I was player #1 on JPP back when it started, and they used to give me loads of free stuff. Then they found out I worked in the biz and it all stopped. Oh well. Anyway, you can continue to play the games online at Sky Vegas and other places, but I'm afraid the party is over.

 

Ah well. It was good whilst it lasted. I made a few hundred out of them, at least!

Hi Folks

I haven't been on these forums for years, but some of the old timers might remember me.

I was a programmer at Mazooma and latterly Global Games before heading off on my own, and doing various things. Still very much in the industry but in the online side now.

 

I coded pretty much every foreign AWP game they did. Since all these machines are long outlawed and probably rusting in a shed somewhere in eastern Europe, would anyone like to have a go at making an emulation of some?

I found the ROMs and original source code on a CD whilst cleaning out my house recently, and can probably get a decent scan of the original artwork.

 

Also, for reference, I am working (very slowly!!) on writing a book about my time in the industry, stories about some of the characters, the games, how they're developed, how compensation/control of the games work. Hopefully accessible and understandable to everyone who's ever played a fruit machine, and full of funny stories. It's titled "Give It A Spin: Tales from the UK fruit machine industry 1996 - 2010". Will probably self-publish but it's only half finished.

 

Cheers

Ed

OK. They're Hungarian games, quite unique shall we say but still quite AWP style. 

Dutch games - I did a couple at Mazooma - total nightmare. How anyone enjoyed playing those is beyond me, but that's what the regulations of the day did to gaming.

@Mavroz

 

I worked there as a developer from 2002 to 2007. Like most Global games from those days, we just had our tongues firmly in our cheeks. Those machines were some of the first Global AWPs to get "approved" by the big breweries for injection into their estates (i.e. they buy a load of machines).

 

Up until then, we had some problems with games like Jigging in the Rigging and other "suggestive" titles.....breweries wouldn't touch them. So Beaver was just a way to continue that whilst making games that appealed to the pub market.

They were very successful indeed. We kept the Maygay factory VERY busy when their own games of that era were a bag of s*ite....

So, to give you a bit of industry info on this - the long and short of it is this:

 

We used to design and manufacture new AWPs, and give 25 of them (free of charge) to pub companies to test. Great. That's a ~£80k investment once you factor in salaries, overheads and of course, building and transporting the machines.

 

If your game took enough money, the pub company would buy between 400 and 2000 machines. 

 

Now suppose your machine didn't do very well, which could be for any number of reasons - not always because it's a bad game. We had pubs with test machines in catch fire (closed = no money!), machines get smashed up, stolen (we once got called by the police to a "colourful object in a farmers field"), covered in beer or fag ash etc.....

 

You don't get a second chance. If your machine fails test, that's it. Done. Someone else's game goes on test and the whole world moves on.

Prior to the 2005 Gambling Act, you weren't allowed to profit share, so the pub company took all the profits from the machine - you as the manufacturer got £0. So you've burnt £80k and got nothing but a pile of machines, often with bits missing (or smashed) and no prospect of any sales of this game.

 

How many of you think this is a great business model? That only has to happen a few times (and remember ~1 in 4 machines is a "hit") and you're in financial dire straits. I lost count the number of times Maygay, JPM and others cut jobs, did 2 day weeks in the factory, etc, to keep the lights on, hoping to have another hit game. Bell Fruit in the mid 90s almost went pop I don't know how many times - only their Dutch games kept them afloat.

 

OK. So on to dongles. 

 

Dongles smooth that curve (read: cliff face) of revenue when a game is launched. Instead of selling machines, they are now leased or given, with an agreement to share the profits. To control the use of the machine, a dongle obviously stops anyone operating the machine - and making money - when the manufacturer isn't getting a cut.

 

That is a much fairer way for the people who actually take the risk and spend the money to develop the game.

 

I agree for the 2nd hand "home" market they are a problem, but so many jobs were lost and companies hitting the wall because of the insane business model that had developed over the decades.

 

Imagine going to your local Ford garage, being given a car to test drive - crashing it, writing it off and then just returning it and say "sorry mate, don't really like it". Then come back the next day and take another car out. Repeat that again and again. That's how the business was - totally crazy.

 

These days with server-based gaming developers can monitor the revenue and get their %. Much better.

 

So, all I will say is, try and see why it happened. Maybe someone will crack/make a new dongle that has unlimited time.

 

Don't get me started on arcade owners. They buy 1 machine and then ring up 5 years later asking for a software update....errr...NO. 

 

Tsk!!

I still have a CD with the entire Global sound library on. How we got away with most of that stuff I do not know..........

Will do. I think they all had the sound ROM files in too...

Hi All

 

I have started uploading small versions of the zillions of flyers I have from 20 years in the industry. There are a lot of crap ones and loads of foreign AWP machines (since that's what I used to code, mainly).

 

I started a gallery (edwardb machine flyers) but not sure if this is the right place? If anyone wants a high res scan of a flyer then let me know.

 

Some right classics in there....and some games that flopped miserably!

..not to mention some interesting things. Talking Barcrest, anyone?

This could be gold dust to the scene. Are we missing many sound roms from global? Many many thanks for sharing this resource with the rest of us. I'm sure many will appreciate it

OK found them - where do you want them?

 

Also, I will do some checking, as the analogue machine market is dead and buried in the UK (with a few exceptions), if I can release source code and stuff for actual games then I will. No point keeping it anymore, would be good for the emu scene to see how a real machine was coded.

 

I'm happy to release the full code for a few overseas AWPs I wrote, since I own it all, which I'll do when I dig out my backups from years ago.

 

I keep thinking of doing a Q&A session or something for people to ask questions. I am slowly working on a book called "Give It A Spin: Tales from the UK Fruit Machine industry" which is starting to take shape. Got a mate whose a publisher to edit it for me, but it is looking good. Lots of funny stories about how games came to be made, crazy business tales (threatened with a gun at a Russian airport...) and a lot more besides....

Hmm OK, CD 1 zipped is 450mb and CD 2 about 250mb.....

Global was all about Carry On humour. Before we started getting machines in the Maygay cabinets, we did rebuilds and the arcade owners loved the style of games (and the price..) and so did very well indeed. I think Spotted Dick was the biggest seller until Beaver came along.

All of the vocals on games were done by staff, one of the main developers (Mark) did most of the male vocals, and the receptionist/admin staff did the female ones. Good times. I still can't believe we got away with it all.

 

My favourite has to be from Jigging in the Rigging - "we've lost some seamen" ! 

I've stripped out WAVs leaving just the ROM files and a few other bits - much more manageable! Still 58mb...

 

https://we.tl/YdJyCrU3pw

 

Expires after a week, let me know if you need it again

Read my new post in a few mins!

Oh I should have said - most games had a bell curve, that is, the game spent the majority of its life in levels 2, 3 and 4. Rarely getting to 0/1/5/6 as these were the extremities and only happened when someone was very lucky or you had someone forcing the machine to high levels.

Hi All

 

Answers to your questions:

 

ritdav: "That was really interesting.First question coming up.Emptiers were they mainly badly written code or were they always deliberate.Reading the above they would have to be beyond the compensators to work .What were the legendry ones and were people fired over them.If you can't talk too much about them thats fair enough."

 

Almost always mistakes. Never intentional apart from one guy at Ace who decide to try and make a few quid by putting an emptier in. He got caught in a pub, fired and prosecuted. I think he got 2 years for fraud. That was on an old SP-Ace club machine.

 

Were people fired - generally no, all software has bugs and fruit machines are no exception. The famous ones, like Donkey Kong, were just oversights (nudge debugging code left in by mistake).

We had an emptier on one of our games, where changing stake should have cancelled holds, but if you were quick enough you could hammer the holds and change stake at the same time. Oops!

Simple fix.

 

When you get a report of an emptier, all hell breaks loose. I did 18+ hr days just playing the game, trying to work out what was going on based on (generally useless) info from the site. You also pore over the code and look for anything awry.

 

Guitar: "An actual question for you though, where do you get the random values from on a machine with no RNG fitted?"

 

Good question! Believe it or not this was on JPM's standard interview question for software engineers. So we had a mixed prime congruential RNG but I suspect most people now use a mersenne-twister RNG. This was in the core libraries for games so we used that. But to answer your question; if for some obscure reason you had no RNG, then you write one, or you use inputs to generate random numbers, maybe timers of button presses, or system timers. I can't think of any library I've ever see that didn't have an RNG though. They're pretty fundamental to gambling!

 

evo1: "On an offtopic question when you played with tokens did the machine play on a different cycle/% cause again never really got any return on token play"

 

Yes, token payouts were typically in the 50% to 60% region. 

 

fuzion: "A lot of people I used to play with referred to compensators as pots, even a lo-tech game like Golden Game had quite a lot of separate pots to play around with."

 

Yes indeed - those lo-techs had about 20 compensators. My first ever bit of fruit machine code (aged 17!) was doing the attract mode for Golden Oldie. Attracts were written in a sub-language to make them quicker when writing lamp sequences (all done by hand...time consuming!). If you watch the "ripple" on the button lamps, you can see that I missed out the Start button further on in the sequence. That was also in every other Mazooma lo-tech - makes me laugh when I see them in a seaside arcade even now!

 

wizard: "I think a lot of the emptiers arose due to a "Free Win", my understanding of this is that a Free Win didn't update the compensators when it should have done, leaving the game in the same happy state."

 

Correct - the win wasn't removed from the comps, or in some cases the win was added to the bank, and then some visuals happen, before the win is removed from the comp. So, obviously if you switch the power off during those bank pay visuals, the win never got taken from the comp and hence a "free win". We never had this problem as the line of code that adds the money to the bank is always immediately after the win has been removed from the comps, and also we separated logic and visuals entirely. You'd be amazed the number of companies that didn't - and were always the ones with problems.

 

fruitman69: "Not really, anti force code normally will monitor certain variables, if forcing is detected then it would set a flag"

 

Actually, in my experience, what people termed anti-force code actually wasn't. It was anti-stats testing code! Manufacturers used to buy other manufacturers machines and play them, log every spin, and work out what the game was doing. I remember visiting Maygay in 1996 and seeing a Barcrest 10 out of 10 being stats played. So what everyone did, was monitor the last, say 200 coins to go in - if they were all £1 coins then you mangle how the game plays. Still hits % but plays differently. Obviously in a pub you'd get other coins inserted, so this would never happen.

 

wayne123: "Thanks for the info - love to read how the fruit machines have ripped people off - strange question but is it possible to look at an actual programme for a fruit machine ?"

 

Yes, I will be releasing the code for a game I wrote soon (when I can find the backups, probably in my attic!). It's a Hungarian AWP but still very similar to a UK game (dual lapper board, etc).

 

shaun2097: "also, a while back some red gaming fruit machines used to put the first £3 or £4 you inserted stright to the bottom cash box"

 

Correct! We spotted this whilst stats playing one in the office one day. We thought like you did - was just to suggest to the players the machine was "backing". Found no evidence of anything else.

I should add, on emptiers, they are a pain not because of the money lost which was usually negligible, but because in those days you had to burn hundreds or thousands of EPROMs (at a few quid a pop, the BFG roms were £8 each at one point) and then drive around site to site and replace them - this didn't go down well with the pub company.

 

An update could easily cost £30k+ to correct.

Emptiers, I can categorically state from my 20 years in the industry, are absolutely not done on purpose. As I have posted elsewhere, developing and testing a new game costs north of £80k. You get 2000 sales of a popular game, and you get a fault that needs fixing, then you're on the hook for another £30k or in some cases the pub company just sends the machines back and wants a credit note. 

Boom. You've burnt over £100k in dev costs, and worst case when machines get returned, you can easily see a few million quid evaporate. That's the hard truth of it.

 

I've been on the receiving end of such problems and the fall out for the business is immense - and these days, with the Gambling Commission, it is even worse (and woe betide you if your game underpays, i.e. is consistently below advertised RTP%). Then you really are in BIG trouble - investigations, hearings, fines and possibly prison. All of which are a positive, in my view, as it keeps people honest.

 

If this happens in a regulated market where every line of source code is commented and often reviewed by a government appointed lab - it gets very messy and laywers get involved. Not fun.

Anyway, the industry has always been self policing but we, as a general rule, would always report bugs to other manufacturers, and they to us. It's a small world and people move between companies like you won't believe. No point burning bridges.

 

@Guitar, we used a proper RNG that was certified for use in many regulated markets like Holland. The RNG was bomb proof. C++ rand() is awful and will fail the standard RNG diehard tests.

Just to clear up on the emptiers deliberate or not; I've never come across this, and none of my colleagues have either, as quite simply, you will be prosecuted for fraud (rightly so) and you can forget getting a job, let alone in gaming, ever again.

 

As I said above, one guy from Ace did it and got 2 years at Her Majesty's Pleasure.

 

wayne123: "Thanks for your response, one more question - if you have a games idea / concept idea for a fruit machine how do you go about it?"

 

I'll pick this up on another topic; I'm writing the next one now. Will talk over how a game goes from a bit of paper (or idea in a kebab shop/shower/etc, usually) to a production machine, with some examples.

Vortex! I designed a game when the same name back at Mazooma - didn't go anywhere. There's a funny thing about space themes in gaming; "putting your money in a black hole". Same as games that are overly green......they never seemed to be popular.

Old friend of mine come up with idea for beau peepfor ace, got free machine and 15%.
Then they went on to make 2nd one without him.

Beau Peep! My god we used to have one in the chippy near my old school. What a bag of shite!

and yes, we got ideas sent in - none ever got made for legal reasons, mainly. That's how I got my break, designed an X-Files (remember that?) game, sent it to Maygay, went nowhere but got a tour of the factory aged 14 and kept in touch with a few people. Left school, went to college, blagged a job at Mazooma and the rest is history....

Great article.
 
Thanks for sharing this side of the business again.
 
With regards to new machines you made back then, what in your memory would have been the biggest success in terms of - yes that was a great machine ?
 
Also, from a testing point of view, did you ever build machines up until you were just about to pass out and think - nope - not going to work and kill the whole project.  How far down the chain would it be possible and realistic to have a dud and the manafacture pull the plug ?

Personally my Monopoly machine for the German market. Not only because I got to visit Germany and drink great beer on the company, but because the game was good, lots of clever concepts and hidden cheats. It did well but fruit machines were banned by the Government shortly after.

For UK games I think Roller Coaster, PCB and probably Jewel in the Crown, together with a lot of the mid 90s Barcrest and JON games were milestones for me.

Things went a bit bland until Impulse came about. They made a lot of good games. Phattbloke can have some credit there.

JPM went off the boil mainly because they stuck with Impact for too long. Better hardware would have let them compete with everyone else, games got computationally more intense as multiline games took off.

Wayne; honestly you have almost no chance. Try by all means, but you'll struggle. I was 14 when I wrote to Maygay and my youth helped considerably.

You would be better doing it yourself as an app for a phone in my opinion.

It certainly won't make you rich, I can promise you that!