Fruit Machine Emulation

[mechamonkey]

Apologies if this triggers some peoples habits in advance.
I'm very middle aged now and yet I've successfully manged to avoid ever playing any fruit machines.
Along with mountains of accumulated gaming stuff over the years I also have an arcade cab and virtual pinball so I thought, you know what would fit in well with those, some sort of fruity, thus began my rabbit hole journey.
So in the last few days I've joined various emulation forums etc and finally got my head round it.
I've got MFME up and running perfectly and even set up "Arcade Simulator" to have a wander round my own private collection of gamblers.
Next step is to buy some sort of touchscreen and mini pc to set up with a touch-play front end for MFME.

The main thing I have learned is I was very very right not to pump any money into these ever, and never will.

Anyway here's a quick video I did for a friend showing him what I'd been up to (Arcade Simulator) thought some of you might get a kick out of it  (apologies if embedding doesnt work, I set it to 18+ because of gambling)
 

 

[Ninja Doctor]

I think @dumpster did some work on these a few years back using save states to show how the higher/lower type games always make you lose. 

[ScouserInExile]

1 hour ago, Ninja Doctor said:

I think @dumpster did some work on these a few years back using save states to show how the higher/lower type games always make you lose. 

I had a mate who played fruities a lot. Like every time we were in the pub. I showed him this research and he's stopped playing completely. He always thought they were essentially fair, but this has been enough to put him off.

[Skykid]

Stu C campaigned on this. I shan't link directly, because I think - for mutually good reasons - he and RLLMUK are probably best kept apart... but it's easily discovered, and was called FairPlay. He documented it so you could follow along at home with emulator save states.

[SozzlyJoe]

16 minutes ago, Skykid said:

Stu C campaigned on this. I shan't link directly, because I think - for mutually good reasons - he and RLLMUK are probably best kept apart... but it's easily discovered, and was called FairPlay. He documented it so you could follow along at home with emulator save states.

 

Yeah, back when he was occasionally a force for good. The industry response was 'So what, we say it pays out 97% and it does' but I think, like @ScouserInExile's friend, seeing how that actually works behind the scenes is too bitter a pill to swallow. I've often wondered if you could use emulation to make them 'fair' but I think they probably just aren't programmed like that.

 

EDIT: BTW @mechamonkeythat virtual arcade looks amazing!

[Skykid]

12 minutes ago, SozzlyJoe said:

I've often wondered if you could use emulation to make them 'fair' but I think they probably just aren't programmed like that.

 

I suspect only to get a feel for when they were more likely to be mean, to avoid them. Some folks used to sit near the machines, only having a go when they'd seen people pour money into them without payouts. Let someone else exhaust that 3%!

[Ninja Doctor]

It’s more like a 70% payout rate typically from what I can remember. 
 

Not been to the pub in years, do they still have fruities?

[Lorfarius]

So how do people win money on them? There always seems to be some sneaky bloke in the back of a pub, watching like a hawk for big losers and swooping in to bag a massive pay out.

[Gabe]

@SozzlyJoe You can't make them 'fair', no. The percentage payouts are based on thousands of spins and they will stick incredibly close to it over the long-term (you can monitor all the stats via the emulator to see this).

 

For anybody that used to play machines in the wild (I'm talking about back in the old £3/£6 jackpot days) you learned quickly that the hi-lo gambles/skill stops/repeat chances would cheat you (to the point that Barcrest machines used to flash-up 'TRUE SKILL' when it wouldn't cheat - naturally this didn't come up often). You just factored into your gameplay that you would lose going higher on a 2 more often than not and made decisions around this.

 

There were (and still are) various tricks that work and ways to empty machines, but for the casual player it all started to go wrong with after the £8 jackpot machines. Prior to then a lot of machines genuine could be fun to play; the feature-board would spun in regularly, with the actual games being enjoyable and you could spend a while playing and not be a stupid amount of money down - and could often win. My friends and I used to go to a pub and decamp to the fruit machines for a fun evening and rarely were ever more than a few pounds each down - ditto places like Southend if you at least knew of some of the basic tricks (i.e. holds after nudges, 3 holds for a win etc).

 

I recently download a few machines via emulation because, as I say, the old machines used to be quite fun. Anything beyond an £8 jackpot is usually quite a miserable experience though, with long periods of the machine sucking in money to build up a win pot - it's not unusual to see them take in well over £100 to pay out a £15 jackpot, for example.

 

Essentially, I wouldn't touch them in the real world because they are hideous beasts now, but they can be entertaining via emulation.

[Gabe]

Just now, Lorfarius said:

So how do people win money on them? There always seems to be some sneaky bloke in the back of a pub, watching like a hawk for big losers and swooping in to bag a massive pay out.

There are various methods that vary by manufacturer (though a lot of exploits get patched-out), but you need to know all the signs and play it very carefully - but they can result in emptying them. A lot of it is timing, too; the proper devoted players will know where the machine is roughly in a payment cycle within a few pounds of spins, at which point they would leave it alone.

[Dudley]

5 minutes ago, Lorfarius said:

So how do people win money on them? There always seems to be some sneaky bloke in the back of a pub, watching like a hawk for big losers and swooping in to bag a massive pay out.

 

That's broadly exactly how, they pay out... ooh 73% over a certain time.

 

If you know the time and you've watched people lose for long enough then it's due to pay out.

[ScouserInExile]

26 minutes ago, Gabe said:

Anything beyond an £8 jackpot is usually quite a miserable experience though, with long periods of the machine sucking in money to build up a win pot - it's not unusual to see them take in well over £100 to pay out a £15 jackpot, for example.

A good 25 years ago now, a mate of mine poured £300 into a machine because "it had to pay out soon". Even if he had have hit the jackpot a couple of times, he wouldn't have recouped what he'd put in, but he thought he could minimise his loss by keeping playing until he got something back. He didn't.

[SozzlyJoe]

35 minutes ago, Dudley said:

 

That's broadly exactly how, they pay out... ooh 73% over a certain time.

 

If you know the time and you've watched people lose for long enough then it's due to pay out.

 

I imagine that leads to a lot of ill-feeling when someone swoops in and takes 'your' jackpot!

[Gabe]

@ScouserInExileYeah, that's the danger in thinking you know how they operate. The payout percentage is played out over so many thousand spins, it is very easy for a machine to go on a long draining period (especially if a 'pro' player has emptied it) and sunk-cost fallacy kicks in quite quickly. 

 

With £100 jackpot machines now common everywhere, I dread to think how much they could suck during a bad patch, but I'd say multiple hundreds easily, with only some token low-level wins every now and then.

[Gabe]

6 minutes ago, SozzlyJoe said:

 

I imagine that leads to a lot of ill-feeling when someone swoops in and takes 'your' jackpot!

Ahh, the number of times we'd go to a pub and spot those people eyeing up those playing the machines. Or worse - you would get people coming over telling you how to play. I remember once at Southend a guy we regularly saw there came over to us one night and was trying to tell us what to do, even offering to buy us out so he could continue our feature board - Southend was a classy place 

 

Back in the day you used to be able to look through the machine and see the pound coin tubes - in a pub, if it was full there was a good chance it would pay out soon. In proper arcades it was slightly less of a guide because you never know when they may have manually refilled the machine, but it was still the first thing to check when approaching one. Man, that was back in the 90s!

[dumpster]

As stated, it wasn't me it was Rev Stu.  He did some amazing work in this area.  The key areas he covered were:

 

1 - The machines would choose the result of the next hi/lo spin after you made your choice.  You go high, or low, it makes no difference.  If the machine wants you to lose, you lose. 

 

2 - some machines had a screen inside that was not visible to the player.  When you got a gamble, the screen might say "Limit 4".  This meant that if you gambled you might win or lose but you'll never win the 4th time.  Proof the games were cheating.

 

3 - the payout ratio doesn't have a legal bottom limit.  So you can make a fruit machine which only pays out each prize once every year and it would be legal.  That, for me, was the big one. Fruit machines need to pay out to keep the player playing so machines tend to be programmed to 70% at least.  But by law you could have a machine that has a 1% payout and there nothing wrong with that.

 

And

 

4 - the odds of playing are not the odds that are displayed.  As explained in point 1 above, all aspects of the game program can cheat as much as they like.  Implied odds in a fruit machine give the player the illusion of having some input, but it's a lie.  You're more likely to go higher than a 2, lower than an 11 or stick on a 6 but it makes no difference.  To me, that's the equivalent of presenting a roulette wheel to a player, and not telling them there's a magnet under the zero.  Like if you toss a coin there's an assumption it's 50/50 because you know how coins work.  Fruit machines know you picked heads and immediately reveal the coin shows tails , if it wants to.  

 

So that's all Stu Campbells work and I thought it was a very good thing to campaign about. 

 

However I did my own similar thing and I'll post that in a few minutes because my kettle just boiled. 

 

 

 

[dumpster]

Ok, so the thing I did wasn't fruit machines, it was quiz machines, specifically for me it was Hangman and Telly Addicts from the 1990s.

 

Like all these quiz machines they promote themselves as a reward for testing knowledge.  It's a quiz, so you're going to win the money if you get all the questions right. They even had their own tax breaks and regulations because these machines were not amusements with prizes, these were SKILL with prizes.  SWP machines.  Keep that in mind. It's all about the skill. 

 

We sussed out the con of Telly Addicts while playing it in the pub.  The game consisted of 20 questions, and a correct answer scored 3 points.  Some questions randomly awarded you a 'telly test card' as well as the points.  Then, at the end of the game you'd be presented with a matching pairs card game.  30 cards on the screen.  Turn over 2 and hope to find a pair. Find all 15 pairs and you win the jackpot. If you won any telly test cards during the quiz, each one would uncover one pair automatically, saving you a lot of time. 

 

If you know all the answers to all the questions you'd go into the end game with a full 60 seconds on the clock and a random handful of testcards. Let's say the machine randomly awarded you 5.  This leaves you with just 10 pairs to find.  We had a system for turning over the cards and we nailed this game, winning the jackpot every time.

 

Unless... Someone else had won the jackpot that day.  Because as you've probably worked out, the machine gives telly test cards at "random".  You might get none, you might get 10.  But without them you're stuffed.  The maximum 60 seconds just isn't long enough to match the pairs.  The machines heavily implied they were skill with prizes, but it didn't matter how skilled you were, you could not win if the machine decided it wasn't time to pay today.

  As soon as someone got the jackpot you stopped seeing telly test cards on future games. Once the machine had taken in enough money they came back, with the machine properly regulating the payout just like a fruit machine.  

 

But my favourite (and thanks for staying on my forum post

 this long) was JPM Hangman.  We spent loads on this in the pub in the 90s or 2000s and when it turned up on MAME I spent a lot of time on it.  I even created cheats for it that became part of the official MAME cheat files.  

 

What's fascinating about Hangman on MAME is that when it asks a question you just pause the game and Google the answer.  So why don't you win any money? Well... initially you do!  Cheating catches the machine by surprise and you win....  Once.

 

Once you've pocketed that jackpot the machine starts to play in a devious new way.  The hangman words get longer.  The clues earn less points.  The timers get shorter.  The questions get more obtuse. You get a new bonus round that looks good but it's there to give them another way to kill you off and sometimes it's a dead end where every option ends the game.

 

 

But that's OK because you're on MAME and you downloaded my cheat file, so you can still try and win, right?

 

And this is where it gets silly. 

 

First the question timer gets so short you can't even read the question.  But  that's no problem. Just add the "stop the timers" cheat.  Then, as the words get harder, pause and Google the clues. Give yourself infinite extra lives.  Keep adding a cheat every time the game finds a new way to get you and watch as it starts asking questions that not even Google knows the answer to.  

 

Then you'll notice that you used to need 400 points to win the jackpot but now you need 1000 points just to get your 50p back. And as you continue to get the correct answers (because you're cheating) the machine has no idea what to do.  It's not going to let you win, and it goes ballistic, firing off impossible questions, giving you half a second to answer them, to guess letters in really long phrases for very low points.  There's simply no way you could ever stand a chance of winning a penny in a pub, yet these are apparently games of skill, rewarding knowledge.

 

If you like the sound of this, give it a go.  It's completely fascinating to see how the machine squirms and does everything it can to make sure you cannot win, but as it doesn't understand youre using cheat codes it goes completely crazy.  

 

Anyway, to cut a long story short TOO LATE.

 

And my tea is ready.

 

Rip Norm McDonald. 

[Rex Grossman]

As someone who has never been interested in fruit machines this is all fascinating.

 

The possibility of winning money was never an enticement. Even as a kid I always assumed they were some sort of scam (probably because my dad ran a bar so I saw them from the other side). As I got older and had friends who played them it felt like even if you were “winning” the profit you got in an hour was comparable with what you’d take home after working an hour on a minimum wage job. Seemed so bleak.

[Dudley]

16 hours ago, SozzlyJoe said:

 

I imagine that leads to a lot of ill-feeling when someone swoops in and takes 'your' jackpot!

 

Ill-feeling and if you're in Vegas, shootings.

[SozzlyJoe]

Fascinating, @dumpster. Anyone ever looked into those online fruit machines? I span a few free tenners on them a few months ago and whilst fun I had to assume they were even more rigged than the physical ones - but maybe they aren't, if they are more regulated? That's where I got the 97% figure from.

You never hear people talking about them, but there are so many providers of them so they must be popular. What are the scandals there? I know one guy was told he won the jackpot only for the firm to try to do him out of it (which he deliciously won in court)

 

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/apr/07/online-gambler-wins-court-case-to-claim-17m-prize-after-betfred-refused-to-pay

 

Hard to know if it could credibly be called a bug as all the news reports were frustratingly light on the technical details.

[Ketchup]

I used to work on these (as an artist) and yeah they’re a con. Even with unlimited money it would basically just drain down. I wouldn’t touch them even for the game aspect of a lot of newer ones as just getting to the game part is tough.

 

Online ones are really popular but generally certain brands take off like that leprechaun one I’m sure you’ve seen advertised.

 

As an aside, casino games don’t work the same way. If you play on a machine and someone else arrives and wins the jackpot that doesn’t mean you would have. They use random number generators generally so someone winning was just lucky. A player that knows this will generally have a few spins and if it hasn’t paid out anything will just move on to the next one and even if it does do a small payout will still move as that payout wasn’t a sign a bigger things to come, just luck on when you started the machine up.

[Gabe]

3 hours ago, SozzlyJoe said:

Fascinating, @dumpster. Anyone ever looked into those online fruit machines? I span a few free tenners on them a few months ago and whilst fun I had to assume they were even more rigged than the physical ones - but maybe they aren't, if they are more regulated? That's where I got the 97% figure from.

You never hear people talking about them, but there are so many providers of them so they must be popular. What are the scandals there? I know one guy was told he won the jackpot only for the firm to try to do him out of it (which he deliciously won in court)

 

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/apr/07/online-gambler-wins-court-case-to-claim-17m-prize-after-betfred-refused-to-pay

 

Hard to know if it could credibly be called a bug as all the news reports were frustratingly light on the technical details.

I've never been interested in them, but they are regulated, yes, and no different really to playing roulette or blackjack etc in a real casino in that the house always wins.

 

 

[Vimster]

In the late 90s my housemate and I at uni would play on this Top Of The Pops trivia machine in the pub near our flat. Every time we'd manage to win the jackpot and basically pay for our first pint each with a £1 go. It asked simple multiple-choice questions and then had a timed round at the end that I'm guessing was meant to make you lose but we gamed it. Imagine our disappointment when they replaced it with some crappy game where you had to make lines of fruit on a grid by answering questions. I can't remember exactly how it worked but it was almost impossible to make a line.

[Gabe]

Quiz machines are interesting in how they can control the payouts, as @dumpsteraptly demonstrated. My friend used to play the Crystal Maze quiz game and it would stiff you not only by having too many silvers (no matter how long you had on the clock), but it would also allow fewer puzzles in each zone along the way.

 

It was plainly obvious even at the time, but he quite liked the puzzles so at least he was having some fun for his 50p. 

[ScouserInExile]

8 hours ago, SozzlyJoe said:

Fascinating, @dumpster. Anyone ever looked into those online fruit machines? I span a few free tenners on them a few months ago and whilst fun I had to assume they were even more rigged than the physical ones - but maybe they aren't, if they are more regulated? That's where I got the 97% figure from.

You never hear people talking about them, but there are so many providers of them so they must be popular. What are the scandals there? I know one guy was told he won the jackpot only for the firm to try to do him out of it (which he deliciously won in court)

 

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/apr/07/online-gambler-wins-court-case-to-claim-17m-prize-after-betfred-refused-to-pay

 

Hard to know if it could credibly be called a bug as all the news reports were frustratingly light on the technical details.

Not fruit machines per se, bit a mate of mine gambles a lot. Mostly roulette, some blackjack. He's pretty good at it from what I've seen. Same guy who doesn't play fruit machines any more. 

 

He had a back operation a few years ago, so was housebound for a couple of months. He signed up for one of the big online casinos - Skybet, I think it was - and played a bit. At first, he was getting the kind of results he'd expect to get, but fairly quickly started losing pretty badly. Just bad luck. Played the next day and the same thing happened - early reasonable wins, then it cleaned him out. More bad luck. He paid a lot more attention to the results the next time he played and realised there was a very definite point where the results turned against him. He changed the way he was betting and realised the run of results ran against him again. 

 

Yes, it's a game of pure chance but, as someone who has seen the wheel spin thousands of times, he could see it wasn't a straight game and he couldn't win. 

 

He stopped playing at that point. 

 

I've heard people say the same thing about fixed odds machines in bookies. They let you win for a bit, then take all your money. 

[ThePixelbarks]

My parents used to own a pub, and with it, a fruit machine. That thing infatuated me, and over the course of watching it while working, I came to a lot of realisations that are being stated in this tread. On the front of the machine, in very readable writing, it states that the machine WILL take 30% of whatever is put into it. I quickly came to see that you were playing against the person who had played before you if you were looking to make any money. 

 

I will admit, when I closed the pub, and had saw someone pump a fair bit of money in before close, I did stick a few quid in and often came out for the better. But I started to see when it was setting me up for a fix. There was a higher or lower game on it with numbers between 1 and 12. I first noticed that 3 and 10 would appear more than any other numbers on the board. And fairly often a 3 would lead to a 1, and 10 to 12. I also started to notice the amount of time the machine would take to land on 3 or 10 would vary greatly. To make it look like it had naturally rolled on to one of these numbers, it was over compensating by doing 1 or 2 more full revolutions of the wheel before landing on those numbers.

 

The fruity went so far out of its way to make it look natural and unlucky, that I started to see the con from a mile away. 

 

Thanks to those in this thread, for confirming my suspicions. It's why I never touched a "high payout" machine. To get to the jackpot in question would take the losses of so many people before it could even think of paying it out, it was never worth putting a single pound on it.

[disperse and recoagulate]

I’m a massive gambler - well, bettor - but have absolutely zero inclination to every play a fruity. Even less so after this thread.

 

Annoying cos one of my mates loves them, and standing with him while he wastes money is so boring. Wanna put some of my quids in? No thanks, mate, I’m not a child.

[dumpster]

Just to address a couple of the earlier posts in the thread, the fruit machines in the UK used to have payout limits. As a kid, the arcades never went higher than £4.80 and wins over £2 were paid in tokens that were only good for putting back in the machines.  As the rules loosened over the years tokens disappeared and prizes increased. But it's those early days that meant fruit machines needed to have games and features to make them fun, which is still a particular UK trait.  The whole Cops and Robbers thing, moving around a board making decisions isn't something you find around the world. Most fruit machines are simply spin the reels, see if you win. Those early payout limits in the UK meant games had to be fun because the prizes were so low. Even if you won the jackpot you just walked away with a fistful of tokens.

 

In Chris Donald's autobiography he discusses licencing Viz characters and specifically mentions the Viz fruit machine.  Initially sceptical, Chris and the team agreed to JPM (or whoever) to allow the creation of a Viz fruit machine and spent time designing it and coming up with ideas.  JPM rejected them all and said there's a standard design that players understand and they mustn't deviate from.  The Viz machine was basically exactly the same game as all the others, like a re-skin of EastEnders. Viz wanted to back out but the deal was done and Chris hated the existence of the finished product.

 

Someone mentioned expert players.  Many fruit machines have cheats or bugs that facilitate a payout. For example, on the OXO machines that randomly hand out 3 nudges the prize is usually 4 nudges away, and players realised there's a cheat.  Do 2 nudges, then wait and don't make that third nudge.  The machine can be noisy but you just have to bear with it.  After about 30 seconds the machine does 2 nudges on its own and you win the prize.  Likewise, if you hold the cancel button on a gamble it slows down and makes it easier.  Expert players know this stuff and you see them "fiddling" the machine and getting the payouts. But none of this is affecting the payout ratio.  If you use one of these cheats, it's simply stopping a win dropping in on a later spin, robbing Peter to pay Paul. But the typical gambler thinks these cheats and tips give them an advantage so they play more.  But no extra money is coming out.

 

Finally, there are people who think they are clever, lurking, watching, swooping in as you leave and stealing your jackpot.  Sometimes they will win of course, but it's not because they timed it right, they are just lucky.  The fact is that the payout is fixed, and it's fixed over a mighty long time. The machine pays out whatever the operator sets it at, over the week, month, or maybe the life of the machine. With emulation you might spend a thousand pounds in one sitting and barely win anything. The machine can go on the take for as long as it wants and you'd never really know in a real-life situation because no-one walks into the arcade with a grand in £1 coins in their pocket.  This was the biggest revelation in emulation - you can play with unlimited money, play for hours solidly and see the overall behaviour of the machine.

 

Many machines have this feature where all the lights turn red and the game goes crazy for a few minutes.  You get jackpot after jackpot.  It makes a lot of noise.  You come away with £100 in a matter of moments.  The game has a legal limit of say, a £15 jackpot and the law says it can't pay more. But the machine can give you ten jackpots in a row, providing you pay for a spin for each one.  

 

Being a lurker, you could watch a machine for days and not know where it is in the cycle.

 You could watch someone put £20 in a machine, or £30 or £50, or £100.  You could then swoop in, and you might even win. The machine could even go red and you win loads.  And the lurker makes the connection that being a lurker really does pay off. But the reality is the machine could literally sit there, taking money off everyone, all week.  The machine owner sets the payout ratio they choose (and a new machine in a pub is often set significantly higher for the first week or two to generate interest). But internally, that machine might be way higher or lower than the fixed amount at any given time. The machine might take a thousand pounds off people without giving a single prize. The internal clock says it's payout ratio is Zero.  Then one day, some random player gets ten jackpots in a row and the internal ratio is now 20% or 50% or maybe 90%. Nobody knows.  Over the lifetime of the machine it will have paid out exactly 73%, the percentage that the owner set.  If you could access the internal accountancy screens you'd be better informed and maybe could exploit that knowledge, but that refill key you got from eBay isn't going to tell you too much.

 

For me, the machines that pay out tickets are the worst. I really believe it's insidious, teaching kids from an early age how much fun gambling can be.  Luckily, the golden age of fruit machines seems to be in the past now.  These days, the pub still has machines but you rarely see people playing them.  Not like they used to. Maybe we all learned. 

 

This post is brought to you by insomnia. You light up another cigarette and I pour the wine. Its 4am in the morning and it's starting to get liiiight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Vimster]

Not that I've been to the pub that much lately but it has been a while since I've heard the pump-rattle of a jackpot payout, you rarely even saw some bored day-drinker stick a pound in. The machine usually just sits there flashing away, part of the usual pub furniture.

[fat flatulent git]

I used to love fruit machines, but stopped playing completely when they went up to 30p per play.  For whatever reason the fact that you could put a pound in and have 10p left over really pissed me off.

 

I occasionally play them on the pier near my UK house, at 2p or 10p a go.

 

I've been lucky in that I've only ever seen it as entertainment rather that a way to win money.

 

Would love to have emulated versions.