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  1. 1974, My first days at JPM I was shown how to put together the component parts of the "flasher assembly" or the "reel unit" that carries the symbols that you see spinning when you press the start button. What some of you newer (MPU?) guys may not know is that it's final resting position actually enabled the win by allowing an electric current to flow through the unseen pairs of contacts that were 'wiped' over by a pair of conductive brushes or wipers not unlike the underneath of a scalextric car (remember those). This was the complete randomness of the machine, their was no percentage controller, no way to inhibit wins. When 240v mains current was used (god forbid) the circuits actually used to arc or flash hence the 'Flasher' description. In previous days the electrical rotary switch, for that is what it is, was used extensively in machines such as the “Bally Bingo” and due to the unhealthy atmosphere (in those days) in pubs and arcades the contacts used to quickly get gummed up with fluff, grease and tobacco grime. Folk lore has it that one enterprising engineer who was particularly fed up with cleaning the grease out with a cloth thought it would be a great idea to use a little petrol soaked tooth brush to clean the contacts which on the face of it might seems an entirely plausible endeavour. Unfortunately the confined area he was in concentrated the fumes and he didn't notice the build up so when he powered up the mains and the machine started up, the flashers did just that, and well the rest can be imagined. I guess Fireball is a good name for a machine? Don't be under any illusion that JPM was always the well oiled machine it turned out to be. It all started in a garage in Porthcawl in about 1972 although the guys had been 'busy' converting machines to the new decimal coinage.The new coin values didn't exactly fit with the percentage values that had been used to create the products and the minor changes or botches that were used to make the machine 'fit' the percentage often screwed up game play. One trick was to inhibit the machine's ability to stop on a winning line, this was done buy either filling in the cog on the reel unit that allowed the solenoid brake to drop, or connecting a feed from the preceding contact on the wiped surface which kept the solenoid active long enough to let the jackpot pass.In any case the guys realised that by making their own glasses, changing the reel bands, rewiring the flasher and re-programming the rotary timers the machine could be revamped and game play enhanced, hence the Conversion kit market was started although they took in a machine and revamped it over night, while still keeping their day jobs. It didn't take long before they found a manufacturer to make cabinets and buying old broken machines they cannibalized parts to build new ones eventually buying all new parts. From their to the old ACE Coin building in Ferry Road, Cardiff took quite a short period of time and the wobbly foundations of the company were laid. Regards Frank Bird ............ Continued. ...........
    19 points
  2. Hello well first of all let me start by saying I never realized how much interest there was in the product and the industries that I enjoyed as a younger man. As much as the industry was interesting and fun to be in, the company JPM, was something very special. Considering the company as we knew it ceased to exist many years ago, most of the individuals that enjoyed working together, and playing hard together, are still in contact with each other. Several people on this forum have suggested that stories about the early days might be interesting so I have decided to attempt to write some humorous lines about those days and the product. This is obviously from my point of view and so it's in a way autobiographical, but I started on the production line, went through to the test department, moved on to development, migrated to customer services promoted to customer service manager, was asked to take over development, was part of the Marketing team and then project managed the new SWP so I guess mine is a particularly wide view. If this seems self indulgent or self promoting it's not meant to be so be honest and re-direct me if I drift off subject. I still work, I enjoy working with a bunch of geeks, lunatics, and research amongst other things renewable energies, water purification and believe it or not mobile phones and beer brewing, however that's another subject altogether. Strangely, at least six of us used to work in the gaming industry, no one else from JPM, they are not that old 🤔 however several from Astra games which obviously I had a big hand in setting up. I'll gather some facts together and come back with more pertinent information. Regards Frank Bird .......... Continued ..........
    18 points
  3. Hello again (anyone) Well the last year has been a blast and work on the project is progressing so back to the history. JPM, the End (for me) circa 1989? So, apart from a few recollections that may crop up in the future, that is it for the history of JPM in its heyday, well as far as I was concerned anyway. We spent quite a while looking for successors to the GUAB, we had ‘3 in a row’ another game based on cards which I cannot really remember and the far more memorable “PAC Quiz”. The latter machine was an amalgamation of PAC man and a quiz game. You can guess the game structure I bet. Your Pac man’s progress was based on your selection of direction with a successful question giving you progress across the dots towards the next question tile while the ‘Ghost’ Icon made progress across the dots towards you as you were answering, the longer you took the more advance he made towards you. The most memorable thing about this product as far as I was concerned was Ray Parker Jr's response to the request to use the ‘Ghost Buster’ theme tune. It went something like “I ain't gonna have my music played on no goddamn cock a mamey gambling machine”. Oh well, you can't say I didn't try! And so in answer to several of you that have asked, especially Sulzerned and Roadrunner, I have no definitive answer as to why JPM’s product’s appeal dipped so much in those days. I have an opinion however, but then don't I always! JPM just took on too much at that time, the talent was spread too thinly and new people just “didn't get it”, whatever “it” is. I remember the new Salesman standing at one of the product release meetings, in fact his first, and as he was playing the machine the feature started and he took a step back, held his chin and was heard to say “its saying something to me” several of us joined in chorus an said “yeah try pressing the fecking button.” The Whitbread thing, the expectation of software for them, the increasing export markets and of course the new SWP were all demanding a distillation of the intellectual input of the 'dev team'. Perhaps the new ‘professionalism’ and ‘specification sheets’ of the Dev process took away from the spur of the moment decision taking that was often the most successful Again as a personal reflection I remember a new salesman looking at rev 27 or so of a programme that was playing in a machine and saying. “If we change ‘this’ and modify ‘that’ and perhaps have the feature doing this, we could release it, how long will that take to implement?” The software engineer said “Well if you wait about 3 minutes I will change the Eprom back to Revision 4 and reboot the machine.” Silence was golden! Combined with these observations and at about this time, the dev team became spread across Cardiff, the lunchtime banter, backgammon and bacon sandwich meetings became a thing of the past. It has to be said that increasingly we were seeing new people as well. Who knows, I could be wrong in my views! I have to be careful here. The next few paragraphs are carefully covered by the following statement: “…without prejudice and in my own opinion the statements following here are alleged but are based on fact and come from individuals that should in all honesty have known the truth…” JPM the end.. As is well known, the original guys had decided that after the many years of success and the effort they had put in, they wanted to realise the money they had tied up in the company and so agreed to the sale of JPM to Whitbread which went ahead for circa £27 million. Jack, Alan, Howard, John and Ernie all pocketed a tidy (welsh see) sum which they were absolutely entitled to after making the lives of so many people so happy by being so successful for so long. However the new management under the watchful and cold steely robotic eye of the new MD were not so benefactorial or inclusive and the company continued to founder for reasons that did not at first seem apparent. The new JPM was now running under the Whitbread banner and it must be recognised , with the benefit of the deep Whitbread coffers, but there were fewer and fewer people there on a day to day basis that understood the heart of the industry or the product or for that matter the customers. The fact is that as the downturn continued to take its toll, around 70 people, me included, were selected for redundancy and around 30 more asked for voluntary redundancy, that was around something like 30 percent of the workforce. Another interesting ‘fact’ is that when we were all sat in the Black Lion at lunch time after collecting our ‘letters’ and drinking our sorrows away, I remember looking around and realising that if I had the money or the drive to start a gaming company, here was the very nub of the old company, the very core of the thing that had driven JPM to where it was. A large number of individuals that were left at the company were capable of doing their jobs and keeping the ‘company’ running, but the driving force behind many of the ideas, the enterprising individuals and the resourceful ones, the creative ones, were all sitting here crying in their beer. Again, from the outside it appeared that over the next couple of years JPM layed down extremely expensive tooling for cabinet designs to house games that were, well, not performing that well at all. The undeniable fact is that after many years of meandering around in the doldrums, JPM was bought from Whitbread by a consortium for £X million, a sum that I doubt anyone had in their back pocket and a sum that in all fairness a bank would have wanted some sort of business plan for. I wonder what sort of business plan could have been put together for a company that had spent years with little profit, had no viable product and undeniably had invested so much to no avail. The fact is that within a short period of time JPM machines, now resplendent in their new and very expensive cabinets ( very expensive to emulate as well ) were making huge inroads into the sales of gaming machines again. Again, the fact is that after a few years JPM was sold to Sega for circa £40 million. For me at that time however being made redundant was yet just another rejection and one that I could not begin to ponder over. I had just become maritally separated in my private life as well so all was not well in the Bird’s nest! So as one of the old crew, and never really seeing eye to eye with the new MD, it was no surprise when I was asked to go and see Martyn Stork who was by then the development manager, and as he asked me to “sit down Frank”. I replied “Cut the crap Martyn and just tell me if I get the car”. Amongst several shakily proffered and previously practised platitudes, love him, he asked me to hand over my access key, the key to the very security system that I had been instrumental in specifying and installing, oh and then leave the building. I told him exactly what he could do as there were over 2 hundred people that I had worked with over the years and I was going to say goodbye to each and every one of them and the only way he was going to get the key off me before I did that, was to ‘try’ and take it off me. I said goodbye to everyone before I left for the Black Lion and Brains beer. It took a while to get over. No, it took a long time. Redundancy is no fun. ( Sorry if this has become too personal ) Just in case it was missed, "the previous paragraphs should be covered by the following statement: “…without prejudice and in my own opinion the statements which have been read are alleged, but are based on fact and come from individuals that should in all honesty have known the truth…” So. Astra to follow, or rather, Where did that steel cabinet idea come from? Once again apologies if it is too personal but it is from my perspective.....
    18 points
  4. Hi all. Been sitting on this for a while. Wanted to get it in a better cabinet but it's time consuming. Long story short, I always wanted to make my own fruit machine from being a young boy, so here it is. Excuse the cabinet, it's a proof of concept. It plays to (I think 80%). I based the hit rates of the original machine but had to make a few adjustments. I can give more details if anyones interested. Cheers P.S The sounds are recorded from the original machine but the speaker is a cheap wank thing.
    18 points
  5. And there's more..... Electro Mechanical (EM) - Versus - Stepper Reel Unit (SRU) As already mentioned I had succeeded in filling a vacancy in JPM's After Sales Service and had a shiny Blue Ford Cortina estate. It was one of the only estates that would get a machine in the back with the seats down, sort of guaranteed to kill you if you were rear ended but I digress. (another welshman). Work days were now in a 3 piece suit as we were ‘an extension of Sales’ as Ernie Beaver, the sales director at JPM let us know on frequent occasions. This was a new venture for me and involved, amongst other duties, taking calls from technicians in field who were stuck with a problem and couldn’t fix the machine and those were the calls we enjoyed taking! It was always a pleasure to speak with a like minded engineer who wanted to fix a problem and needed another pair of hands to assist so to speak. We would pore over the schematic in the office asking the engineer to try various things and offering our suggestions until we eventually nailed the issue! Believe me the last thing we wanted was to have an engineer left in the field with a machine that was still OOO as we called it and no idea of how to fix it. In fact several of us had been know to jump in the car after work and drive to site to be there for the next day and check out the problem ourselves if the answer was not found. This was especially true in the case of a new machine just in case it was a production issue which would be replicated. We sometimes took calls from executives of influential Companies pointing out the shortcomings of a design or a flaw in the product and demanding that we come and ‘sort things out’. Both these types of calls resulted in us often taking a two pronged approach, perhaps going to site to see the issues first hand as a PR effort, but also checking on the production facility and seeing if we could see the problem first hand and persuade Dev or production to change things. We were expected to man exhibitions stands as well in such places as Alexandra Palace, back in the day before it burnt down, Olympia and also the NEC. That last venue based near Birmingham was used only once and was the stage setting for the culmination of an important (head banging) period in JPM’s history and proved to be a turning point. More of that later Lets just step back over 40 years here Everything is no longer in black and white but it’s still sepia coloured. It’s early evening, it’s raining, and a machine is out of order. The call was made earlier in the day and the engineer turns up. First thing he does is light a fag and ask the landlord about the nature of the problem and checks out the machine. Let’s not forget before we go any further, there is no test routine per se! So, drag the machine away from the wall, create a space around the back to try and get some working space, open the beer sticky back door to the tobacco stained inside, perhaps kneel in the beer soaked carpet and wait for the usual comments from the crowd. “Ooo it’s like a telly in there,” “look at all those wires,” “can you make it win for me,” “come to stop it paying out have you?” And dozens of other well know comments He’s heard them all a hundred times If it’s payout related it’s easy, get some credit, move the reels to a payout position, hold them, hit start, wait for the game to finish, payout should happen, simples. More game related issues? He played until it came up. But then of course there was a schematic supplied with every machine and furthermore most canny engineers had a folder with the latest schematics in. By looking at the schematic, cycling the machine and following what should happen the engineer could trace the circuit and find the faulty component and here is the big difference between those days and today or at least when I finished in the industry and more’s the pity . He either went back to the car or delved in his tool box and pulled out a micro switch, a relay, perhaps even a timer motor. He might even look at the schematic and in the case of a relay related fault, check out if the contact was broken or pitted and perhaps search for another that didn’t utilise that contact or open the relay and even abrade the contact. Whatever it took. The point is in the vast majority of cases, unless there was vandalism, fire, or some other physical issue the engineer fixed the machine. He was proud of that fact, he was known for that trait. Of course with the introduction of the electronic systems many engineers, well in those days anyway, became worried. And rightly so, but their fears had to be allayed. I had already been, quite literally, "sent to Coventry" as the one person who was prepared to repair a new machine on site. The first breakdown of JPM's prototype electronic machine, the Each Way Nudge was in Thomas's Showboat Arcade in Coventry. I had a spare board with me obviously but I found that a transistor had blown and although I wasn’t prepared to actually de-solder the defective one, I scrunched it up with a pair of pliers and soldered the new one on to the legs of the old one. ‘JD’ as we say. (Job done) Lets not forget it wasn’t LSI in those days and there were many discrete components on the board. Crude?………Yes! Effective?….Definitely! Happy?……..Ecstatic! This first “repair” of the electronics in an Electronic machine on site was no small matter and was deemed as the crossing of a major hurdle for the company. I can already hear the snorts of derision here, and I don’t blame you guys, but try and figure that this was all new ground and there was a lot riding on this. In itself it proved unquestionably that the product ‘could’ actually be repaired by anyone (gee thanks), a fear that everyone had borne since the inception of the product. In practice of course (it has to be said) that the reality proved to be a lot different. The electronics system was without question more reliable. However with the delivery of the new machines and the inevitable issues with peripherals still cropping up, many of our customer's site engineers all over the country were desperately trying to fix broken bulbs etc, on this initial batch of machines by taking out (aka ripping out) the controller and ordering a replacement part in sheer terror of the unknown. This was because they had lost the traditional testing or ‘exercising’ methods that they had learnt over many years on the electro mechanical machinery. They did not read the manual, I mean what real man ever reads a manual! All of the calls to After Sales were recorded on a ‘Call Log’ and the vast majority that started the line with EWN (Each Way Nudge) had the immortal phrase RTFM written against them They didn’t know the machine could be exercised via a test routine. Engineers were far more used to robust systems and were playing havoc with the more delicate connectors, which with later hindsight admittedly were not up to the job. It became obvious to everyone that the industry would need to educate these guys, or this product and the very future of JPM and the massive investment already made would in turn fail. It goes without saying that the success of a product meant it was taking more money than any other machine and an old adage by Mick Foster of Associated Leisure was that a charity box took more money than a dead fruit machine. Due to the previously mentioned mind set it seemed that every fault was being blamed on the new technology and the product was getting bad press. JPM quickly came to realise that it was fear and ignorance as much as anything else that was fuelling the transplant epidemic which itself was introducing the aforementioned damage to connectors coupled with the huge number of circuit boards being returned with NFF but damaged connectors. So after devising a training programme with Charles Weeks and several other colleagues we went around all the ‘majors’ in the Industry pointing out how the product could best be serviced, exercised and how to fault find! Often this was on a shift by shift basis as Engineers would be on call out Rotas. My colleagues and I were tasked with travelling the length and breadth of Britain and eventually much of Europe, setting up training road shows in Hotels, Village halls, Cinemas in fact anywhere that could hold 20 or more engineers and a few machines for them to work on. I was promoted (?) to Training Officer and this constant exposure ensured that my face was well know throughout the industry. Due to my experiences I was eventually offered the job as After Sales Service Manager. Bob Old had left the role as my manager and moved over to open a new venture that JPM had entered into, supplying spares to the industry for our competitors products as well as our own. Bob Old eventually left JPM and went on to work in a Sales role for Aristocrat in London and then Australia and became truly successful in that role. So I inherited the Spare sales team as well He unfortunately passed away a few years ago. RIP Bob you taught me how to drink!
    18 points
  6. Electro mechanical to Electronic machines 1978 ? ish As I recall, the initial ventures into the future with the new electronic JPM machines used the traditional reel unit mechanics. Obviously a much lower current than was traditionally used was sent through the static reels mechanism, after the reels had revolved and stopped, and in the case of a win position through the aligned wipers against the studs and shorting the appropriate contacts. This brought about new issues due to the low power required, variable resistance due to dust, dirt, scratches etc, and other problems due to the sensitivity of the control circuits and the soon to be antiquated mechanical nature of the reel unit. To keep the wipers held firm against the studs meant that the motor needed to be held on while the sensing pulse was sent, but any aberration of the drive shaft meant that the wipers would continue moving slightly and the contact would be less than optimum. If I remember we called it ‘breathing’, the reels would literally move up and down and seem to separate from each other! A few machines were constructed in this way and tested in Arcades in local seaside resorts such as Barry Island and Porthcawl but they proved to be unreliable to say the least and demanded regular call outs and attention and the system was deemed troublesome. One (older) guy working with us, Charles Weekes (who became my mentor and a friend friend) was an old school technician who could regularly be seen scratching his wrinkled forehead with his foul smelling, smoke belching briar pipe. Charles Weekes (RIP) had worked on Juke box’s, old Bally, Jennings and latterly ACE machines, having run his own operating company in Caerphilly. Not only that but he had during his National Service days worked on very large scale flight simulators or more correctly as I recall, bomb and anti aircraft training simulators for Lancaster or Wellington bombers. I know not which aircraft and I suppose it could have been neither of them but that’s not really the point, they were large scale electro mechanical projects which demanded regular calibration.. It was Charles that explained to me that a ‘bug’ in the system, well at least back in the day, was in fact exactly what it was. An earwig, moth or similar insect, which had crawled into an open relay or a rotary timer had either shorted out two points or stopped a current or signal from being transmitted from one point to another so you had to find the ‘bug’. Charles one day, completely out of the blue, suggested that we should be looking at using stepper motors to send the reels to a random position then recognise that position by reading a code from the edge of the reel, a grey scale or grey code I believe it was called. He also mentioned to me in a conversation over coffee, that this was a proven technology and normal practice on military tank turrets and rotating gun emplacements but I have no way of proving this was the case. By this time I had moved to After Sales Service and was busy in the field and on the phone but as I was a product of the development department I was always welcomed in to help and give field input or just take a coffee and a Marlboro. He also mentioned to me over coffee and a game of Backgammon, he always won, that this was a proven technology and was normal practice on military tank turrets and rotating gun emplacements but I have no way of proving this. Of course the big problem was the gigantic leap to reverse typical current thought processes. Consider the following.. Randomness in an electro mechanical gaming machine had hitherto always been brought about by the various lengths of time that the reels span and then stopped. This in turn was governed by the control motor run time, but this was also interrupted by a, at least on JPM machines, a ‘random’ timer thus allowing the reels to spin for a random period each game That tried and tested method was about to be turned on its head by sending a reel to a position ‘that was already determined’ by the on board computer. Although the grey scale method was tried and proved to be effective it became obvious that the drive system itself was proving to be pretty reliable. Indeed the precise fixing of the grey scale could prove itself to be problematic given production conditions and personnel, so it never got past the initial prototype and research stages but it was exercised as an idea. Reality was that the drive was so effective, the software only had to check the reels once in a revolution to confirm that it was where it should have been to be reassured that all was ok, or stop and alarm if it was not! Despite all this the first actual ‘game’ implementation proved to be problematic, but I’ll come to that later A great deal of thought and effort went into the process and all the while the realisation that JPM would have to gain the Gaming Board of Great Britain’s approval for such a system. And so the Project began it’s long and tortuous journey. The initial conversations were conducted and the agreement was to go ahead in principal and develop a prototype to conduct a presentation. In reality JPM had already begun scratching the surface of the design and development and had enlisted the help of Texas Instruments. Charles and the dev team had put together the prototype and enlisted the help of a company called Starpoint to build the plastic assembly that would hold the stepper reel in place and allow the free movement of the reel. Starpoint were already in the Industry and had supplied various high quality, precision made plastic parts so they were a natural choice and apart from that, the Directors knew each other and already played golf. Although initially it was a single stand alone unit fixed to a base, it was soon developed as a modular unit that could be clipped together in banks of three or four. In order to prove to the Gaming Board of GB that the system was infallible JPM had to run the system for, as I recall, 250,000 games. As each game ended, and with the use of a super 8 cine camera set on single shot, the result of each single game was recorded. However this would be of no use at all if we did not know what the computer had decided which position the reel ‘should’ have been sent to. So as a confirmation we had a 7 segment LED panel mounted by the side of the reel and this recorded the game number as 12,350 12351 12353 etc which was duly recorded on the single shot. Combined with that a dot matrix printer recorded on fanfold paper, and in a very fine font, the result of the games i.e GAME 12350 Org#1, Lem#3, Bel#1 etc for every one of the 250,000 games. That (#) number against the fruit symbol was as a result of their being more than one of that particular symbol on the reel, and it was necessary to prove that the system had selected the correct one. After being asked to be part of this process, seconded as it were from After Sales, I was asked to check at least 1,000 lines of these results at random from each page of paper. Oh the Joy! This included rolling the cine film to the numbered position to check the result at which point I placed a small tick against the checked result on paper. There were no mistakes. The gaming board were once again invited to the factory where they were asked to look over the result and if they wished they could check for themselves that all was in order. They did actually check the results for themselves and I sat with them for that whole day going over the prints and the video shots and instructing the machine to go to a chosen win line which we did several hundred times. Starpoint did a brilliant design job of the Reel Unit and the product was released with the first machine being the “Each Way Nudge”. Previously, electro mechanical machines had used the principle of Nudge or shifting a reel one position forward. Due to the mechanical complexities it was fraught with problems and proved practically impossible when trying to move a reel backwards. This brought it’s own difficulty with the first game as I mentioned earlier, you see during the ‘dev test’ of the game software, the machine kept getting out of step and we could not figure out why as it had never happened in any of the extensive tests before the ‘game’ software was introduced. It was only when we realised that the break of the optic beam by the registration tab on the reel was made by the tab going forward OR backwards and that the tab was ‘x’mm long, that we understood the problem. As the machine was the Each way nudge, occasionally the tab would break the opto beam as intended, but in the reverse direction. Realisation was that the software had to look for the leading edge of the beam being broken on forward rotation and the trailing edge on reverse, the problem was solved. There were problems introduced when differing suppliers of reel bands supplied alternate thickness of reel bands, adding to the inertia of the reel and overcoming the ramp timing which could cause problems, but tighter specifications overcame that as well. Due to the stepper motor implementation any reel could move in any direction which opened up a whole new world of game possibilities and of course any one of a number of fruit symbols on a reel could be used when the ‘game engine’ decided on a result. Normally there were 20 symbols so if 4 of these were lemons the chance of a lemon coming up for any on reel (given decent randomness) was 4 in 20, (1 in 5) or 20%. Thanks to the design it was irrelevant how many symbols were on the reel as the game was run and the reel was told exactly where to go, or to be more exact, which symbol to go to, so there could now be 20 completely different symbols on the reel as the percentage no longer relied on the actual number of the symbol on the reel. Of course for cosmetic reasons and because of the nudge, there had to be more than 1 of each symbol but the ‘reel’ in the software could be 100 symbols long. This new method became known as the “virtual reel and as it was buried in the software department I know very little more than that. As I still worked enthusiastically and closely with the Dev team, my exposure to and knowledge of the product was growing in contrast to my colleagues in After Sales. This placed me in a good position for the next step up the JPM ladder. As an aside, the ‘nudge’ feature was actually patented by the Dransfield Novelty company, a facility that I visited and was welcomed to quite often. This no doubt provided the company with significant income as every machine with the nudge facility had to pay them. This is quoted from the Dransfield web site… "The nudge feature, which is still an integral part of most modern gaming machines was developed and patented by Dransfields many years ago and demonstrates its long established pedigree within the industry."
    18 points
  7. Hi All. Found this site just a few days ago. Memories came flooding back. Here goes with my first encounter with fruit machines and the following years. 1966 I was 16 years old; I had an interview at A.C.E. with a Mr Dave Shenton (more about him later). I was lucky I started work the next day. A.C.E. was a relatively new company it was set up by the Collins family, Maurice (the father), Michael and Roger (brothers). Dave Shenton was a director; he was the brains behind the company. He had spent some time in America learning as much as he could about ‘one armed bandits’. The company was working from 46 Charles Street in the centre of Cardiff. The ground floor was offices, the second floor production line, wiring section, test area and stores, third floor more offices. There was also a basement which became the machine shop making most of the metal components for the machines. The Jolly Roger was the first machine made by A.C.E, although it was called by the old fashioned ‘one armed bandit’. This machine for anybody that is not familiar with the Jolly Roger I’ll give a brief description. I have tried searching for photos of the Jolly Roger without any luck The best way to describe the cabinet is that it was shaped quite like a coffin standing on its end. It had the traditional ‘arm’ on the right hand side and a glass front with the picture of a pirate front centre (if my memory serves me right). At the top of the cabinet were three small round windows, lights would flash showing the symbols (I will describe later how these would light the individual symbol). There were just four of us on the production line, myself, the foreman, David Davis, Ralf Foward (later to become the store man) and John Jenkins. Working the test area was Tony Mathews We would turn out between 5 and 10 machines a week. I was interested in the workings of the machine so I would spend my coffee and dinner breaks sat behind them trying to find out how they worked, little did I know both Dave Shenton and Tony Mathews noticed my interest that later on they would offer me promotion which led me from production line to testing, fault finding and helping design. Not to make this too boring I’ll post this and if anyone is interested I will add more about life in Charles street and A.C.E. moving from the City centre to A.C.E. house in ferry road
    17 points
  8. Hi guys its been a while since i have posted over here at MPU mecca .... its been a funny old year ... with C19 and loss of Wizard, some serious bad shit this year just to cap it off for me, i ended up testing positive 3 weeks ago, although im now on a full recovery it was not enjoyable, But on a positive side im hoping this will prevent me getting it again if my antibodies can break through the red wine in my bloodstream So firstly i would like to wish everyone a happy new year ( its got to be better than the last pile of poo ) anyway the reason for posting here was i was over at another forum that deals with vintage mechanical slot machines and some one posted a link to the George Wilson Arcade photo collection, i have never seen this before and found it fantastic ... so thought i would share it with you guys, if you have already seen it great, if you have not ... then you will love it here is a taster photo here is the Link to the collection https://www.seasphotography.org.uk/georgewilson Enjoy ... all the best ... Dicky
    17 points
  9. Well 14 years after this post i thought i would give it a final update. As posted above i bought this in 2006 as a Winsprint and first but when the Fruit chaser £3 roms where discovered(2009 ish) i already had FC glasses so i started the reel band reproduction and made a set for FC. Then some Snappa glasses came available so i then patched the roms for £2 and JP tune on reaching the end of the maze and converted the machine back to the original out of the factory Fruit Snappa(Fruit Chaser was a conversion when the JP changed from £2 to £3 and the FS production run had already ended so a new top glass and roms where produced and changed out in local workshops or even on sited machines). All has been well for years but if any original parts come available they will always be added as i like all my machines to be as close to factory spec as possible. About 4 years ago i managed to bag an original Fruit Snappa reel rack and while the bands i produced where spot on you can't top having original parts. The last piece of the jigsaw is now complete with an original set of Fruit Snappa Version 8 roms discovered by ian at instance automatics from a disused operator which he dumped and emailed me the 3 roms. I only have roms 1 and 3 for FS version 2 and rom 2 from FS version 3 and they dont mix. Ian asked me to look at them as the roms in an old sys 80 board he found that had had no rom labels so he was not sure which machine it was(these where sat in my inbox for a couple of weeks before i had chance to look for them). The roms are now in the machine and running. It's taken me 17 years to restore this machine to it original state on leaving the JPM factory and oddly enough the machine itself is 40 years old itself in just under 2 months. Roms Reels And finally the fully restored factory spec machine on it's 40th birthday year. I got there in the end. 😁
    16 points
  10. From Customer Services, back to Development 1982 (ish) The 'Machine’ Development Department was falling apart at the seams. It wasn’t producing prototype product on time, BOM’s were badly prepared and priced, wiring diagrams were erroneously designed and Prototypes were poorly prepared. This was thanks in no small part to the Toss pots that any of you that have read my previous posts will have recognised. I was asked to leave Customer Services and take it on. It took some thinking about because I had never been trained to be honest, it all came naturally, but leading a new crew in disciplines I wasn’t too sure of? I thought long and hard and decided to give it a go. Just to add here that I left the Customer Service Team in the capable hands of Martyn Stork who worked with me for many years and of course ably assisted by the other colleagues, Huw, Russel, Steve, David, Adrian and of course Julia. First day I brought everyone in and we had a long chat about what was going wrong and what they thought about the problems. Basically they were being treated like idiots by the morons that were now gone. They were not respected, they were being told exactly what to do without any chance of input and they felt like they had no respect in the company like for instance they pointed out, the Customer Service guys (sic). They were constantly told to sweep any problems they had under the carpet. So in a bid to try to raise moral I bought everyone (and me) white coats, we all had ID badges, installed push button access pads with "Authorised personnel only" above the doors. There was a secondary and far more important reason for the latter but I will come back to that later. I started two systems of appraisal, I appraised them and (and this is unusual) they were asked to appraise me, and they were commanded to attend exhibitions. It wasn’t a magic transformation, it took time, but heads were held high(er) and more pride was taken in the work. Things changed. One thing didn’t, my hatred of the huge IBM main frame machine, well not exactly the machine but all that it meant in terms of waiting for the Data guys to prepare reports and input data and Jaisus H christ. (apologies) We would prepare the BOM’s from an available (previous machine) parts list (IBM output, wait). We would then have to ask for that parts list to be copied and have new part numbers input and costed (wait) and of course some parts deleted in the new machine listing, then after they were put back in we would have to wait for a costed BOM to be created or printed (wait) so we could let Jack know how much the new machine was going to cost. So sod that, I persuaded my new boss, Alan Parker (yes the P in JPM) to buy an actual IBM PC, which were by now coming on stream and so we had this new machine delivered with a hard disk! My god 10MB hard disk, we were never going to fill that. Anyway. We bought the new Lotus 123 package and as I had some (limited) experience with spreadsheets we started to make our own BOMs from the system by copying the numbers from the screen on the System 38 terminal that we had into the system. Oh explanation, the IBM PC had the ability to interface with and display, not record, information data from the IBM main frame. This is when I realised that a guy that had been working with us, John Lockwood yes Julia’s brother no less, was taking to this new machine technology like a duck to water. Trouble is he was a little, lets say, wild. All he wanted to do as I remember was go off to Teneriffe and get drunk and shag anything that stood still long enough No one had any time for him but I gave him some brotherly words of advice and tried to point him in the right direction. We enlisted the aid of another guy who described to us some (illicit?) software from the states called SideKick, that allowed us to grab the screen ram contents while were in the IBM’s ‘terminal’ mode and dump them into the PC’s hard disk as a comma delimited file. Like I knew what any of that meant! We bought and installed it and by doing so we could load the data into a spreadsheet, select the parts we needed and prepare ‘live’ BOM’s that were costed at that days buying cost, something we would have to wait days for. It’s hard to comprehend these days, given the distance we have come, but back then the systems guys were hugely protective and, it must be said overly busy, or was it the other way around? The machines were comprehensively labour intensive and of course the GUI was yet to be introduced and many things were command line driven and of course no mouse! I remember the first mouse manual. Honest! Around 10 pages. Anyway, I got called into a meeting in Jack’s office to explain how I was once again bucking the system, and of course the hugely expensive IBM monolith. I seem to remember his wry smile and the shaking of the head as he stood and defended me in front of the Irate Data Team manager. The days of the IBM were numbered thanks in no small way to me, Johnny Lockwood and the other nerd who’s name I cannot for the life of me remember! John went on to become a leading Computer Specialist with a national multi branch company. Good man. One other humorous departure. I asked a colleague to bring me some striped wire as I was helping with a wiring task due to an urgent preparation, cant remember what for! I said bring me some brown-red cable and some brown-orange (colours may be wrong by the way) He brought me some Red yellow and Red-green. I obviously said "don’t be a dick" and with that he looked at me strangely and asked what was wrong? He had been taken on as a junior in the department and was colour blind! You couldn’t make it up! The reason I know it was 1982 is that it was my 30th birthday while I was in Development and I walked in to a clean desk (not my way at all), a bottle of Jameson's Whiskey and a glass. The day went down from there but that's a whole different type of story and doesn't belong here!
    16 points
  11. After being shafted twice on ebay and my back up plan unfortunately not being available I decided to buy the glasses and reel deck for my broken switchback. Had a great opportunity today to combine a visit with Nick sulzerned got to see his amazing collection and had a grate chinwag and swapped my dodgy down nudge hold button for my latest acquisition for the proper down nudge button thanks mate with a collection of said parts. Heres where my confession starts as many on here will know I've been torn on a purchase of the switchback glasses on ebay that originally sold to mark300 for 23 quid who graciously offered them me at asking price only for them to be shilled and relisted twice until a buy it now price of 75 quid which to be fair isnt unreasonably priced for full top middle and bottom glass including reel deck just really stuck in the throat that the seller behaved like a total shyster. So upon leaving Nick's house I found the closest atm machine and withdrew said amount even nipping into the shop to buy something so I had the correct amount as the seller insisted on cash on collection upon leaving the premises I firmly tucked the extra 50 quid from the original sale price into my previous nights curry worn butt cheeks and headed the 100 odd mile 2hr trip to reading I was obviously conscious to have a really good squirm around on my seat and try and fart as often as possible during the journey. Upon arriving at said property I carefully wrapped said notes into the original 25 odd quid sale price and hand them over to the pleased seller whilst collecting the needed projects items. I hope I'm forgiven at the pearly gates and if the seller is a member on here I'd wash your hands dude.
    15 points
  12. Received a message from Frank for the forum.... Hi guys, I know I have to finish the history but I have had to look for a new employment. Unfortunately the Williams formula one team took my previous employer for a few quid, like £30 million. I didn't want to wait around, and to be honest they just may brave the storm but I wasn't ready to sit back and be thrown on the scrapheap as I am not ready to put my feet up. I have a new task as Project manager to develop 17 acres of development land and 3 WWII Aircraft hangars so that should see me through to retirement. Promise to come back. Regards to all, best wishes, stay safe!
    15 points
  13. Hi there, happy to be back. I was (eventually) the project manager for the SWP Product and that will certainly be mentioned in time, I am trying to be as historically correct as I can.
    15 points
  14. Apologies.. Been a strange couple of years hasn't it? I have some more to add ( at last ) for anyone interested - let me catch up what I have done before.
    15 points
  15. More..... As an aside to the product per se we had couple of issues to deal with that were not down to the design of the products themselves but were down to the industry we were in and products appeal to those less scrupulous characters One such issue that JPM experienced was the new products susceptibility to Static electricity and the result of that ‘attack’. We found quite early that the machine could give unexpected results to static but this was not just the gas lighter piezo cell that was being used by the public to upset the controller. Even walking across a carpet could cause an issue and this was being exacerbated by two fairly new concepts that just happened to occur at more or less the same time. With the advent of ‘banked wins’, punters ( I always hated that term) were allowed or encouraged to bank their wins. As a manufacturer JPM realised that this was a good thing as the resulting payout always seemed significant rather than the staccato clank of smaller wins, believe me a lot of people were persuaded to play when they heard that advert! Anyway, JPM had a major issue with static and it got to a head and was proving to be so troublesome that I was bundled off to an establishment called ERA Technology where we subjected the machine to a series of tests in an anechoic chamber. I don’t think the sound quality or lack of it in the room was anything to do with the tests it’s just that was the only room available at the time. It was a very strange environment in which to hear a machine payout! So we sat there for hours hitting the machine with static but nothing seemed to be getting past the earth bonds and when they did the level 3 interrupt(?) circuit performed as it was supposed to. Then suddenly the machine went haywire, pulsed out a coin and the test equipment registered a huge spike - from out of the blue. Scratching our heads we continued to play and then it happened again, but this time just as the machine was paying out, one clunk and reset and the test equipment showed a spike. As we discussed the subject of static over a coffee, as you do, the engineer from the establishment explained a little about static and how simply raising a coin from your pocket to the machine could induce static but not enough to cause any issues and in any case the new Mars mech was plastic and so it could not dissipate the charge. The answer struck me like a streak of ………. The coins were entering the coin guides and coin tube, unearthed, and then standing there like a great big capacitor ready to jump that gap between the payout slide and the casting of the payout mech when the charge was sufficient and believe me it was huge!. We tried earthing the tube with an insert and overcame the problem but then any of you that have had site experience will know that anything in the path of a coin WILL cause a coin jam, no matter how careful you are. So I took out the payout slide, inserted a rivet through the slide and filed it down, again after refitting and testing it sorted the issue, however this was not an answer. I contacted Coin Controls in Oldham and persuaded them to add a measure of graphite ( I think it was graphite ) to the plastic material before injection moulding, this gave it the conductivity of a peace of wood. After explaining what the problem was and negotiating for JPM to take the first consignment, we agreed to uniquely test it for three months before releasing it to the industry. That’s how we overcame that particular static problem first.
    14 points
  16. Can I just say again that these notes are taken from my perspective so I am bound to figure large in them. If this seems self indulgent or self promoting it's not meant to be so be honest, re-direct me if I drift off subject. The appeal of Development and creating new ideas and (truth is) actually being “recognised” for my abilities was beginning to appeal to me. It was here where I learnt how to create, wire and programme the analogue computer (for that was what it was) from the schematics prepared by Alan and Howard Parker. I never knew what a schematic was and the consideration that it bore no resemblance to the actual physical layout took a while to get my head around. As by way of explanation consider the London underground schematic is not geographical and gives no idea of the distance between two points! Constructing them as we did with a hole cutter, a plastic tray, a rivet gun, a soldering Iron and several rows of SAIA or Starpoint (more of them later) rotary switch timers, dozens of Omron relays and yards and yards of tri coloured wire. Bad Boys Race Our Young Girls But Violet Generally Wins Oh my lord where did that come from…. Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green Blue,Violet,Grey, White Isn’t memory a strange thing, I can forget anniversaries but that came from no where? Anyway, I digress (sounds Welsh?) Working for the first time with Alan and Howard and Ron (Watts) I learned how the machine was wired and constructed. I was also introduced into the world of ‘programming’ as indeed that was what it was, sequencing the operation of the timers and cams so that the various components operated in time during the game cycle. As a simple example the reel motor had to start momentarily before the reel stop solenoids were lifted or the reels would not start quickly and together. Oooh if I remember it was 10 degrees before, now where did that come from! All these little ‘sub routines’ would be recognised for what they were many years later with the introduction of the computer programme, perhaps it was around even then I don’t know. Furthermore I was also exposed to statistics, probability, chance, randomness and game structure and I eagerly started to read about them and found them fascinating. Although basic calculations could be worked out and a free running machine could be constructed to record the wins on meters without a player, believe it or not, the only way a machine was percentage tested was by sitting there with a black coffee (Nescafe) and a fag (Marlboro). Playing the machine over and over again and trying to get maximum return from the benefits offered via holds and features was second nature after a while, all the time recording on sheets of A4 paper the result of each game and what you had done to influence it with hold or hold after win etc. Example…. 6421 Gr | Gr | Or |.......|......|.......| 6422 Gr | Gr | Gr | H1 | H2 |.......| 20p | H 6423 Gr | Gr | Gr | H1 | H2 | H3 | 40p | HAW And so on. By the way I guess the payout amount is wrong but you get the idea hopefully, and the big number? That is the game number and until you got to around 5-6 thousand the results, apparently, were not very revealing unless they were really crazy by which time you knew there was something wrong with the design. With a 3 reel machine and 20 symbols per reel the full game cycle was 8000 games and until that number was achieved we sat there and played - and played. This was the boring bit but it helped that I had a colleague to share banter with and Charles Hazel or Bingham, was that man. One episode that was amusing was brought about while checking the percentage of a machine and realising that I had not recognised a 'Grape' win, or three grapes appearing in the win line. This was about 40p or some small amount and this appeared to be bringing the percentage payout down and certainly should have appeared more often than it had appeared to have done. I checked the spec and the glass and and there was the win symbol but looking at the third reel there were no grapes and the wiring had not accommodated the win either. It had been missed out of the design. I wont mention the guys name but he did go red from embarrassment! I mean 'what' are the chances eh? I found that I was really happy in the development arena. I began to notice that the later endeavours from the research area incorporated electronics, micro processors and plug in circuit boards some of which could be seen in the ‘extra secret’ development area. Plug in sub boards could be seen on a back plane and discrete components such as transistors and capacitors could also be recognised none of which I knew of at the time. So I decided it was time to get some serious studying done and I enrolled in Llandaff technical college for a course in Micro Processor Controllers and Electronic Circuitry and turned up in my Vauxhall viva HA ( to give a time reference). I was not alone as several of my colleagues decided that this was the way to go so we used to got to college and this was an excuse for another night out! Working with industrial research and development teams and being exposed to ‘cutting edge’ technology of it’s time meant that much of the stuff we were exposed to was ahead of the college’s mediocre supplies. I began taking orders and quite often delivered components, circuits and odd parts in to donate to the tutors which they were grateful for and helped me to become friendly with the tutors. All this was sanctioned by the company as it gave us an ‘in’ to the University. As an aside here it was during this period of development that we were working closely with Texas Instruments and as we were about to take a great deal of their products, particularly the TI 9980. This was to be the heart of the new system I was told. Anyway, one of their consultants came to work alongside us to help with the interface. The guys name was Peter Crow. I can remember some years later the hilarity caused as a receptionist in a hotel took down the names of myself and my colleagues. Martyn Stork, Frank Bird, Peter Crow and Ian Wingfield when we all booked into a hotel for the night. Cheeky girl laughed and her name was Abigail. Part of the development of the Electronic system for JPM was the adoption of a cutting edge drive for the reel unit, those spinning wheels that display the recognised symbols such as Oranges Grapes and Lemons etc. Again as an aside here, many people are unaware that the symbols or Icons of fruits, are actually supposed to be a hangover from the early days of coin operated machine in the US. Or at least this is what I have heard from many people both in this country and the states and it is the subject of much conjecture. Most people (well those not on this forum anyway) probably don't know where the term ‘fruit machine’ came from. The modern day ‘fruit machine’ is actually supposed to be a result of several American companies around at that time one of which was called Bell and they produced chewing gum, or so the story goes. They developed a machine along with the Mills company (again so the story goes) that dispensed the ‘Bell’ fruit flavoured chewing gum and sold them in early coin operated machines that used the reels as a gimmick. The game would play and the customer would get delivered a fruit flavoured gum! The ‘Bar’ symbol is again, supposed to be, a representation of a stick of chewing gum and the Bell symbol, well that goes without saying. Of course the typical bar owner would always have a little ‘book’ on the side and you could give the guy a dollar or two and bet him that you would win your stick of gum. If you did he would give you back a prize whose value was based on an arbitrary amount depending on the fruits that came up or perhaps the Bell or the Bar symbol would have been the top prize and gave perhaps 10 to 1 on your stake. Of course the odds were heavily in favour of the Bar (for Bar read Mob, of course). In any case enough of ancient history, the next step (sic) is into the future with the Stepper Reel unit!
    14 points
  17. Morning all, just to be clear, my recent rant about unlicensed AWP sellers was not aimed at Legacy & pre legacy machines ( like the stuff we all collect ) its aimed solely at people selling modern machines in big numbers without an operating license, theres loads of fruit machines for sale & wanted on Facebook & theres clearly people selling them commercially without the proper licence, i have to pay £5k per year for our Sell, Supply , Manufacture & repair license, these guys are just flouting the law, which makes it an uneven playing field in my eyes, we dont sell much in the lines of AWP other than PX`s we take that we just flip into licenced dealers we know, we have to hold a licence for Cranes, redemption machines & the likes of that as they are all classified as gambling, im about to approach the GC to see if they will listen about making legacy & machines before that Exempt from the Gambling laws, probably on a 20-25 year rolling age ( bit like classic car tax ), i will try this through a consultant to see if we can make any headway. cheers for now, Ian
    14 points
  18. As you will hear on the video this is dedicated to everyone on the mecca as a big thank you for all your help shes back up and running again
    14 points
  19. Continuing my recollections ( stop me if I'm boring you ) The Ace building in Ferry Road was a fairly dilapidated old warehouse unit that had cracked brickwork but was nicely white painted with of course a large JPM sign. A huge concrete ceiling some 20 foot high in the main assembly area and no insulation to the walls in those days ensured that in the winter it was freezing. Offices and development were on the first floor accessible by a concrete stair case or for the prototype machines, a hoist and a steel floor with chains, no cage, HSE what's that?. The stores and the cabinet shop were across a large potholed access road that went no where except to the weed covered red brick wall that was the boundary of the Gas Board wall and the huge gasometers that supplied some parts of Cardiff and dwarfed the factory. Stacked on shelves behind the 6 assembly workers were the parts to be fitted to the cabinets and in front of them scraps of domestic carpeting were a protection from the cold floor in front of the assembly runners. Empty machines were brought in on sack trucks and set on plywood bases to be pushed down the floor level roller line. Graham, Tommy, Howard, Gareth B, Gareth G, Gary (common name in Wales yew see, init,) used pneumatic drills, screw drivers and nut runners to install the components necessary for the build and they all raced with their guns screaming to see who could finish their machine first. From the end of the line machines were again sack trucked into the test compound which was delineated by a low stud wall topped with a green plastic coated chicken wire, this to make sure that no one could get in unless they were trained as the earthing was protected, the machine having to be earth tested separately. My first job was to build (reel units) flashers which I found both daunting and interesting if a little repetitive but soon, chasing my own build count made me want to better the build environment. Given a colleague to work with we finished our efforts quite early in the week so rather than pass them on to the Flasher Test area, I offered to learn and was introduced to the Schematics and so we combined the build and test which just made common sense to me. Finding work to do was easy as we were getting more and more successful by the week and demarcation lines were thin. One of the tasks we could help with was producing the Schematics from the master copies. To make the large scale AO circuit diagrams or schematics that made up the only diagnostic guide sent with the machine we had a master that was made by Howard Parker drawn full scale on a transparent plastic like material. This was then placed on a special sheet of ‘blue print’ or photo sensitive paper and both were put into the rollers of a diazotype printing machine. This machine used neat ammonia as part of the 'developing' medium and the paper being photo sensitive bleached with the blinding light produced, but only where the master was blank. When blueprint paper is exposed to uv light through the machine a positive image is "burned" onto the blueprint paper from the original. After this occurs, the paper is then exposed to ammonia gas which fixes the lines or the print which turn blue. The problem was that the Ammonia had to be fresh and transferring it form a bottle to the machine ended in the room filling with ammonia fumes, the process itself producing even more fumes. Again HSE? I seemed to understand the schematics quite readily so I was keen to learn how to test the rest of the machine and started hanging around the test area where the relay covered control units with their various rotary control timers were being tested or perhaps exercised is a more fitting description. This was done on huge test rigs covered in lamps and switches which were in reality simply a machine without the cabinet. Helping with this, and testing the reel units introduced me of course to the concept of fault finding using the schematics which stood me in good stead as time went by. Regards, Frank Bird .......... To be continued ..........
    14 points
  20. Ta-da!!! ....... looking rather lovely if I do say so myself 🙂
    13 points
  21. Nearly done with JPM now, not much left but the tears.. 1985-6 - Give us a Break and it’s successors JPM finally got the approval from the Gaming board of Great Britain to create a true SWP machine or to give it its full name, Skill with Prizes. The main criteria for this success was that at the onset of any game the maximum prize displayed must always be accessible given maximum skill being applied by the player! (Gaming Board) Questions answered correctly in turn therefore provided progress through an award structure towards the goal of the prize that was offered at the onset. On the earlier machines like Treasure Trail this maximum prize was altered randomly according to the machine’s current pay-out percentage. The higher the pay-out percentage the more often a lower prize would be offered and the time allowed to answer the question would also diminish. It became obvious that this was a distraction as the occurrence of lower prizes more frequently displayed indicated the machines “mean streak” so we turned to another route. In the case of Give us a Break we played with the idea of keeping a tally on the players performance within any given credit period, i.e. the same player or players. For the life of me I can’t remember if we instituted this (honestly 😉 ). What we did do was where the player was proving to be continuously successful at Sport, we would reduce the chance of a sport question being chosen later in the game. Similarly where the percentage was high we made sure that we used questions that had not been offered as frequently as others. We even tried grading questions for difficulty but this proved to be so totally subjective and ineffective that we gave up on the idea. The changing of question topic however worked really well and of course we could change question sets regularly, and simply thanks to the disc. We often tested the product locally and as product manager and part of Marketing, I was asked to go and observe the new breed of players as they approached the machine and see what difficulties that they encountered and perhaps interview them afterwards to see how they found the experience. To our huge satisfaction we found that without exception those people that played it were on the whole, not the usual gaming machine players and that they were loving the experience. The GUAB product was at prototype stage and we had to take the machine off to London to the BBC studios of Radio 1 to get their final approval, this was of course after all the discussion and the legal heads of agreement had been completed prior to the final preparation of this prototype. And so one afternoon I arrived somewhat excitedly outside the Radio 1 studios in Great Portland Street and parked the rather overheated, white Cavalier Estate on the pavement while I unloaded the machine. This was all under the watchful eye of an unusually forgiving Traffic Warden who was extremely lenient after he saw the machine and we had a quick chat. He kindly gave me enough time to drop the machine just inside the building before I had to move the car elsewhere. Alan Parker was there in reception and took charge of the machine so I just found a car park and rushed back in time to see Alan and Peter Cox (Project Marketing consultant) disappear into a lift, but not without me I thought as I rammed my already battered, black, leather pilot case into the closing doors. Emerging from the lift to the offices of the controller of Radio 1 at the time, one Dereck Chinnery as I remember, we walked slap bang into Steve Wright who looked at the machine with some distaste. At the time I only had an inkling of the ‘feeling’ between the other DJ’s and Dave Lee Travis but we were soon to learn more of it The idea behind the trip was to install the machine within the hallowed halls of the BBC canteen (yes that very infamous place) and set it on free play so we could get some idea of the response to it from the company that was going to be associated with it. Now it is important that you read and appreciate the words ‘company’ at this point as a turn of events that we thought might happen made it fortuitous that we had already exchanged proposed agreements on the deal with the BBC’s legal department. In any case we all waited within Dereck’s office for the arrival of Dave Lee Travis. The machine was powered up and working and after a suitable period of time (obviously DLT was fashionably late) he walked in trailing a cloud of evil smelling pipe tobacco fumes behind him and propelling his huge Ego quite a way ahead of him. I am never one to bow, chastened, at a celebrity or the rich and famous, so looking for an entertaining way to meet him I said:- “Hello, I know the face but I can’t put a name to it”. The silent noise that followed was Alan Parker’s hopes being dashed and Peter Cox’s wishes crashing to the floor. “You can call me Sir” he said “and I will call you pratt.” Not a good start, to the meeting I will admit. He went up to the machine and pressed the button and played it and such was the simplicity of the prepared questions, the game and the excellent GUI, even he managed to play quite a way through before he answered a question incorrectly. “Where’s the Quack Quack Oops?” he said. Now for those of you that have never heard the show there was a pre recorded duck ‘quacking’ that followed every wrong answer and that was allied to a deep “Ooops” and together they were an identifiable audible part of the show. “Sorry but we don’t have the capability to do that at this stage” I said although I never truly realised the significance of his question until later. After a few minutes of play and satisfied with the representation he asked about the release schedule and we explained that given the test results our belief was that we would be taking the machine to the ATE in London. DLT asked for our cards and left soon after, leaving us to arrange the move to the BBC Canteen and, yes, I have had a cup of tea in the BBC Canteen and it wasn't that bad! We set up the machine and left that afternoon. The test results proved really promising so the machine was subjected to the final production engineering process. We began developing the marketing materials and, due to the agreement with the BBC, the machine and the brochures carried the description “DLT’s Radio 1 quiz Give us a Break” Prior to the exhibition I was working quietly in the office with the usual day to day project management stuff when my phone rang and the receptionist said “Frank I have someone on the phone, says he is an agent associated with the BBC and he wishes to speak to you, a Mr (can’t remember) from London, will you take it?” From memory .. “Yes of course” I replied and with that a larger than life voice projected from the handset and this is what I recall was the gist of the conversation although perhaps not verbatim . “Fraaaank how are you my dear boy, I trust you are keeping well?” Did I know this guy I thought? “I have been to the BBC canteen this morning at Dave’s request (DLT?) and saw the machine, have to say at the outset, what a great job you made of it, you are the Project Manager? Top class” he went on to say. “DLT’s name is not significant enough and it is called Radio 1’s quiz? Flustered I thought that’s strange I know I had been back up to change the glass to the latest release and make sure the Beeb’s licensing department were happy with it. “I beg to differ” I said “I fitted that artwork myself after checking the design of the logo with the BBC as they were very specific on colour and size etc, you know what these corporates are like?” “Oh dear boy yes” he said “but never mind about the BBC at this point in time, in fact sod the BBC Ha ha. My client, Mr Dave Lee Travis’ name is not that well displayed……” “Oh but it is” I interrupted, “in the help screens, it is displayed quite clearly that ‘this machine is based on the BBC’s popular game show, introduced by DLT’ and of course we have licensed it, and we fully intend to pay our royalties………….. to the BBC.” In a much slower and lower tone he went on "Are you actually trying to be funny?” “Because dear boy, if you are not you are certainly looking for an altercation and believe me you don’t want to tangle with me.” I replied “I apologise but I don’t have time for this conversation which in fact is pointless, I suggest you speak to the licensing department of the BBC, do you need the number….” And of course I couldn’t resist the retort “Dear boy?” Click… And that was my first experience with a London agent although in later life I have met Simon Cowell, but that as they say is another story! A few weeks later and the receptionist introduced a call with “Frank I have one of your crazy friends on the phone reckons he’s DLT” “Hmm” I said, “it could be him!” “Your joking” she squealed. I heard “putting you through Mr Travis” and again, forgive me but this is the gist of the conversation that transpired. “Frank” the recognisable voice of the hairy cornflake (DLT’s nickname) “how are you?” “Fine thank you… (meaningful pause)….. Sir” “Please, it’s Dave" he had obviously forgotten. “I have been speaking to (Agent) and he tells me that the BBC really think they have the deal sewn up with you, but I will leave that to him. For now, I know you have an exhibition coming up in London and I want to ask you about it, do you think the press will be there?” “Well, Sir” I continued “the BBC are making a big thing about it and I am being interviewed for ‘The Arts show’ for some reason, they are interested in the crossover from Radio show to Entertainment in gaming!” “Exactly my point” he went on, excited by now at the prospect. “If we can arrange for me to be there it will be to both our benefits.” “Well” I said “you will obviously be welcome on our stand and I think I have a time and a date when the TV crew are turning up if you want?” Silence. “Ok, now I know you are trying to be a (insert an expletive) ” he said “my appearance fee will be £ x,000 (can’t remember but it was at least 3 zeros). “Sorry I haven’t been clearer” I said “but we don’t need you to be there, your radio show every Saturday is doing a great job advertising our product already?” I can’t remember now how the conversation actually ended, but I do remember it was he that put the phone down and he completely avoided me when he turned up for a camera shoot, well he had to didn’t he? And so back to the testing. To convey a humorous episode we came across during testing I need to describe the screen on which the player was presented the questions and answers. The question was printed and beneath it were four answers, a pair of answers in a column to the left and pair in a column to the right i.e... Question is printed here? [A] first answer second answer [C] third answer fourth answer [D] The [ ] denotes the position of the button to be pressed. The question is printed out and the answers are then displayed, and then the timer is started. One early evening during one of the product appreciation sessions in a local pub called the Malster’s arms in Llandaff village, a rowdy bunch of Rugby shirted Scotsmen, some of which kilted for gods sake, were playing the machine. Perhaps they were not best prepared for the mental agility, due to the amount of Alcohol they had consumed and I guess Wales had beaten them so no doubt they were drowning their sorrows as well, due to their countries performance at the rugby earlier that day. 😉 🤣 Nevertheless, loud, humorous and I have to say somewhat surprising progress was being made due as much to luck, as the number of combined brains that were being put to the task. With one person acting as the player or single handed button pusher (the other wrapped around a dripping pint of Brains Dark) the others became the loud but smiling Celtic font of all knowledge. The ear splitting consequence of every question conquered by those beer swilling Celts (careful) was a deafening cheer and a great raising of glasses. More and more people in the overcrowded bar were becoming interested in the game, as much as those larger than life players, much to my pleasure and great relief. The £10 goal was eventually in sight and was but a single button press away when, much to every one’s amazement, the following simple question was displayed to a hushed and expectant audience. Which of these is a vowel? [A] X M [C] F A [C] Obviously a great cheer of “A” went up and gleefully watching the seconds ticking away on the timer, the elected button presser, as directed, slowly and deliberately pressed button [A], which of course is the wrong answer as the correct answer was aligned with the button [C]. Without exception everyone broke into huge fits of laughter. From that singular moment I knew we had a winning product on our hands and recognised the huge difference between the player, the mode of play of this equipment and the traditional gaming machine.
    13 points
  22. Not a lot of people know that A.C.E. bought Gilbern cars in Llantwit Fardre in 1968 the Collins family sold it in 1972 for £1. I did work at Gibern cars for a while, not for me, heavy work didn't suit me. There were a few new fruit machine companies setting up in the late sixties. One of these was Automatic Amusements. They were working from an old disused garage in Richmond Road very near the junction of City Rd/Mackintosh Rd/Crwys Rd. They did conversions of mainly the Monte Carlo I think if I remember rightly the machines were called San Marino. Yes I worked for them They didn't last long, One of the owners was Dave Shenton. He joined a company I mentioned earlier Lynguard Automatics. Lynguard was based in Sanatorium Road Canton. Again I worked there, I have just realised I followed Dave Shenton (no I wasn't his love child). After stints as a bus conductor, a milkman, a mobile hot dog salesman I went back to fruit machines. This time as an fruit machine/ juke box engineer with a London based company called Gainsmede. The Cardiff offices were in Leckwith place Canton. My love affair with fruit machines ended when I left Gainsmede. I became of all things an entertainer.
    13 points
  23. Okay hello again. Getting near the end now.. Hope you enjoy these last few posts. SWP (eventually) but for now Criss Cross 1984 -5 As a response to a projected squeezing of the Gaming Market Place a survey was conducted by Whitbread and was made privy to the Marketing Team at JPM of which I was a member. This survey predicted that due to the recognised change in the appeal of ‘the pub’ and the drive towards FEC’ (Family entertainment centres) with their concentration on food as a more profitable product, the smoky, flat cap Pub was going to change massively over the oncoming 20 years. With hindsight, looking back today, how right they were, but I think even they would have been surprised at the scale of the change and the wholesale closing down of pubs across the country and of course the impact that on-line gambling and the lottery have had. The survey showed that the demographic of the pub was changing and the average Socio Economic Group frequenting FEC’s was actually going up market. Alongside those results a survey that we had conducted independently of “the player”, had tried to uncover what created the appeal of a particular machine or game play and what it was that players got out of playing machines in general. Although obfuscated in the language of Market research, a commonality of attitude in the responses came over loud and clear with phrases like “get to know it,” “find the winning streak” and “beat it” used by the typical player. Again thanks to the findings of the research this player was (typically) 18-30, working class, more likely to be a smoker, often a loner and a heavy drinker. Now don’t shoot me (if I’m still here) if you like playing machines, I did say typical and there were certainly those that were also 80 years old and never smoked but you get the picture! The Survey didn’t end there as I remember. I found out most of this first hand as I was one of those tasked with asking people in pubs and arcades but we specifically targeted as well, those that vowed they would never ever play a machine and quizzed them (sic), why they had made that particular decision. A few of the reasons given, amongst many others, were that playing a machine was boring, was not a challenge and was seen as antisocial. So the mold was set and we had to come up with a product that addressed those criteria. The SWP or skill with prizes machine eventually emerged from the joint efforts of several team brainstorming events and on one particular coincidence. At one of many lunch time meetings, all we were talking about was how to put intellectual competition into a machine, while we were playing Trivial Pursuit (DOH) how obvious it seems now. We seriously sat back, stopped playing and sat there discussing how it could be done and with the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end ran to get the Software department manager to come and join Alan and Ron and myself to discuss whether and how it could be done! Days later I was asked to become Product manager and Project leader for the new venture which I jumped at with my usual blissful ignorance and willing attitude. Suddenly I was subjected to GANNT charts, CPA and other Project management tools, this was certainly an eye opener and another career path which has stood me in good stead even until today. (2022) The new product obviously had no spinning reels, instead it sported a video screen which displayed a game that allowed players to answer, hopefully correctly, questions that were displayed with a suitable GUI. The product demanded a particular or peculiar consumable and that was questions, and lots of them, but more of that later. Of course we also needed the physical media to store them on and very early on someone had ventured the idea of a floppy disk as being ideal but the 1.4meg floppy was still in its relative infancy and getting a disk drive into a gaming machine for the first time was seen as fraught with danger. I fiercely defended the idea that the storage aspect of the product was developed in a two pronged attack, one utilising EPROM which was a mature, well known and easy path. The second was to be a floppy disk which meant writing a secure and unique Disk Operating System in order that the question sets could not just get ripped off by other manufacturers or canny punters. I recall we called it Wingcode as the creator was Ian Wingfield! So determined was I to make sure that we implemented this storage medium that I managed to get in touch with one of the buyers at a well known computer manufacturers and obtained both a sample, and the supplier of, the suspension mounts that Compaq had fitted in their Luggable PC’s at that time. We fitted them to a floppy drive and started bashing a machine around while the drive was spinning. We were astounded to find that it would really take quite an extreme amount of punishment without exhibiting any problems at all. We decided to go along with the overhead of duplicated effort and continue with the development of both branches of the project just in case a gremlin jumped out of the box. Coincidentally during the ongoing supplier acquisition stages we learnt that a competitor that you must have heard of, was quite near to us and was having difficulty obtaining an ‘unusual amount’ of Eprom for his production. JPM concluded several things, 1) that he had got wind of our development. (remember the new locks on the doors that I spoke of earlier?) More of that later. 2) that he was embarking on a product like ours. 3) that we would suffer even worse supply problems if we continued with the Eprom route. 4) that we should immediately put an order in for thousands of Eproms just to make the supply even worse for the competition, after all they could always be used in gaming machines. So JPM took the, what was momentous decision to dump the Eprom development and re allocate resource to the disk. We happily prepared for the launch in London at the London Hippodrome. For the moment I need to go back to answer the question of questions. For the production of every machine we figured that we would need 6,000 questions, each with 1 correct and 3 perhaps plausible but incorrect answers. We played around with selecting answers at random but too often we came across totally stupid answers that denied plausibility, or equally as unnerving and totally by chance, alternative but correct answers. We toyed around for a while with several ideas and we developed the final specification for questions and answers and where else would we go for help but to the accepted seat of intelligence MENSA. With the question ‘recipe’ in hand and a description and demonstration of the product, we anticipated that our prayers would be answered, but how wrong would that prove to be. After our meeting with them, and after a very thorough and complete presentation of the product and the philosophy behind it we felt confident that having accepted the brief they understood exactly our requirements. We received the first few thousand questions on disk in sets of 100 questions within a week and I was given the task of assessing them before they were passed on for compression and encryption. These had obviously been developed by a computer programme. It was immediately obvious that answer lines were being used as responses in far too many questions as they were the same and on further analysis I found that the 3 incorrect answers in questions 1, 10, 20, 30, 40 for example were the same but just presented in a different order. "Furthermore this grammar on many cases were wrong, indicating again a computerised production." Do you see what I mean? We also found that answers used in this haphazard way presented by coincidence, more than one answer which just could have been construed as correct! So we decided to set u our own Q+A department which I staffed and by purchasing the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was the font of knowledge in those days (no Google, no Internet), we were able to verify and prepare suitable alternative answers to some of those questions. It wasn’t long before a member of our team and my father in law at that time, Ken Friis, pointed out that with a little help he was sure they could we could prepare many of the factual questions for ourselves and add value to our department so this we started doing. To inject a mix of the more down to earth questions on Pop music, TV and Sport I enlisted teams of students from Cardiff University using one Tutor as a question ‘gleaner’. He would collect and send us the questions in groups of 100 for which we would pay £50 or 50p per question. So lucrative was this that he subsequently left university and set up a company, using me to get another copy of Encyclopedia Britannica which I managed to get at a reduced price. A fact is that after buying several sets for other people I was presented with a copy of the ‘First edition’ by the publishers which is leather bound and presented in a glass fronted, teak cabinet with my name initials engraved in a brass plaque on the lid. The system we employed with the universities worked so well that I extended it to other Countries when we eventually realised the product’s international appeal. We soon became aware of exactly how correct the choice of the floppy disk was when it became clear to the site owners and machine operators that certain individuals were playing the machine constantly and getting to know a lot of the answers, so much so that the machine was no longer making as much as it should. This was not simply because the overall payout percentage had rocketed but also due to a lack of overall plays which confirmed that the appeal of the machine was as a challenge. To combat this effectively we set up a 6 weekly, direct debit linked supply of a new disk with 6,000 fresh questions which proved to increase the revenue of the machine due to the incentive to those players who really wanted to be challenged. A news set of questions was accompanied by a new ZCA flash screen indicating, the revision number of questions, a recent event such as a football match or news headline, and the date of compilation( I think) We released the initial product in the London Hippodrome at a huge and well advertised event that most of the industry were invited to. The product was to be an answer to the demise of the industry and it was creating massive amounts of attention. The machine was centre stage with all the pazzaz reserved for a new car launch. Music was blasting from the PA system. Laser lights were dancing. Hundreds of people listened to the presenter from TV’s “Tomorrow’s World” introduce the product with an explanation of the need for the change and a huge screen displaying graphs of machine ‘take’ and the concept of the question replacement service which I was about to launch. With a final flourish timed to perfection … The house lights went out and, Unseen. A centre stage trapdoor descended. Sprach Zarathustra began to play, extremely loudly. A machine was pushed on to the lowered trapdoor by a colleague. A lead was plugged in to the socket actually on the trap door. The machine was switched on. The trapdoor ascended as the machine booted up. A single spotlight picked out the machine as it rose through a trap door in the floor playing it’s initial boot up melody exactly 1 minute and 40 (?) seconds after the lights went out. I think that was the longest 1 minute and 40 seconds of my life, we couldn’t plug the machine in before we moved it as the connection was sunk into the face of the trap door, so we had to suffer the possibility of a non start. The “Next Generation” product literally rose from the ground. JPM literally lived on the product and its successors for the next year! As addendum #1 to this tale. Many years later when I joined that very competitor that I spoke of earlier that got their product out before ours. I met the people in their R+D and it became obvious that the biggest problem they faced at that time was not only the purchasing of, but also the cleaning, erasing, programming and relabeling Eproms. These devices returned from the customer had been so badly damaged in many cases by ham fisted operators that they could not be used again and a charge for the damaged chips had to be made and of course they had to be replaced. They were losing money on their updates and so had to extend the frequency, whereas our update service was straight forward and with the 8 gang disk copying facilities we made we could copy 4 batches of 8 disks in 10 minutes and of course the old returned disks went straight in the bin. Addendum #2 and further to the new locks on the doors Jack Jones, now armed with the fact that apparently our security had been compromised, guessed that it was either someone inside selling ideas or an outsider getting info from us. He paid a discrete security agency to infiltrate us and obtain whatever information they could. No one questioned the window cleaner that came around with a bucket and cloth to clean the office dividers, or the rodent inspector with new traps in the factory or even the the new guy collecting waste bins from development! We should have, they were all from the same company and when we were all called to a meeting, there on Jack’s desk were old revision specification sheets, programme printouts, out of date Bills of materials the whole dam thing! Days later there were security locks everywhere and no paper ever went out without being shredded!
    13 points
  24. Exhibitions, and one in particular! The first exhibition I ever attended was in Alexander Palace and it was an eye opener for me to be there and to be put up in a swank hotel in London alongside the directors! After Alexandra Palace the exhibition or the Amusement Trades Exhibition went to Earls Court and to Olympia and has since developed to be ICE or the International Casino Exhibition now that the Amusement Machine industry in the UK is a dim shadow of its former self. However around 1982 I believe, the organisers decided it would be a good idea to move the venue to the centre of the country and away from the admittedly archaic building which I guess looking back was not suitable at all because of the fire, and so it moved to the NEC in Birmingham. Unfortunately the organisers overlooked one of the main reasons why so many overseas visitors came to the exhibition and that was simply because it was in London. Fuelled with expenses, they could get from the exhibition hall in minutes, back to their hotel rooms and on the piss within the hour, if indeed they had not cleared out the mini bar before hand. The one thing about the exhibition and the trip from Wales was that we were all housed in the same hotel. Nothing had changed in the basic philosophy of the company and there was still very little us and them, that was to come but not from the original directors. I have to explain. Despite using one of the nicest hotel in London at that time, we were all housed there, the directors the managers the lorry drivers and the production workers that came up to assist with the moving of machine etc, everyone! The NEC was another thing altogether and Birmingham in those days was not the International Metropolis that it is (?) these days and it didn’t fit the industry and so it was that the exhibition was held there just the once. Again we were all in the one hotel, the whole team! Unfortunately and just some time before this historic move to the Midlands and this stage of the companies history, the original directors were trying to put “Names” in managerial positions. I believe this was to ensure that managers in top positions were seen to have pedigree and to prepare for the impending sell off which eventually happened although many years later and to Whitbread. And so along came four guys that we were introduced to over a short period, and who were taking or creating positions that had not really been recognised before and in some cases over individuals that had been with us a long while and that should have had the job. I will not name them here although their names still make me think of bull shit! The guys were all without question, from different ‘Blue chip’ companies and were all time wasting, egotistical toss pots. They were professional, disciplined, experienced ass licker's dropped into a highly flexible yet hugely successful company and they were actually like fish out of water, and their response was? Try and drown everyone else with their ill fitting methodology. I won’t go into the arguments, the show downs and the crap we had to go through or the number of stupid Memos that we started to sink under (no emails yet). I remember getting one that was on pretty, pre printed, letter headed paper and came from “The Desk of Toss Pot #1” (That’s my substitution to maintain anonymity by the way!) Suffice to say that on the morning of this particular exhibition, thanks to their cumulative cock ups and as the ‘Stand Manager’ of the exhibition set up I faced the following scenario. The first lorry arrived and having prepared our stand and that of our distributors I had all my guys bright eyed and bushy tailed ready and waiting as they started trucking in the machines on a procession of sack trucks. A long faced member of the production staff trucked in the first one and I glared at the sheet of A4 paper stuck to the front which went something like:- “The Print supplier had a problem - no reel bands - to follow” “Oh well put it in place we can deal with that later” or words to that affect I guess I must have said as the second machine came towards me again bearing another A4 sheet of bad news. “No Eproms - Programme to follow” Um…. Third one came in “No power supply - to follow” And so it went on. By the time we had unloaded the lorries and taken the machines and furniture etc to our own and the various distributors stands we had 46 machines that had parts missing from the 95 machines we were exhibiting. Just under 50% and the worst of it was that we couldn’t even begin to test some of them. I made it to a phone (no mobiles) and of course being Saturday it was difficult to raise anyone, however I did manage to get hold of Toss Pot#2 and gave him a discrete but fair assessment of the situation and politely requested, with due reverence that he please put every effort into assisting me! Did I buggery; I called him all the snivelling little s**t bags under the sun and told him to get his sorry arse on a train and get up to Birmingham with the missing bits for the poxy machines and as fast as his fat f*c**in legs would carry him. But of course, there was no way he could. The parts that had been delivered, in some cases incorrectly designed, had to be re-made which meant that suppliers would be working the weekend and the parts would be up Monday morning, just before the start of the exhibition and, this was a big AND, hopefully functional. There was nothing for it but to try and swap parts around from machine to machine and by mixing and matching, robbing our own machines for parts and making sure that all the distributors stands were as complete as they could be, we stabilised the situation by isolating and concentrating the problems as far as was possible, rightly or wrongly, to our own stand. Finishing at around 10:00 pm on Sunday night we tried to get a beer but there was not a lot around so we got back to the hotel all ordered room service and robbed the room bars We had already arranged to get back on the stand by 08:00 the next morning as we still had a of of work to do and just over 3 hours before the exhibition started. To say I was stressed is a slight understatement. When Toss Pots numbers #1 #2 #3 turned up they walked in and were all smiles as they felt their job was done. They were obviously happy in the knowledge that they had the answers to the current problems, accompanied as they were with all the parts necessary. They further made their accomplishments known, with knowing smiles and winks to the directors who had also turned up early having gained wind of the problems, from me. Eventually after brown nosing everyone of importance they came over to me and in suitably loud and condescending voices, and looking to the directors, said! “Right Frank, now what can we do to help you and your team put YOUR problems right” like it was my teams fault! MY PROBLEMS! WTF! Without a moments hesitation and I suppose quite improperly in front of all my staff, my colleagues, the directors, staff on other stands and whoever was passing, I practically touched noses with Toss Pot #1, lets not forget, ex of a large Blue Chip Company and shouted in to his ugly podgy face. “F**K OFF - Get off my stand and leave me the f**k alone” Numbers #2 and #3 turned to Ernie Beaver, Sales Director, who simply said… “I really think you should do what he says.” With that I emptied the boxes of parts on to the carpet tiles and issued instructions quickly to my team who took those new parts and fitted and fully tested each machine before moving on to another one. With only a few minutes to spare Adrian and I pushed the one machine that we just could not persuade to work into the back room. As we shut the door the speakers announced ‘the show is open’ and crowds started to pour in. I left for the Cafe after quite loudly giving my notice to Ernie and Jack and, I am ashamed to admit, broke down in tears. Sitting, shaking and weeping over a Coffee is not a good place to be at the start of an exhibition but I had honestly reached the end of my tether. I couldn't continue to fight against these odds, don’t forget this wasn’t the first altercation where they just would not listen to common sense. Whatever happened I could not work under that sort of pressure especially as it was brought about by such a bunch of w**k*rs and that is exactly how I put it to Jack, Alan and Ernie when they eventually came to find me. They pleaded with me to forget what I had just said as they had apparently already done so. They suggested that I should go back to my hotel room and chill reassuring me that things would change and soon. I finished my coffee, went for a walk, had a Marlboro or two and then went back to do my job, running the stand, meeting customers, answering their questions and leading my team. A week or maybe two later, many people went including Toss pots #1, 2#,#3, and #4. As an addendum to this tail. Toss pot#1 had once taken me aside after I had confronted him in an emergency meeting called as it was about product safety which needed immediate answers. I had both questioned, and then proved his judgement to be wrong, in this meeting that was with many of the senior managers and directors. He had said to me, while looking over his shoulder to make sure he was not overheard, that I was a nothing. The words he used were ‘nothing but a jumped up untrained nobody who was actually very clever at twisting the truth’. He told me over his pointed podgy finger and in no uncertain terms that he would see me out of the company if it was the last thing he did. Most mornings thereafter, as I lowered my arse into his comfortable leather and teak chair, possibly the most expensive chair in the building, I couldn't help feeling just a little sorry for him. No honestly. No seriously! 😉
    13 points
  25. Once again forgive me, these are personal observations so I’m bound to figure in them. Ok, so early to mid 1970’s. Flairs were the in thing, that and turtle neck sweaters, bright flowered shirts and JPM were reinforcing their early beginnings. We seemed to have found a recipe for machine development that combined decent technical detail and popular game play. Most of this was the brain child of Alan Parker, Howard Parker and Ron Watts the latter being the one that combined the ideas of the others into great artwork design. At this time I had moved from reel build and test onto the Control Board test and from there a step, literally a step, through a newly opened break in the wall and onto the final machine test area. In reality this was taken quite soon after I had begun my employment with JPM and I was one of only a few individuals to have worked full time in all the areas within the JPM test area although others had obviously done similar with other smaller companies. Alongside the production staff’s motley collection of vehicles, the car park was beginning to be populated by vehicles that displayed, quite rightly, the recent success of the company. BMW 5 series, Rover P6 3.5, Aston Martin ( ok second hand ) and Mercedes. Visitors regularly turned up in equally high class vehicles and it was not unusual to see the odd Rolls or Bentley parked out front as the larger than life operators and distributors, sometimes with their secretary's ( nudge nudge ) came to look around. Let me necessarily outline at this point a little about the culture at JPM. It was a Team. That is no hyperbole or unrealistic exaggeration. That phrase has been hi-jacked over the years by wannabe’s with no real substance behind their claims, but it was used as a slogan in the JPM Marketing Strategy ( photo to follow ) and quite honestly, it was the truth. There was just not an us and them. The directors had a job to do as much as we all did but they often joined in with conversations at the factory door or came to have a chat and ask how things were and if anything could be improved, and they quite often were as a result. They also bought Fish and chips ( no Domino’s in those days ) when there was a need to work late, sometimes all nighters, and it was far more that just ‘trying to stay with the boys’. One of the biggest factual statements of the team culture was the payment structure. As memory serves we were on about £30(ish) a week, now that wasn’t a lot of money and certainly less than I had been earning as a time served Joiner and latterly a Ceramic tiler, but I had to give it all up due to an injury which is why I took this temporary job in a factory! (Nothing as permanent as temporary eh) If you worked a flat 40 hours then no bonus was payable ( as I remember ) needless to say I never found out and when the shout of “Bonus is up” was shouted out, the top wage earner on the huge paper chart pinned to the wall was either Gary G, Gary P, or me or one of very few others. I have recollections of monthly pay slips boosted by over £1,000 but 70-80 hour weeks were not unusual, and you were never, never ever, late. I also have vague recollections of going over to the Plymouth Arms on bonus day, but I don’t remember going home. That is not to say that this was a constant, I remember vaguely being asked to go the cabinet shop which had a large open area that was usually filled with cabinets but on this day was ominously empty. As we all circled Jack Jones he explained about the huge downturn in business and that he had to lay off 30% of the production staff, turning around he apologised individually as he picked every third person, I did the maths and the head count pretty quickly and stayed exactly where I was but filled with fear at the possibility of being laid off for the first time in my life. A few months later most of those staff that were laid off were back anyway. However it was just a little time later when a position was advertised internally for the development department and although I had not long been married and taken on quite a mortgage, the idea of a constant flat salary, but admittedly at a considerably lower wage, appealed to me after all I could still earn a few quid on the weekend tiling if I needed to! And so it was that I left the production area and climbed the stairs ( and not just metaphorically ) to claim my bench in the development area and join a bunch of new colleagues and disciplines. L These were the TEAM ( printed on the back) give away T shirts - one was in each Cash box for a period L -> R Rob Higgins, Me, Ernie Beaver, Rob Old, Howard Parker, Huw Thomas
    13 points
  26. Hello Members, If anybody lives near Preston, Lancashire there is 3 fully working on new coins MPU3 machines Adders and Ladders Exchange Unlimited Line Up All for public use I believe they are testing the water to see if there is a demand for more classics to be sited in the bar area
    12 points
  27. No longer JPM Good afternoon chaps people (carefull), well at least those of you who are still reading this. So the new JPM spat me out. And again, before I go much further these last reminiscences are not about JPM obviously and are a personal recollection of the last four gaming organisations I worked with just to finish what I started. I was also mid divorce and had to find employment so after messing around with the useless benefit system (for people like me) and not finding employment and bills building up, I decided to go back to my tools so Property maintenance was the way to go. As an aside, I remember speaking to a benefit agent and explaining that a mortgage, 2 kids in private school, maintenance to pay and a one bed flat to rent was difficult and I was trying my best to get everything sorted and what could they do in the short term or at the very least for a month. When he offered me £42 quid I asked how tightly he could roll the cheque up so it didn't hurt when he shoved it up his … After a short and I must say fairly successful period of around a year, I took a call from JJ (Jack Jones) who said “How do you fancy meeting me next week.” I thought why not and we both went to a decrepit factory unit on the Somerset Industrial estate in Cwmbran. Walking around through the cobwebs, bankrupt stock, steel patterns hanging on the wall, inches of dust and debris and huge noisy and oily machinery he explained that he was going to restart the business and supply IP65 electrical trunking systems again to the Automotive Industry. In conversation he just said “and would you be the MD?” Of course I agreed, without hesitation, repetition or interruption, although what the hell did I know of Sheet steel? So we built up on the base of the old business and updated equipment, systems and brought back staff. When I say we I mean it, to see Jack with a toilet brush scrubbing the old bogs was a sight to behold and one many people just would not believe. I contacted suppliers and customers, got to know the staff and also worked on the machines when I wasn’t doing the office thing, and between us and with the guidance of a mate, Spencer Davies (https://www.amcanu.co.uk/) we slowly dragged the business back to some sort of break even within a year and a half. Installing new Cad and Cam systems and training the staff in their use revolutionised the business and Electrical Enclosure Products dragged itself back into life. As another aside Spencer was also the coxswain of the Burry Port Lifeboat and a good mate of Jack’s and accompanied us on Jack's 50ft boat when I was lucky enough to be invited for a day's outing around the Pembroke coast, what a day to remember. Over a lunch meeting at Mcdonald's one day, Jack suggested we could design a metal table top cabinet, just like the vegas machines and he began to sketch it out on the back of a napkin. I nearly threw a coffee over him. To be frank (sic) I had developed a bad feeling with regard to gaming, who could blame me. I stubbornly pointed out that the business could not afford the machine time or for that matter the design time for playing around with what seemed to be a romantic departure if we were to continue to supply our customers in the way they had grown accustomed to us doing. You see we were small and flexible, I would drive (in my second hand BMW 525) to Vauxhall or Ford or Land Rover and look at the problem with the installation of electrical and control distribution layouts and call back to the factory with changes to the ‘standard’ units that we made, or perhaps design a new control cabinet and we would start the process there and then. This sort of thing… https://www.at-enclosures.co.uk/products/switchboard-enclosures With a few guys willing to work overnight and with our own powder coating plant under our roof, we would have the units dispatched, often in the back of the lethal 2 litre P100 pickup, before other competitors could even respond as they were in many cases overseas manufacturers, in fact we often modified their offerings. We were also supplying systems to the guys that supplied large scale machinery to the Automotive Industry, did you know that the engine block goes through a washing machine after it has been machined? This photo is of a small one, I was actually locked in the large fully automated one as a prank, although thankfully it was not running at the time! Jack explained we could employ one of the dumped guys from JPM on a part time basis and fit things in around production (Yeah, shure) So Clive Salvidge (mate) joined us and together from those drawings on the McDonald napkin we drew up the cabinet that was to become the Astra machine and started sending the parts to the CNC machinery. Not only that but we built the first one together. We also became involved with Barcrest as they wanted a machine cabinet to house, as I remember, a lottery terminal after they saw that prototype cabinet. Yes they saw it, you see I hawked that dam cabinet to all the majors to see if we could get funding to further the development and buy machinery. No one wanted it, “too expensive”, “never catch on”. So one day JJ took the cabinet away to Consort engineering in Pembrokeshire and the manufacture of it was to be taken on board there. JJ sold the enclosure company, although I would really have liked to buy it,I was ‘taken on’ by the new buyers and I transferred the business, the machinery, customers and know-how to a company in Derbyshire that made Conveyor systems. Ever seen the escalator at the SnowDome in Tamworth? I was involved with the first drawings of that thing. I worked with them for a while until I got the call from Alan P to ask me if I would like to join Astra to develop the cabinet further as the shell design and manufacture was practically ironed out and the interior design and population needed addressing and manufacturing needed to be set up. And so I joined Astra Games, back in gaming, and became the go-between from Penarth, where the design offices were, and Pembrokeshire where the cabinet was being made. We pushed the boundary on a lot of things by putting the machine in that cabinet, and of course introduced the Azkoyen hopper into the design. It was so strange us all being back together, me, Ron, Alan, Jack, Clive and a couple of the software guys who would not be familiar to you. The intention was to build and populate the cabinet in Pembrokeshire. Consort is a brilliant company and was already successful in manufacturing electrical appliances, but the constant back and forth was a problem and we soon realised we needed to be on top of it. We leased a factory in Bridgend and also moved the offices to North Road in Bridgend, I transferred the manufacture there and we started minimal production runs with Consort still supplying the machines, In fact they are still supplying the industry to this day. Astra was built up with many ex employees of JPM but also carefully handpicked new employees and we soon built a new structure much like the old JPM. I eventually celebrated my 40th Birthday with a huge bash to which most of the guys were invited and many others from the JPM days turned up much to my surprise. I guess the rest is history as they say. I eventually moved from manufacturing and design back into Customer Service, we sent stuff all around the world and I ended up travelling to Scandinavia, Africa, Italy in fact all over as the product was new and different and training was often necessary. We developed and installed the first Party time or Community games as they are called now or so I am led to believe. “Good things have to come to an end or you would never know they were good.” Once again I found myself at loggerheads with an intransigent arse who would not listen to reason as his ego was all important, the Sales Director. I had bruised his ego once in JPM when I enabled a sale in Germany and it appeared that it had taken all this time to seek revenge. Too much to go into here but I had a stand up and very heated, red faced argument where it all came out, this in front of a room full of staff and I ended up calling the Sales Director a c**t, well because he was, and it was obvious we could not work together after that. Astra had just started a Casino division, I went straight to the team leader and immediately asked for a transfer and they seemed happy to take me on board. So that was me and Astra finished. Hello Core systems! At Core we designed a new Casino product for a Canadian company VLC. When I say new product I mean the whole thing: the circuit boards, the software, the cabinet design and all to Nevada gaming board regulations which was quite a feat, that I can assure you. The team was led by Jeremy Boswell, ex Aristocrat and a german gaming company (IGT?) but also an ex stock exchange developer and a total knowledge blotter. Whatever he looked into he understood immediately and we ended up working together for 20 years some time later and in a different industry but that’s another story and not for here. I remember helping the techs during prototype build, with SMT, a circuit board and a heat gun for the first time and I ended up blowing all the dam components off the board. My how electronics had progressed. My job was to document everything and transfer those designs to the manufacturing facility in Montanna, Canada, which we did with members of the team going over to make sure the prototypes were to a standard. I used html to create a dynamic library of images and drawings which worked really quite well and was eventually going to be a CD based diagnostic tool, allowing engineers to recognise the faulty part by delving into dynamic images and clicking to circuits, wiring diagrams and part numbers. After around a year we had the thing nailed and then came the bad news. IGT had bought VLC in Canada and as such the new organisation had no need for the product! I had just had my third child (second marriage) and I didnt want to end up once again on the scrap heap so I sent out the feelers and had a quiet meeting with Coinmaster gaming. Despite promises from Core that other markets could be found and the future was perhaps bright I decided to jump ship and so moved into the Casino Industry. Finally Coinmaster Gaming to follow.
    12 points
  28. Well here's my bargain of the year ( I know it's only January 😊) saw this machine on eBay early this morning thought it was to good to be true £30 bid or £50 buy now so I just brought it it's only 40 mins from me so went over to collect it and was pleasantly surprised there it was they have owned it for over 30 years and it hadn't been touched or used for many many years so I got it back stripped it down ( didn't switch it on ) took the mpu apart and was mint but it had the dreaded blue battery but it hadn't leaked I removed it anyway cleaned all the connections and cleaned 30 years of muck out of the cabinet refitted it all and switched it on and it worked perfect first time only needs a new potentiometer as the one inside is cracked there's sound but it's just a bit quite it also had half a tin of 10p tokens locked in the bottom which was a bonus as there were no keys to look inside but for fifty pounds half tin of electrical cleaner and some elbow grease and here's the end result very happy another old classic saved IMG_0974.MOV
    12 points
  29. Haven't posted much recently on the 'Tales from the workshop' but this one was a corker so worth documenting. A couple of Sys1 boards were giving me the run around. They'd already been returned but failed soon after! The trouble with these boards is the dreaded green plague gets in everywhere even where it doesn't show and once repaired, even after soak testing, can sometimes fail shortly after. In the case of these two, one had the CPU fail (which looked really clean) and the other the sound chip failed causing (apart from bad sounds) no dip switches. So, the first one with the CPU fail burst into life with a new CPU but there was no sound? Surely not two faulty sound chips (AY-3-8910), these are getting difficult to source these days. Luckily there is a more modern pin for pin replacement in the Yamaha YM2149. So in with a new one and full sound restored. Now back to board two and out of curiosity I just thought I'd put the bad chip from board one into board two and blow me it worked just fine??? Back into board one and nothing. So now I'm scratching my head as to why the Yamaha chip works but not the AY-3-8910 in board #1. After a good few hours and with the original chip in board one it did start to work but stopped again never to return. It was time to get the big guns out! Armed with the scope I started checking the pulse feeds into the sound chip (pins 27 & 29) and noted that in board one they were twice the speed as board two?? Hmm in that case maybe the modern Yamaha chips are faster which would explain that one, but why the speed difference? This is where someone was looking down and smiled on me I think. IC7 (74LS00) does quite a few things in the circuit, one set of gates is directly connected to the sound chip but it wasn't that. This had already been changed on the first repair so I knew the chip was good. Another of the gates selects the bus speed depending on what ROMs are fitted (via IC10 74LS175). Hmm that looks promising. Looking at the waveform coming out of IC7 pin 3 it didn't look right ie there was lots of crud on it and it was low. Funnily enough it looked almost the same as on pin 2 which is one of the inputs. On lifting the chip out of the socket it measured about 4 Ohms across the two pins. Looking under the socket with the microscope I could see a tiny spec of solder that was sitting across pins 2 & 3. Once removed the waveform was now correct and the speed of the pulse feeds to the sound chip were now at the correct speed. Of course now the 8910 chip worked as it should do. I think I need a holiday after that one!
    12 points
  30. Latest machine has landed, chuffed as anything with this one (thanks Drew) - few jobs to do but its in tidy original condition, will get the frames re-coated due to the usual corrosion around the corners (will try the chrome look powder coat which is apparently pretty good! we shall see - a first for me). MPU4 has original battery on board so we will see how that turns out, likely a job for Mick we shall see. Cab is pretty solid and tidy, overall a good find! So - if anyone sees (or has) a club double, solid silver & grandstand please let me know they are my 3 remaining wants to complete my early MPU4 club collection (thx) - I would also consider a crackpot for completeness. I cannot believe how quickly I have gathered such a mass of classics and just how addictive this is!!!! 😬
    12 points
  31. Just got the new glass back for this machine last week and fitted it yesterday. It s actually been printed onto perspex and doesn't look too bad and was a very reasonable £70to do .so after a bit of head scratching with the reel deck it turns out the mpu 1 board Was faulty so a quick change and bingo she s working 100% again .so this machine really was a phoenix from the ashes project but glad to own a lucky nudge .here s the vid .
    12 points
  32. All done, just waiting on the coin mech should be here today (thanks Ron) - I decided to leave on old 10p’s and 50’s (have loads!) but upgraded the £1’s. Tests out all ok with my spare mod 2 MPU4👍 Original MPU will go in once Mick does his magic (cheers Mick) 😊
    12 points
  33. Good evening all, Well finally got hold of a Barcrest Hi Lights, my first Mpu2 as well. I am delighted. Came to me as a non runner, and it's taken a little bit of work to get running, but with the help of the Mecca folk's, it all came together!
    11 points
  34. Re-Release of a classic layout by Bugs / Trouty, that has been out for quite some time, updated to run with the most current version of MFME, and now includes the long lost sound ROM's, c/o a very nice contact of mine.Enjoy! Omega £4.80JP 20p (Classic - Maygay).zip Maygay Omega £4.80JP 20p ROMs 1.zip Maygay Omega £4.80JP 20p ROMs 2.zip
    11 points
  35. Hi everyone. For Christmas 2022 I am doing a 3 part release. For Christmas eve, I am releasing the original 5p blue version of Eachway Shuffle! As always this is a complete redraw in 4K. Thanks to Launton for the ROM's (https://www.fruitemu.co.uk/). TopShaun (https://desertislandfruits.com/) for nagging me to make this, and for testing and of course the mighty Wizard for MFME:). I have included an EWS manual from here a while ago which I have merged together. Not sure who uploaded it, as I can no longer access downloads on here, but thanks to that person. Have fun....Eachway Shuffle v1.0.zip Happy Christmas:) Come back tomorrow for part 2! Submitter Amusements Submitted
    11 points
  36. This is an interesting old tech and getting to be quite rare these days. Luckily manuals and schematics are available (in downloads) which makes things a whole lot easier. Before starting work on this tech I cut my teeth on the System 1000 which is very similar in construction. I've yet to document that one but one useful part of the project is that both techs can use the same tester I've built along with Bell Fruit Black Box. Here's a quick outline of all the cards and chassis..... I couldn't get hold of any 22 way molex connectors but luckily I had managed to get some 24 way ones from Digikey for the 1000 cards and had just enough spares to trim them down. Starting with the PSU card. They used a very odd arrangement of obtaining a 5v supply for the logic. The main supply (15v) is dropped to 10v and this is then used as the negative for the logic chips, the 15v rail then making the +5v, if that makes sense. I did read an article about the reason for doing it this way and at the time it was the standard way to do it. Wish I'd read that first as taking initial voltage readings was extremely confusing. The next cards are the CPU's. Two types have surfaced so far, C1 and issue 3. The first is the C1 variant and the next two issue 3's but some have only one ROM no RAM and no battery components. The CPU is the 4040 24 way chip so it's only a 4 bit device. The clock and RST is generated by the P4201 chip top left and these are prone to fail. Spares are non existent! Next is the I/O cards. Triac and transistor ouput. Lastly the input card. Most the I/O circuitry uses the same or similar format of ACE techs right through to System one so there's no head scratchers there. Of course things would be too easy if there weren't any any at all and lo and behold we come to the reel deck. There's no documentation on this so it had to be worked out from the physical deck. The principle used is similar to the old mechanical Bell Fruit decks with studs and wipers except they took a leap into technology and made it all electrical. Basically the reel has 20 positions with various slots cut into an attached sensor wheel. This then has 5 LED sensors to report the wheel position back to the program. Considering the motor arrangement is similar to the Bell Fruit it's quite clever how it works. There are slots cut in the outside of the sensor wheel which locks/stops the reel when its associated solenoid is released. It didn't take too long to sus out that the 5 sensors are used to translate the reel position into binary. As I didn't have a reel deck I needed to be able to create one in software on my Arduino. The basic code has been written but not tried as yet due to PSU issues with the test rig but hopefully this won't take too long to resolve. My understanding is the reel sensors are read at every position due to the slots ( 1 per position) on the outside circumference of the sensor wheel. When the program knows it's at the correct position it releases the solenoid to stop the reel. Any old hands out there, please feel free to educate me if this isn't correct or you'd like to add anything. So far I've managed to get all the CPU's to run and a couple of PSU's. No I/O cards have yet been worked on as the PSU supply from my test rig doesn't have enough power to run them and a larger transformer is needed. Once sorted I'll update this thread, hopefully with a working system.
    11 points
  37. Okay, 46 Charles Street The production line was just that, these coffins disguised as a ‘one armed bandits’ were in a line of about five, just the basic cabinet. We would fit all internal workings i.e. coin mechs, overflow tubes, payout mechs ,looms, I think most know what would be fitted inside, payout cup, handle boss e.c.t, each screw, nut and bolt by hand. The Jolly Roger didn’t stay in production for very long. Dave Shenton was working on a new type of machine, one which none of us were aware of. A complete new design of cabinet, new inners, new face front glass. If my memory serves me right (in my 70s now, mind gets muddled a bit) this “new” machine the mighty Monte Carlo. This machine made it harder on the back, bending over to install the inners, not so much for me as I was young but for the oldies Ralph was in his 50s John in his 70s. Later when sales picked up a raised platform was built with rollers (less backache); an air compressor system was installed allowing the use of air tools, drills, screwdrivers and so on. In the same room but behind a partition was where the girls worked, wiring reel units, control boards and payout boards. On the same floor was a store room, machine test area, a unit test area and an office for Dave Shenton, all this in a Victorian house. My basic wage was around £5-£7 a week but the bonus system was so good that I was bringing home between £25-£30 a week. As production increased more people were employed, bonuses decreased. Here is an interesting fact that now we would be saying “how could they do that”. In the storeroom there was a trap door when lifted there were stairs leading down to the basement which as I said earlier was the machine shop. If anyone wanted anything from the stores they would have to walk from the basement up two flights of stairs. Roger Collins said that this was a waste of valuable time so he decided to open up the stairs in the stores. Stacked high were dozens of Jennings and other makes of ‘one armed bandits’ Today when seeing these machines we would say “treasure trove”, heartbreak time, I and another worker called Karl had to strip these machines of all their inners (plenty of old 6d pieces, still currency then, needless to say they went into our pockets) and throw all the metal shells into a van that was then taken to the local rubbish tip and dumped. Why they would want to do that I do not understand because just up the road at 58 Charles Street was another company called Lynguard amusements, they had these types of machines rented out but they decided, “chuck them away”. Little did I know then I would work for that company a few years later. Behind the scenes the company had bought the premises in Ferry Road. We, the workers had no idea until one day we were told that production would stop, a meeting was set up with the whole work force, we were then told we were moving. Everything was taken from Charles Street, if it moved we took it. Vans were parked in the lane behind the building being loaded up. At Ferry Road all the buildings were set up ready to start production. Raised platforms with empty cabinets all ready for work to start. A wiring department, two test areas, a building for a machine shop, also one for cabinet making. A.C.E. was becoming big. More later if interested
    11 points
  38. This one had got little to do with machines, sorry but it's part of the history! 😉 As well as running the Customer Service team I was eventually asked to run the Spares Sales department which was recovering after an unsuccessful attempt at trying to stock other manufacturers spares for the industry, a sort of “Radio Spares” for the industry. This meant I had to get to grips with stock holdings, more budgets, stock takes and bin cards but while I was there though I became more aware of the Ferranti computer which was a dirty great Main Frame computer that ran the rest of the company and which we in Customer Service knew very little about. We had to put our figures in via data entry clerks specialists. Looking back now it seems farcical, but let’s not forget that at the time Fax hadn’t made its way to the office yet, we were still using telex and TNT had only just started delivering parcels! Jack wanted to bring the place up to date and install a much smaller but much more powerful machine from IBM but was concerned that the change over would be a bit of a nightmare. The decision was taken by the board that the trial would be made by installing a system 36 as a test bed, more for the company than for IBM obviously, and he decided that the trial would be under my wing. Bird ha ha! Spares Sales was chosen as it was the smaller of the stores and so I was banged off on a course in Bracknell where I was exposed to the programming language and the various process’s involved. When the trial was over I could start helping others understand when the larger system was installed. I think it was system 38? The installation went ahead and within a week we had our stock levels in and were running the two systems in tandem, the same numbers being entered into both machines by ourselves and the data entry clerks, these were then tallied against the stock at the end of each month. Problem was the figures never tallied. Try as we might we could not get our stock figures to match up with those that were in the main frame and this was a complete mystery. We had a consignment of stock delivered from the main stores, we stocked it, sold it, dispatched it and logged every single transaction. The ensuing figures were often way out for too many items to be comfortable, so exhibiting less trust than perhaps I should have, I worked for a month with the team watching as many transactions as I could and cross checking data entries. After a long period of head scratching and considering all the variables we eventually came to the simple conclusion that the only figure over which we had no control was the item count of the incoming goods. So when the next delivery came from the main stores I took the film wrapped cases, opened them and counted them in rather than taking the quantity on face value. Many of them were wrong! The clouds cleared. Light Bulb moment! For my incoming stock to be wrong the main stores levels should in reality also be similarly incorrect? As some quantities were actually greater than they should have been that would mean that the corresponding items in the main stores should have been short? Yet their figures and stock levels were constantly correct so throwing bad light on our efforts and therefore reinforcing the effort to keep the Ferranti and the status quo. It was obvious to me that they were passing stock errors, shortages, and who knows what else, on to us and then casting aspersions our way, but who to tell? I decided that the only person to tell was Jack Jones as I didn’t know who to trust, that sounds a little conspiratorial but in truth there was a managerial clique, as there often is in business, and as the Customer’s representative I found I quite often didn’t fit, but then you knew that already? My goals were a little different to theirs although they should have been the same. I called Jack over and prayed that the items we were about to open would give credence to my claims. A pack of expensive TMS 9980 Micro Processors straight from the stores were first opened, we checked the quantity against the stock sheet we had been given, it was short. Eproms, worth a few quid each, 40 too many, transistors at pennies each, hundreds too many and so it went on. The only thing to do now was to wait for the next stock check in the main stores which came in and was apparently correct. Even with the irregularities in our transfers, really? After a few weeks the obvious and very visible shortages in the stores were several of the stores staff and a data entry clerk who also failed to make an appearance. Quite what was happening I never found out, but the Ferranti was changed and the System 38 was put in. On another point, having had experience of the IBM and the Ferranti and being exposed to personal computers, I began to consider the common ground between them. But this was not my ‘job’ it was just an interest, and currently my ‘job’ was Customer Service and Spares Sales. But not for much longer……..
    11 points
  39. Hi Guys Here is a special treat for all the old school players! Double Top From the early 80's, on 10p play with a magical £2 jackpot in tokens! (Best played in 4K or 8k in portrait mode) I have included both sets of ROMS, that were kindly uploaded to here, by Louie Bee, and Midi Bob, so thanks guys:). Also thanks to Louie for uploaded a few pics, which helped me draw this monster! Thanks to TopShaun (desertislandfruits.com) for play testing, and a special thanks to Wizard for making MFME the backbone of fruit machine emulation, and for final checks on this before release:) Have fun guys, and I hope you enjoy playing this for many years to come. Short cuts are in the Read Me file in the folder. Layout: Double Top JPM (SRU).zip
    11 points
  40. Many thanks to Phil1974 for doing me a good deal on a very nice clean Silver Shadow. I’ve been looking a while, and thanks to Tim Harrison for spotting it, It was good to meet another Mecca member too.
    10 points
  41. Machine is working perfectly now, mixture of broken crimps, missing bulbs and a faulty bulb holder. Fitted starters and the florescent tubes are good. Re wired the token solenoid to pay the jackpot in tokens instead of cash. Thanks all for your help.
    10 points
  42. Heres the rom dump Fruitopoly.zip
    10 points
  43. Here’s one of my many projects it was looking rather sorry for it’s self smashed glass reel errors lamps not working cabinet was leaning as base rotted away but after a good few hours work a brand new glass rebuilt base and rebuilt and repaired reels and wiring sorted it’s back to its former glory nice to bring an old favourite back to life IMG_9590.MOV
    10 points
  44. Just got my mits on a set of S80 Master Spy roms which are not in the rom dat. the only legible label says Master Spy P1 31/1 top & tum. I guess they are for top up and tumble conversion. They run in the emulator on the Ploggy Tumble DX Master_Spy_P1.zip enjoy & Thanks to the person who posted me the roms!!
    10 points
  45. After 2 yrs searching I finally secured the final part required to complete this conversion (bottom glass) many thanks to the donor. I believe this may have been converted in the past, coin plate sticker gives it away lol. Just got to sort the coin plate sticker and its good to go, ive scanned the Rodstock and barcrest stickers if there useful to anyone, they could possibly benefit from someone better than me with photoshop to touch the black up and reinstate the 2p on the Rodstock one. Hope there useful cheers Tony
    10 points
  46. Don't forget Frank that you worked in the amusement industry in its golden age(late 70s and through 80s) along with the Arcades there was the computer and video game market flourishing at the same time and watching the tech grow over those years always a fascination of mine. Most on here would have been playing the machines you(and others) created back in the day(pubs,clubs,arcades) and when we all started reliving our youth 15-20 years ago by collecting and resorting machines and joining forums like this along with other like minded people we all learned off each other. To have an ex employee of JPM to come on here and share all those stories about how it all came together is for me as interesting(if not more)than the working of the machines themselves. Keep posting those memory's Frank they are a compulsive read. I think i speak for everyone on this forum.
    10 points
  47. I've been working on a different project, but got side-tracked onto this - a friend said I should post over here, since it's for real fruit machines It's an early proof-of-concept of an auto-rom patcher, that means you wouldn't need a Chr chip any more, even for the 'scrambled' lamps, in at least some mpu4s (just done a Barcrest as a test). Here's a quick demo using MFME, you can see the characteriser is completely clear (zero'd out, just like when it is missing). This has been tested on real hardware - by another guy who is working on a cool project to potentially make replacement Chr chips (it's what inspired me to make this). So it adds the code that decodes the lamps direct;y into the rom itself, so the rom no longer talks to the chr chip, but instead does the decoding internally in 6809 code.
    10 points
  48. these can be done in full mirror finish but the company that does it takes an age to do a prototype, this is why i took another route, they are not mirror like the originals but they are well acceptable, ive done a load of work on this glass stuff & sold one glass, ONE, did it for the love of it really & to prove if you try hard you can achieve anything. sold decent amount of the S80 Programme cards . oh & now you all know im a man of my word, might take a while but we get it done in the end ....
    10 points
  49. I have just released MFME v19, it can be found here: http://www.desertislandfruits.com/forum/index.php?/topic/3062-mfme-v19-release/
    10 points
  50. Here's one for you... Development team. The older gent was Charles Weekes, a mentor, what a guy, we've all grown used to stepper reel units? They were his brainchild. More in future stories. Left to right. David Mead, Tony Braggins, Ron Watts, yours truly, Charles Weekes, Charles (Bingham) Hazel.
    10 points
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