Leaderboard

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

On this thread I'll post my channel and will link every video on here daily https://youtube.com/c/innfection my channel link I upload mfme videos basically brief gameplay of machines some I do multiple parts

The sound chip looks like it's soldered in so that makes it a MOD2.

Here's mine .carfield/dransfield defo.they did seem to mess about with the fruit symbols and buttons .

Remember the Vampire one, wasn't it called Haunted House or Frankenstein?

Not sure what mod that one is but if it's a mod4 then none of the ic's are worth recovering as they will have all their legs cropped and can't be re-fitted in sockets. One of my pet hates.

Yea I manage to get 5000 of just playing the Adders and ladders and the Vampire one can't remember what it was called tho

Me too for the kids but those prizes are a fucking rip off, 500 tickets for some poxy sweets, I gave up in the end, better to try and win dough, even if I lose I am still better off but in essence it wasn't too bad in the beginning until owners got greedy but what else is new!

Yes that's the battery position. A good example of how battery leakage can damage tracks beneath the battery!!!

Yea mate used to play the ticket ones to help my brother in arcade to get prizes on golden sands

These are still on tickets in many arcades. I'll see with what I can come up with, love your content dude and always appreciative of it even if some are not. Ever used a 🖕🏽

Here's another video Odd question does anyone have any images of this machine as this only in classic atm

Nope they are capacitors.

Thanks Bob, it’s Mod 5 and sensitivity pot is turned fully to MIN. I think it’s redundant anyway as I’ve previously removed T56 & T62. I’ve changed the big PSU cap and will check all is well with the regulator board, but that has already had new capacitors.

Let me know if can read this matebull.bin

For intermittent resets always check that if the board has the sensitivity pot fitted that it's always backed right off! If It's there it will be written on the case, so easy to see.

Fantastic read frank and in one particular area that I have a very keen interest in(as I have a few of this type of AWP in my collection). one thing JPM never released where schematics for the hardware(obviously for security reasons)which has made repairs very difficult as can be seen in my GUAB thread. i am working on some interesting updates for this line of machines which is not for this thread. as nick said the 85-86 era was the last of the best years for jpm.

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!

Lovely problematic system 80 Goodness lol Any ideas why my Nudge Shuffle keeps re-setting like this? All the plugs are on tight as far as I can see. The cpu card has the 3 lights all lit. The reset lights keep coming on and off on the in-out board as seen in the vid. The roms and the cpu chips and ram chip are sat properly on the board. Not sure what else to check! Any advice is greatly appreciated chaps. Many thanks