Brief Introduction & First Project!

Hi there!

My name's Ben and I'm a freelance (non-union) voice actor.

I've been a fruit machine fan and a lurker of this forum for a long time now and always wanted to sign up, but given how much I struggle to balance social networking stuff these days, I felt it was worth waiting until I had something to contribute to you all first vs. posting an introduction then vanishing for weeks at a time.

I was born and raised in Blackpool, (so as you can imagine I've experienced my fair share of fruit machines!), but currently live in Hawaii in the United States with my wife.

My all-time two favorite fruit machines are "Crazy Fruits Green" and "Homer's Meltdown".

I was super happy to discover a couple of years ago that there were emulators for these sorts of things and that "Crazy Fruits Green" had a brilliant and clean layout recreation by The Killer Tomato (mocochoco?) but was slightly disappointed that my absolute favorite-favorite of the two machines, "Homer's Meltdown" didn't.

I've been following the progress of "Homer's Meltdown" via emulation for a good while now too. Seeing it go from not working at all, to running (but with Italian Job sounds), to just recently having a basic layout made by mazza500.

But having Photoshop and Graphic Design in my background, I decided "why wait for someone else to do it for me when I can contribute something to you guys myself?".

So over the last several months (on and off) I have painstakingly redrawn and color matched every element on the board. Going as far as to track down the original fonts used and so forth.

In that time TommyC has released a brilliant mash-up made from several images (which I also recommend people download!) so we sort of already have a layout with the actual graphics now, but my version has been completely redrawn from scratch at a high resolution, so hopefully it should still be worth having!.

I still have a ways to go before I finish, but I wanted to introduce myself, let people know I was working on it and tease folks with my progress as I'm now heading towards the home stretch as it were.

When I'm done (or when I have more to show) I'll create a thread for my project in the appropriate section before release, but for now; Howdy folks!

Thanks for reading!

Pictures:






As you can see, I was inspired layout-wise by the Crazy Fruits layout. I love how clean and clear that one is vs. coping the machine angles (but obviously that's totally a preference when it comes to emulation).

Please excuse my heavy watermarking and zoomed out/in screenshots. The finished release will have absolutely no watermarking, but I want to keep this thing underwraps really until it's done.

P.S. I feel now that I'm getting involved, it's only right of me to admit that I made a second account way back when I first started my project as I needed to do some testing and accidentally downloaded the wrong emulator (D'oh!). At the time I wasn't aware there was a hefty rule against this (though I should have expected as such really), so please forgive me folks!