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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! 😉

Again, in 1982 aged 30 I was running game development (hard and BOM's) not software or electronics or Game dev just arranging prototype development, cabinet population, wiring harness specification, change control and phased introduction and of course latterly SWP. Hands off the actual gubbins and much more of a back room boy until the SWP pushed me back into the forefront again. By the way the job I was given was to replace Toss pot#2, nice raise as well as the nice chair.

Hi Tony, If it's the small cap that's connected to IC7 (MC1488) pin 3 then it's 330pF. I assume it's the little square grey one with the purple stripe at the top just under plug Q?

It's very difficult to say without any actual diary as such but they were not there that long, I don't think it was years TBH. It was very tedious and at one point I was looking for another job but I didn't really want to leave. These periods were very busy for me as I moved house 4 times while at JPM and my eldest was born in 1980 and the next in 1982 so I was busy at home too. That doesn't sound the way I meant it BTW, you see quite obviously as an ex carpenter and tiler the last thing I wanted was to pay anyone to work on my house, still don't in fact.

Yep all been there Frank. Job's worth WANKERS. So somewhere around the end of MPS2 games there was a noticeable change in the way games seemed to run. All earlier MPS games were quick to run with the notable pause when a 2 of a kind win was on the way and Plus Money was the only game to ever freeze/crash very occasionally. Somewhere around the Bank Roll game the speed slowed down and the games became...clumsy ??? You could also see this in some of the later rebuild kits. Did the development kit or programming change somehow ? Maybe in preparation for the 68000 processor system to come.

What a great write up, it’s amazing how often in a job, a tosser gets employed and totally fucks up everyone’s hard work! Going through the same thing as I write this 😂 Love the stories Frank, I can imagine how tough that must of been!

Thats the one Bob thanks mate ive found some now i know what they are, are they polorized at all cheers

Nice one Chloe, you know what the next stage is don't you😉

Stake yer claim and up yer riggin also please

Awesome work chloe

Thanks people, I feel privileged to have been there during those heady days, and grateful you find my ramblings entertaining! That Roulette machine was around 1980-1 as far as I remember, I only know that as it was the last few years of my time in the 'rebranded by me' Customer Service Department. In answer to the 'what was the system', we were looking at video products like poker and Roulette as they were big at the time and JJ (Jack Jones - J in JPM) wanted to break into America and we had tried the America product with a nudge which didn't work very well and poker was seen as a good way to give it another go. You may know this, because I know you guys are so knowledgeable, that JPM had its own Video gaming departure and assembled various early games, I had nothing to do with that venture so I only knew of it from a distance. What I do know are two things. The Roulette machine was quite popular in France and the controller had a separate, single, memory and processor module. At that time a company in France, one Jeutel as I remember, were extremely swift in taking games and back engineering the software and creating their own copy of the product. In order to overcome that it was decided that we would POT the controller in an Epoxy compound that would make it particularly difficult to get at the devices and this product was tested on site in Newport, South Wales in an inland arcade. The product stood up well so we continued and several were sent to France where most of the interest had originally been generated from. There were several venues that were associated with Vinyards as I recall or perhaps it was owners of Vinyards had arcades. Forgive me I was the monkey not the organ grinder. In any case as you may have guessed the temperature in the south of France is a little different to the South of Wales, where it rains lot! Dieu dieu! Quite soon the controllers were cooking themselves and the addition of extra slots in the back door and added fans did little to cool the product down. Can you see the roulette wheel on the video screen? Guess what? That is a printed vac forming with apertures to see the ball rotating beneath it, that is how basic the video was and that vac forming used to deform under heat as well - Nightmare. In any case I had a very pleasant time flying from place to place and driving to the odd one as well, armed as I was with new controllers and replacement vac forming. Not our best effort but the endeavours did open the way for video development and the whole Criss Cross thing. More of that later

Top man, much appreciated for all you have uploaded. 🙂