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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.

Lol I’ll take that. I’m pleased to now have the £50 and £100 versions 👍 The £50 blue looks so much more current, don’t you think?

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

Hi everybody. On the radio the other day somebody said "nostalgia is our comfort blanket". Could not agree more. Down the pub in the late 80s where a pint was less than £1. We'd spend more on the "fruities" than on beer. I'd love to be able to experience those games again. Which brought me here....

Yep same with the royal exchange. Looks a.lot better

I don't have any friends either Some people have all the fun and luck Take care

All I have is memories . no real machines of my own One day ... maybe .. who knows

I remember being sick over my nostalgia blanket every Friday night from doing my nuts in the machines yet again..

Progressing now have a working MPU3 (thanks @midibob) the alpha is in and its playing really well, taking coins, paying out bug free! The start of this topic was all about the CHR, thats also sorted thanks to @johnparker007and @stonyat421 in fact I have the first version with unblocked gamble to have a play with and compare to my £100 V14 code. All good stuff! thanks to all involved......

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

Wow ive just been reading this for the first time and you have done a great job ! fantastic 🙂

Having worked in the service side of the industry most of my life, It's great to read especially from one of the major manufacturers side Frank.👍

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!

What's the point when you play on your mates machines🤑