Friday 27 February 2009

Project Coin - The Roll and a into to Emulation.

This machine was so good back in the day. Such a shame machines aren't made like this any more. Also, shame there's hardly any about these days.

However, a year or so ago I found one!

The clip below is just your typical machine play, not much going on but keeping you interested enough to keep going.




When you got the feature (getting 3 roll symobls on the winline) there was always the possibility that the machine would climb all the way up the cash wins, and sometime doing it more than once!



Overall, great game, great sounds. Such a shame there's none about anymore.

This is where emulation is your best friend!

You can goto a website called http://www.fruit-emu.com/. Here you can download emulators and user created machines and play them on your PC! They are just like the real thing. They actually run the machines game rom and sound cards. The machine thinks it's running but it is in fact running on a computer screen!

They are very easy to run. Even easier to get it all set up and costs nothing at all, not a single penny!

For now, here's a clip of Barcrests Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!. This classic layout was created by myself! There is also a DX version created by other users and all a freely avaliable to download via the above website.

Just to add, a classic layout has no graphics. The only graphic will be the reels and sometimes a wintable. A DX is a classic but with complete graphic lamps. It's not overly complicated to put either a classic or DX together. If you know you photoshop or paint shop pro softwares then to be fair it's all straight forward. Classics are a bit more tricky but nearly all machines that do run have a classic. There's always a need for hi res photos or flyers or in the best case machine glass scans. If you have any of these or can get some then please get in touch with me here!

Anyway, onto the video.



As you can see, although it's a classic it does in fact look quite like the machine. Laid out the same and all that. Notice how the sounds sound like the real machine, it plays like the real thing, hell, it may aswell be the real thing apart from the 120kgs of weight that goes with it!

This is one of thousands of emulated machines and that's not joke. If I asked you to think of an old machine i'd say there's a 90% chance it runs on your PC!

Saturday 21 February 2009

One of the all time greatest fruit machines? Pyramid!

Back in the day Electrocoin made several really good feature game fruit machines. They are amoung some of the best fruit machines ever to hit arcades.

One came up on ebay a while back, only a few miles from me so had to buy it! Although it had a 5p stake and an £8 jackpot it still played fairly well. Originally it was on 20p play with a £6 jackpot and it played so well on the set up.

On the very inside layer the Black Hole would nearly always kill you off. There was a half decent feature there called Win Series which went like this!




My favortie feature was SkillClimb. Very easy to obtain and red sevens were reachable and sometimes a jackpot, not in this case though :-)



As you can see from the clip below, the whole theme along with the sound effects worked so well. There was really so much going on. You see the reel skill feature at the end of the clip. Jackpot was a big no no on this feature but it would happily not jump on red sevens.




Spot a Win was very hit and miss, never really took it when playing in an arcade. Saw it give too many low wins! There was so many better features to go for like skill climb, reel skill, pick a win or nudge time.




Overall, great machine with a fantastic jackpot tune!



I would certaily buy another if it had a better stake/jackpot ratio!

Big Jackpots! Reel King, Fortune 500 and 8 LIner



This video is my most viewed video on http://www.youtube.com/FruitVideos

The video was filmed in the Section 16 era of fruit machines. Stakes were high! This one could be played on 10p a go all the way to £2. Crazy to think 15 years ago £2 was a jackpot on many machines! Not only that, a select few Section 16 machines could be played on £10 a go! Now that is crazy! Why it was ever allowed is beyond me! I never played one, way to risky but I did how ever buy one. Didn't cost the earth at £135 delivered to my door and still gets played quite a bit by myself after owning it for nearly 2 years!

The above is one way to snag a £500 jackpot on reel king, the other is below.



Anyhow, below is the monster Fortune 500, running on a manly £10 a spin!



The above video is running on a massive £10 a spin! Took ages to set up a real time jackpot. Real time was always the aim with this one. I have been trying to get a real time double jackpot on it for ages now and am beginning to think i'll never get one! Still, it's a fantastic saver machine for me!

Before I bought this one I bought another Section 16 machine called 8 Liner. This one could be played on as little as 50p a go all the way to £4. It had a £200 jackpot and paid alot! I had to set up a real time jackpot on this one too :-)



Sadly the machine developed an error and I couldn't find a way to fix it. Shame really, thought it was better than Fortune 500 and certainly had better sound effects!

Still, it lived for quite some time and I had many hours/days playing away, not losing a penny!

A while back now Section 16 was banned and B3 was brought in. Still £500 jackpot but on a limited £1 stake. Also only 4 machines to an arcade/bingo hall which was a great idea. Still, loop hole can be found and arcades started sectioning off areas and putting 4 in each area! Money grabbing or what? No wonder arcades in this day in age are empty compared to the crowded places they were in years gone by!