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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!

All bulbs now changed 😀Thanks all!!

That's the one, those were the first decals we ever put on and they were a bitch until we learned of the drop of fairy liquid in a bowl of water trick! I have just recalled the ZCA music, my gosh memories.

Hi, there, forgive me but given my position I had a multitude of things to think about rather than disk access time 🙂 , but what I can say is that I was instrumental in the software 'specification' later on when we stared getting hit by teams of players but that will come in the next post so watch this space! Thanks for your interest by the way!!! Oh by the way, at one exhibition we had a reel unit that played "the entertainer" on the four stepper units much in the same way that those disks are playing the tune. The guy that did that was one John Trevelyan and he was one of the first software 'gurus' I ever knew and a very clever guy he was too.

Fracture free?

Cheers Frank and I vaguely recall the machine.the first one I remember properly was give us a break

Hey there Sulzerned, The very first machine was called Criss Cross and was simply the Noughts and crosses game that you must have played as a kid. You tried to make a line, horizontal or vertical or diagonal and the time you took to complete the task was entered into a hall of fame so not SWP but simple entertainment. Obviously if you got a question wrong the square was populated with a 'O' rather than the X you wanted. To my dismay I cannot find the professional video we had made of the evening that I spoke about.

Amazing to think each machine had a little floppy drive inside whirring away, but i can see the practicality of asking operators to change a disk vs an Eprom. Did it fetch each question from disk in turn, or were batches cached ahead?

Great read Frank and what brave new era this must of been for jpm. I always thought 85-86 were last good years for awp type machines as they were obviously changing due to market trends ,just as you mention above and going out and about to see what people wanted to play or get out of a gaming machine .so bringing out the swp quiz type machines was the obvious step forward .what was the name of the first machine ?apologies if you've mentioned it above .

Well if that’s the case then surly you’d not want your children to grow up thinking what you write is ok. I’m certainly no bully ! And as for accounts I’ve one, my tech is well known and if he wishes to say who he is then that’s up to him and not me but either way he’s certainly not me. In this world we should all be nice and as you say you help people out which is nice. Thank you for your reply and stay safe.

Yeah its kind of flawed in some ways to restrict any wins off exchanges. I think the main problem is the very limited 8 nudges which only allows for 2 nudges per reel .I think an extra gamble upto 16 would have been a lot more exciting .unlimited only being achieved on the mystery as well .I do like these mpu3 clubbers but they really were there to grab money for the club and giving very little back .thise single cherry wins are very frustrating and we're only put in to maintain the %.again very lazy programming .

The Winner electro from JPM 1977. This was a good time for JPM electro games and this was amongst them, Although no nudge it had the feature on the left side of reel glass that would offer a number of bonuses. 20p cash and a number of ways of winning the 50p tokens made it a good % payout machine. The reel glass seems to have seen better days which was something I found with JPMs around then with the glass being a sandwich of two pieces, they were especially a problem of misting up. Although description says working I would still prefer pictures of inside the back and lit up for that top end £200 buying price. Pounder being the £1 version.