come up over at Desert Island Fruits fairly regularly (and even here at CM in some variants from time to time), so I figured it'd be useful to just have that video to point to

 

[ritae]

The Degsy Ballbag Game sounds fun

I would presume that Retro Tapes and Retro Sweets carries on the theme of picking a predetermined win instead of being random. I have seen two bonus rounds the same where three sweets did the same max win before the bonus started.

There was also a issue with Retro Sweets being certified, this delayed the release by about five months.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Even by the standards of my channel this one is probably a bit niche.

Back in the day (1996/1997) there was a machine called BIG 50 by a company called JPM. It had a £10 jackpot but the name of the machine clearly implied that it had the ability to do a jackpot plus four repeats for £50, the titular BIG 50. And some folks spoke in hushed tones of them having witnessed it happen.

Only problem is basically no one ever saw it. Like, ever. Never saw it on the real machine, never saw it in the emulator either. And we've talked about it a lot over the years on the fruit machine emulation scene, and I've ploughed a lot of money through it in the emulator.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, someone private messaged me over at Desert Island Fruits to say they had access to a real Big 50 machine that was capable of repeating out to £50, and it'd been caught on camera doing it.....

 

[ChopleyIOM]

So here's interesting, if you're a real spod for this sort of thing, as I am

Over at Desert Island Fruits someone has turned up the official JPM ROM revision record for Big 50, and as you can see, at Revision 11 (ROM 1.1) they added 'tighten % control in arcade mode', and this fits in perfectly with what was seen in my video (linked above).

Revision 8 (0.8) ROMs still have the 'saved for' streak in them, and will periodically chuck out the titular £50 the machine is named after, this is the ROM revision that's running in the real machine someone sent me a video of.

However by Revision 12 (1.2) ROMs, which are the ones we have in the emulator, the behaviour of the machine has changed and it will never save enough for £50 streak, keeping far closer to percentage if played 'properly'. As I proved in the video, you can still get it to do the £50 on this ROM revision, but you have to play it comically badly for a period of time, way beyond what even the most ham-fisted of real people would ever do, for it to finally drop £50.

It's one of many examples we've seen over the years, of where the behaviour of the machine is completely changed, invisibly to the player, from one ROM revision to the next, and there's never any requirement for the player to be informed of the fact that they're being faced with a machine that is, in many regards, an entirely different proposition from the one they were playing the day or the week before.

 

[PMKFRUITPRO]

Same thing goes on in the world of on line slots mate. Don’t think it doesn’t.

Bonanza 2.17.3 - Dazza G mode added.

Only that spawny c**t can win on it.

 

[maxwin88]

some funny things here zulul

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Unravelling the mysteries of history with artefacts from the past.

Also, a whole load of these official ROM revision sheets have now been posted over at Desert Island Fruits so there's more to come in this regard.

For example, 'pay fresh air' was an operator selectable option.... Literally, 'fuck the player over and then carry on as if nothing untoward happened'.

 

[Reelsoffun]

Pay fresh air wasn’t as brutal as it sounds it just meant it wasn’t going to go into IOU if a tube was empty, often a 20p tube, making the machine unusable for a minor thing until engineer etc refilled it.

As already covered the whit bread was just a single site version of the profile that was as you say quite flat ( it would be as that’s the flattest of the three main types single site/bingo/arcade ) in real terms compared to the pretty lump arcade version.

On the vid I also saw reference to “twin reflex” added or similar, that is also game control and can be anything like token reflex eg when a game was getting loads of tokens put through it would reflex against that etc, but there were other reflexes as well not just tokens.

Not sure if you ever covered it on a vid but there was also several nasty bugs when games went to all cash, and snakes and ladders was a very common one that was affected in that even tho it was all cash if the token tubes were empty it would NOT award any win that was a token value, so blocked at £4 on the £8 ROM, nothing the player could do you were never going to jackpot it ever on those lol

Of course if the engineer had left tokens in the tubes when they did the convert, which a vast majority were done on site the day all cash was legal, so left the tokens in situ then they ran fine, but for ones that had them taken out any players trying to force jackpot out were screwed…… ooops!

I only found out about it at the time as I was working as an engineer at the time and was called to one that a player had put £400 into a £8 jackpot without a single win over £4!

All the “locals” in the arcade just said yeah it has never given jackpot in the 3 months it’s been here!

Never forgotten that lol

 

[ChopleyIOM]

Pay fresh air wasn’t as brutal as it sounds it just meant it wasn’t going to go into IOU if a tube was empty, often a 20p tube, making the machine unusable for a minor thing until engineer etc refilled it.

As already covered the whit bread was just a single site version of the profile that was as you say quite flat ( it would be as that’s the flattest of the three main types single site/bingo/arcade ) in real terms compared to the pretty lump arcade version.

On the vid I also saw reference to “twin reflex” added or similar, that is also game control and can be anything like token reflex eg when a game was getting loads of tokens put through it would reflex against that etc, but there were other reflexes as well not just tokens.

Not sure if you ever covered it on a vid but there was also several nasty bugs when games went to all cash, and snakes and ladders was a very common one that was affected in that even tho it was all cash if the token tubes were empty it would NOT award any win that was a token value, so blocked at £4 on the £8 ROM, nothing the player could do you were never going to jackpot it ever on those lol

Of course if the engineer had left tokens in the tubes when they did the convert, which a vast majority were done on site the day all cash was legal, so left the tokens in situ then they ran fine, but for ones that had them taken out any players trying to force jackpot out were screwed…… ooops!

I only found out about it at the time as I was working as an engineer at the time and was called to one that a player had put £400 into a £8 jackpot without a single win over £4!

All the “locals” in the arcade just said yeah it has never given jackpot in the 3 months it’s been here!

Never forgotten that lol

The all-cash transition wasn't really a thing on the IOM, as we'd never had token payouts here, and I was living here permanently by the time the £10 jackpot came out (albeit just about).

Bugs like that these days don't surprise me at all, given the absolute wall of corruption and/or incompetence that has come to light over the years thanks to fruit machine emulation and conversations we've been able to have over the years, things still come to light over at Desert Island Fruits even now.

One guy over there was a coder for Mazooma back in the day and they put 'anti-competitor' code into their machines at one point, which tried to detect 'non standard' play that suggested a competing company was trying to work their maths out. One of the things it looked for was being played exclusively with pound coins, and would change its behaviour if it detected that, and wouldn't streak. If you were a player who happened to have a load of pound coins and played for a while with just those, and didn't put any other denomination of coin in.... well.... sucks to be you I guess.

And that wasn't even a bug, that was deliberate behaviour!

Compensated machines, best consigned to the dustbin of history. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

 

[ChopleyIOM]

I'm sure we all remember these.....

 

[kidgloves]

I played one just today in my local. They are still fairly prevalent in both inland arcades and at the coast in England.

 

[Reelsoffun]

Good vid, just a couple of points.

I was the one that helped Chris with the stuff he needed to get the “talking to each slave etc” working, his words not mine that after that he said “quite easy to do” lol

The reason people waited when someone was up was actually the correct play as the original games couldn’t go up if one was already up.

The player “queue system” was added quite a bit later, and on newer models.

The way they work was also what you expected, in that each slave controlled itself, kept its own RTP like any other AWP and just “told” the master what to spin in for the top wins, simple, and much better than having a communal top box pot, and was also much easier for compliance.

Leaving the nudges to time out also has some minor advantage, as some setups allowed you to get a win that you wouldn’t get if you didn’t, although overall I strongly suspect that any player missing those wins, it would just give the missed wins back at some point rather than be lost forever ( eg if player misses a setup to get X’s for a £1, it will just give a £1 win quicker than it would have if the player had got the win )

Please don’t ask, I’m not going to give full details but,
There was also a very serious operator exploit on a least the party time arena’s, maybe all the party time variants, which to this day not sure if it was ever patched, but it involves putting a slave in a position that it would NOT go up at ALL.

Once its put back to normal operation the slave in question goes off its tits depending how long it’s been in the exploited state.

Im sure there will be some players that either know about the exploit, how it was done, have experienced it or know of someone that has or does, although it was quite a guarded one, compared to other cheats of the time that every Tom, dick and harry knew about. LOL

 

[Jono777]

Only a quick one whilst we're talking AWP exploits....

Not one of the better ones but did anyone every get to take advantage of the 'Monopoly Road to Riches' one?

Basically (not sure if this worked on them all but sure did on the ones I came across) if you played with just £20 notes it would return 99-100% RTP using a strategy of collecting all wins when it was due to kill you (obviously experience players would recognise this easily) of £4 and below.

You'd stay level or only a few quid down until it streaked and then the streak 9/10 would be decent and also offer a bit of after play.

Emptied a few and even IOU'd some but the profit was usually £40 - £50 for up to a £100 investment so maybe too "risky" for some even those with the knowledge!