Hi i'm trying to get a space clubber running called big break deluxe,it comes up bigbreak 1.3 then says error 4.2 and nothing else,does anyone in the know,know what this means.Not sure if this has missing sound roms or the sound is built into the program roms,any help would be appreciated.
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Error 4.2 On Space machine
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Fruit Machines Inside Out: Compensation
Hi All
Decided to write a some articles about how real fruit machines work. In today's lesson, how fruit machines would control themselves, i.e. how decisions are made to pay a prize (or not).
BFG/Mazooma called them "compensators", Barcrest "stablisers", Ace/JPM "reflexes", Global "buckets" and 101 other permutations of the name. They all mean the same thing; essentially an amount of virtual money held in memory that the game uses to decide how much money we can give back to the player.
As I learned this stuff at the University of Mazooma, I called them "compensators", and that's what I'll use for this post.
How they work:
A game has a number of compensators, decided by the developer and/or mathematician responsible for the game.
Each game, we put the target % of the game into a compensator. So if the game is set to 80% payout, and you're on £1 a game, 80p goes into the compensator, and the other 20p is forgotten about.
A compensator is viewed from the player's perspective, that is, if the compensator is negative (hereafter referred to as -ve and positive as +ve) then the machine owes "the player" money - it has "underpaid". If the compensator is positive, the player owes the machine money - it has "overpaid".
As a side note, Barcrest worked the opposite way (from the machine's point of view - +ve being underpaid, -ve as overpaid).
We divide the compensator into "levels". The size of each level depends on various factors, again usually determined by the developer/maths person.
Let's see an example:
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0------1------2------3------4------5------6 Compensator Level
|
+2500 +1000 +500 0 -500 -1000 -2500
So Level 3 is our midpoint - the compensator has ZERO money in it. But that doesn't mean you won't win. Quite the opposite.
Now we play some games, we stick £10 in and we win nothing. Now our compensator is -£8 (we took 80% of our stake, remember, the other £2 has evaporated!), we are there now in level 4 (between -£5 and £10).
But how do we decide if we're going to win? Easy. We use a chance table!
Let's see those same levels, but this time we're going to assign a % chance of something happening:
£2 nudge win chance:
|
0------1------2------3------4------5------6 Compensator Level
|
1 3 8 15 35 60 80 (% chance of winning)
As you can see, the chance of getting a win (or maybe of getting the feature) is adjusted depending on the level of the compensator.
Chance tables controlled almost every aspect of the game; the likelihood of getting nudges (losing or otherwise), the likelihood of holds, features, even to the point of choosing which music to play (the more money we have, maybe we play a more "intense" bit of music?).
When a win is given, assuming the player collects the win, we remove that money - £2 in this case - from the compensator (after which is still in level 4, now) and carry on. If they didn't collect the win (gambled, and lost) then we don't do anything - the machine still needs to get rid of that money at some point. When a compensator is at zero, the machine should be bang on payout %.
The money in a compensator has no relevence to the physical amount of money present in a machine - so if the hopper is full or empty makes zero difference to how likely you are to win (or not). So those urban legends about "the machine is backing" (i.e. coins going to cashbox) and therefore due to payout are nonsense, but we all had a good laugh about it!
Most AWPs, certainly ones we did, had 1 main compensator for general gameplay, and 1 for big wins. We would then divide the 80% into the two compensators, maybe 80% of 80% (are you following?) to main, and 20% to reserve. Once reserve compen had reached our target value, transfer the whole lot to main comp (which then shoots up to level 6 - super generous!) and get rid of it. Maybe set a flag to say "big win time" and force a red mode or jackpot repeater.
Believe it or not, often, the more simple the game (lo-tech/Bar-X) the more compensators there were. From memory, some of our lo-techs had 20+ compensators, all receiving a small % of the stake each game, and then use to pay for things happening in the game (multiple streaks, hopper-emptying wins, etc).
Hope that's useful to some - let me know of any questions!
What would you like to know about next?
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bellfruit scorpion 2 sound
hello i have a only fools and horses dice edition machine and cant sort the volume out on it , when i turn the refill key its not giving me any options to turn volume up or down , all refil keys are the same for any fruit machine right ? allso ive pressed the red button on the mpu and you can set the volume using that but once ive set the volume nothing has changed so still no sound , can anyone help please ?
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bellfruit coin mech
I cant get the coin mech to work on my machine money just falls through , ive made sure everything is plugged in well but having no luck , do all bell fruit scorpion 2 machines use the same coin mech ? there is also some boards attached to it , can anyone help me ?
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Birthdays in the house
Happy birthday to site regular mazza500 and long term site supporter and creator bladefan2,who we haven't seen for a while, hope he comes back soon.
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MFME Red Hot Poker Cabinet Build
Evening All,
Following on from No1Stoney's, Uptown's, Andy2003's and others who have built their own fruity I have had a pop too. Here is what I have done so far: -
https://www.youtube....h?v=QxjM5Prz4nk
This is based on a Barcrest Elvis Sitdown cabinet which I picked up for £19 (well it was £20 but I found a pound coin inside it when I was taking it apart!).
I am going to leave this as simply a single poker machine, BWB Red Hot Poker is one of my all times favourite games. It will take coins and pay out coins but so far, all I have done is what you see, made Big Red Poker full screen, it has a touch screen so that I can select the holds without having to use the buttons and it takes new and old £1 coins!
There is still loads to do but not too shabby!
A massive thanks to No1Stoney and Uptown for their help and patience in getting this far. Appreciate it guys!
Any input or comments are welcome.
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missisippi lady nova mpu4 video error
hi i work on my first layout for a german machine called missisippi lady from nova .
its mpu4 video like monte carlo or bust but i need help to setup the rom correctly.
i get the error alarm bezeichner (identifier).
can anyone look over the rom to setup it correctly and post the settings?
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Attached Files
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![Attached File]()
v4missis.zip 2.69MB
5 downloads
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Front end for my MFME Cab
just a quick vid showing the Mgalaxy front end in its early stages.... once this is mastered and i update each machine with a flyer image this should be epic.
Just a couple of quick notes
is it okay to start a new thread each time i update of should i add to an existing thread?
also is there a flyer library or any resources were i can get images for these machines?
Cheers dudes....
just a note this is my sons youtube channel is you subscribe youll be bombarded with train and lego videos haha
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empire change stakes ?
hi folks is it possible to put some of the empire games on 10p £5jackpot such as the big cheese , tresure island, high spirits, bank raid.?
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Monopoly Street Party "community" £70 help
Hi i got these roms via mattys casino monopoly topic which he uploaded.
i've placed them within 3x layouts as the machine is asking for A. machine ID 1,2,3 and B. the machine name - car/dog/hat.
afaik i've put the roms where they should be and the coin slot is set ok, but when it/they finish initializing it then has to wait to connect, now this is a countdown from 100 of which takes an eon each unit down takes five seconds so 100-0 takes upto five minutes lol.. when it finally finishes they all say comms failed!!!
i hope someone can cure this as would be great to have a "community" game
here's the roms matty uploaded in case i've loaded the wrong ones and the layout wip with some already loaded into it
thanks in advance v666
p's take no notice of the reel bands these are there only to get it to start up!! not sure if all seven segs are added yet too.
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![Attached File]()
Monopoly Streewise £70 lo tech roms.zip 5.6MB
1 downloads
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![Attached File]()
1 Monopoly Street Party £70 Wip.zip 5.1MB
5 downloads
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Fruit Machines Inside Out: Design & Development
Hi All
Next instalment of FMIO, I will be talking about how you design a game and how it gets to production. Ready for a mammoth read?
1. Ideas
Well, everyone has ideas in this business, but it is usually a game designer (which wasn't an actual job title save for Barcrest's shrouded-in-secrecy MMG team) or developer who came up with the game. Most developers were players, in Mazooma certainly, and this showed in the games and how they played. I always felt this to be a good thing!
There is no set process, you have an idea, write it down and then when a new game is needed, out comes the notebook etc. I would always sketch out my ideas and make
sure they worked in my head.
What has/hasn't done well recently? What did the other companies release? Why did game X work and a similar game not? What new stuff can we do that won't confuse people?
The best "new" concepts were a 5% move on from another game.
So we've got a concept. Let's kick it off!
2. Design
So you have an idea and need to get it fleshed out. You write a game specification that explains how the game works, the layout of the board or trail, and
anything that might not be obvious. The spec is read by technical and sales people so you need to be sure it has everything you need to get across in plain English.
Have you checked your board layout? Can you reach the game over/mystery square within 12 moves of every other board position in case you need to kick the player out?
Are there any dead ends, i.e. can your game get somewhere where you can't boot the player out, and he can manipulate things?
List and explain every feature game, layout of the mystery/bonus dapple and what each outcome does. Got a cashpot? How does that work? How do you win it?
OK good. So your spec is written, usually 15 pages or so, now let's talk to the other guys and get it rolling.
3. Art
The game designer, developer and artist will all sit around and talk over how they want the game to look.
The artist generally does a pencil sketch (though nowadays, mostly done on PC) which takes a few days to a week, and has the basic layout and rough character sketches on.
From that, assuming no big changes are needed, the artist will then start on the artwork proper. This can take anywhere from 2 to 8 weeks, depending on what's needed.
Detailed characters add a lot of time.
These days, art is done in Photoshop but some still use Freehand.
Once art is finished, everyone looks over it and checks for spelling/grammar mistakes and anything that may be wrong.
Designing artwork is a technical and mechanical challenge. You have "restrictions" which are areas you cannot place a lamp for mechanical reasons,
such as near a hi-lo reel (I think we left a 10mm gap top and bottom) and also near cut-outs for coin/note acceptors etc.
There are areas where reels cannot go for the same reasons, as they would catch on hardware inside the machines. Hence why you cannot have a reel on the
right where your hoppers and coin mech are! Each cabinet would have a restriction drawing made for it, showing where you cannot place lamps or reels. I have one somewhere, I will dig it out.
You need to leave a 3mm "land" between each lamp box as that's the minimum tolerance a vac former can do.
The artist will produce a "PCX" file, basically a technical drawing of where lamps are, and also for printing, other colours of the artwork - called "separations" or just "seps". More below.
4. Prototyping, Glass Printing & Vac Forms
A prototype machine is then created, which is usually a paper print (done on a poster printer) stuck on a thick bit of MDF.
A punch is used to mark where lamps will go, and then holes drilled out. A bit of plastic is stapled to the other side, and lamps inserted.
Remember to remove all burrs and sharp edges!
Someone (usually someone in the cab shop, or other tech person, but I did my own) then designs & documents the wiring harnesses and wires the prototype lamp board.
Wiring is expensive, so you don't want to use more than you need. You generally follow the shortest path from the connector to the lamp.
Once that is done the machine is given to the developer who starts the code.
We now have our bill of materials, we know what it takes and what it costs to make a game, so it can be sent to stores to order parts for production.
Meanwhile, we have to get building the real machines, and that means printing glasses, getting vac forms made and wired up.
In the old days, BFG, Barcrest and Maygay had their own print shop and vacuum forming kit. It all got outsourced in the end.
As an aside, in the old days, the BFM factory used to make kitchen cabinets for MFI. They had all the gear, so why not use it overnight when the factory was quiet?
To print a glass, there are two ways:
1. Screenprinting, which you take the artwork and split into 4 colours (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) and print each colour separately. If you look closely at an older glass
you can see the 4 colours. BFG used to print on perspex which never worked as well as glass - the colours looked duller.
2. Digital printing, essentially inkjet printing on to an adhesive paper which is stuck to glass. Cheaper, more efficient and more flexible.
Spot a mistake on the glass? In the bin they go. Fix and print new ones. Expensive - £40 to £80 a pop for a top glass, £20 for a bottom glass, not to mention staff costs etc.
It did happen. I remember the first Mazooma games hi/lo games had the hi-lo reel window solid red - god knows why. Had to scrap them all. Moving to digital printing saved a lot of cost.
Vac forms; if you did in CDT at school the process is the same. You made a wooden jig (done by a CNC router) and then pull heated plastic over it, remove the air, and
there's your vac form. Simple. £15 or so for each unit.
Wiring the vacs; a job I hated. We had a rig where you put the last black over a lightbox, and then the vac on top, and a pedal would step through each lamp in sequence
and you followed it with a wire. Tedious but that's how it was done. You then plugged in the loom and checked for bad connections, missed lamps, etc.
You now have a glass and wired vacs, and these can go to the factory for a hand-built number of machines for use in dev (later on) and then testing.
4. Code
The prototype machine is handed over to the developer, who will write the code. Sits next to your desk.
All machines start from the the previous game - to ensure the latest versions of the libraries are used, and any bug fixes are also in.
The developer normally starts by getting lamps configured; hopefully (though not always) a lot of lamps are the same as a previous game.
Entering upto 256 lamps as #define LP_NUDGE_1 (LP_DATA_1|LP_STROBE7) gets very tedious....
Once lamps are defined, we can make tables (arrays) of lamps to make control much easier. Say you had 12 lamps for your nudge pot, you'd create
a table e.g. nudgePotTable[] = { LP_NUDGE_1, LP_NUDGE_2.....} and then with one line of code, AllLampsOff(nudgePotTable), switch them all off.
Easier than doing all lamps individually...
Once your inputs and outputs are done, you've entered your reel strip layouts and reel mech types (libraries make this easy), you can then move
to start coding the game properly.
As you've started from a previous game, if it's the same style of game (a board game, lets say) then you define your board squares, and call
functions to action the square (e.g. AddToCashPot(100) or AddToNudgePot(1) etc).
Before about 2000, most dev and debugging was done on the machine. We then ported the entire software to PC and have a fast play simulator where
you can use Visual Studio to debug the code before it ever reaches a machine. Logic and visuals are entirely separate for the most part; the visuals
just show (on lamps, alpha or screen) what the logic has already decided what will happen.
The obvious exception to this is skill stops, where you watch for a button press and then action that accordingly (sometimes "rolling off" if the player stopped on something
we didn't want them to have!).
This is a very simplified version of what is a long process, coding a game could take 12 weeks until it was ready for testing. You have to write any new feature, but
if you want a Money Belt, and you've done one before, you go and take that rather than code from scratch.
Most games were just bolting pre-existing bits of code together, in truth.
When you want to test your code on the machine, you download via an EPROM emulator. These are boxes of very fast access RAM, connected to the USB (or parallel port!) of a PC
and you use a utility to download your BIN file to the machine. The emulator usually had a hardware reset line, connected to a pin on the processor, which pulled the CPU
into reset whilst the code downloaded. Not doing so resulted in the machine trying to boot every second or so, and failing, and you got this awful clicking noise every time.
Then the machine boots up as normal, and you use either the alpha or the serial port to debug what's going on. A lot of times we put pauses in so we can
check what's going on (such as when calculating the win from nudges) before letting the machine continue.
Nudges are interesting, actually, as they (especially for multi line games) need quite a bit of computational power. I remember coding a game on Scorp 4 which had 3x 24 symbols
on the reels, and 5 lines with wild symbols. I got it to calculate the best win with 24 nudges once. It took the poor 16mhz processor a whole 8 minutes ![:)]()
Needless to say, we found another way - pre-calculated look up tables of wins from your current reel position.
So assuming your game is finished, coded, balanced (i.e it plays right and your payout % is fine) then it's off to test...
5. Testing
Though you test your code, there is no substitute for a fresh pair of eyes.
Game testers (I started as one) will sit and play the game both methodically to a script, and "free play" i.e. playing as a real player would,
to find bugs. Some test scripts are simple, i.e. insert £1, check it registered and meters update, etc, and some are much more complex.
Testing takes a good 2 to 3 weeks. Once any bugs are fixed, and the game is ready to go out to the wider world, you "master" a set of EPROMs.
This gives them a part number and also adds security to prevent tampering (checksums tests, etc).
During the end of coding and test phases, 25 or 50 machines are built for primary test; these are given (in the old days) free of charge to a pub company
for test. Machines are sited and weekly figures are generated by the Pub Co and fed back.
You are looking for your game to beat the previous machine sat on that bit of carpet space. This is known as "indexing". So the last machine averaged
£200 a week - that's a 100% index. Your game goes in and does £400 a week, that's a 200% index. That rarely happens, usually if the game is good you'll see a 120% index.
If the game is good, or the pub's been closed, the index is affected.
If the game does a good bit higher than the previous one, the game goes to secondary test with more machines (again, given free..) and the process repeats for another 6/8 weeks.
6. Sales?
Machine fail test? You get them all back - usually in pieces. Big money up in smoke.
Game does well? Time for orders! Big companies would order in lots of 250 or more units. One of my favourite sights was seeing the Mazooma warehouse full
of machines, and a good 100+ with the cab door open looking like a guard of honour, walking down the middle. Awesome stuff.
Lots of machines sold, we can keep the lights on and people's mortgages paid and kids fed. Great.
Now on to the next game............
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FME Screenshot
As promised 300mb worth of screenshots, with a few random other FME related pics.
First part.... http://www68.zippyshare.com/v/jiflusfw/file.html
Second part.... http://www68.zippyshare.com/v/rTq0S3me/file.html
I hope they are useful for game managers, frontends etc... or just to see what's is out there you may have missed layout wise.
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MPU 4 - NileJewels_1280_WDX
File Name: NileJewels_1280_WDX
File Submitter: spiderman21982
File Submitted: 12 Jul 2017
File Category: MPU 4
Nile Jewels German Barcrest MPU4
design by Gordon
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£130 in £20 out - 10p/£5
I am wondering how is it possible for a machine to only pay out £20 of the duration of £130 being put in.
The machine is set on a 80% payout, 10p stake with £5 JP. The machine is Gold Rush, Stampede, 4 player, sitdown.
A lot of you know more than me so I am wondering how this is actually possible on a £5 jackpot machine?
Information:
There was not one gold rush top feature including stampede
Not one pound coin dropped / backed
Jackpot was awarded only once with no hold, rest of the wins were small.
Gold Rush bottom feature awarded Gold Spin which span Cherry's for a £1 win. This happened twice also no hold.
Wondering if there is a proper explanation on how a machine can payout so badly along with everything else I have listed.
Thanks in advance
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Scorpion 4 and Scorpion 5 manuals
Stumbled upon this site by accident earlier tonight.
some peeps may know that it exists, but just in case, i thought i would post the link.
it may come in useful if anyone is doing a layout or has a fruit machine and is looking for a certain manual
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MFME 5.2?
Hi, sorry if this seems a stupid question but does anyone know anything more about the release of the new MFME5.2? Im asking as it was mentioned it could run bullion bars multiplayers which would help me keep out of the arcades. I noticed in may/june posters were asking/saying it was expected soon, but then no mention of it since then. Does anyone know if its still happening or not sorry if this should be obvious.. thanks in advance
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Project Coin - HotSpots
This has been a long tme coming and a PC hard drive crash took me back a little. Anyway still tinkering with it and hope to get it finished off and released within the next couple of weeks.
J
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SATURDAY NIGHT BEAVER £5 / £25 / £250
HEYA GUYS !!,
Just wondering if there is any news on Saturday Night Beaver Machine ?
SO Looking forward to playing Machine 
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i wonder if....
sorry to revive an old request,but was wondering if anyone knows if the roms are available for this yet ? with the new emulator and and all the fantastic new layouts,it would be the icing on my FME cake to get this back to life...
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Extreme's Jolly Roger £25
Coming soon (hopefully lol) is this pirate themed slot
the image i got from richy1976 i think its originally from fleabay, its not the crispest image but hopefully something can be done with it
the usual font id help required, can anybody identify the hi lo reel fontage and does anybody remember if said reel has arrows up n right on it??
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