how much?

[cfdu]

i know this will sound really crazy but how much would it cost to develop and make my own fruit machine? the idea being to take my favourite features from the past and make a machine that handsomely rewards skillful play. it would not necessarily have an emptier or even a method, but would be interesting to pros and average joes with their spare change alike. any thoughts please.

[dannydan]

i think it would be quite a bit because you would have to pay for all the parts the art work of the main board and reels have that put on glass and then of course fill the hoppers but seriously i don't think it could be done without working for a place or at least knowing a couple of high up people in a company to maybe build it for you
try e-mailing sites with your ideas you never know you might get a job then we get inside info way hey

[Topthelot]

you want to try fruitforums.com or http://www.poundrun.org/forums/ as a starting point

these are fruit machine emulation sites. one of the regular guys on them built his own as a project a few years back

[Booked_moss]

depends on what you are planning to do.

on the coding side id reccomend you choose one tech and nick the bits from that one tech coding but you need fucking great coding skills for this.

Myself id reccomend you try to make a bar x clone to get yourself dtarted off in coding for fruit machines. (its quite easy but getting it to stic to a %age is hard as i found).

[Scott]

Youd need mad math skills to eh..

I coded a fruity game in VC++ once was mad hard eh...

Can only imagine how hard MPU5 is.. ASM?

[dev001]

Most embedded platforms will have at least a C compiler that you can get hold of, although you probably need to write your own interrupt handlers for hardware inputs/output so, yes, some assembler knowledge would be necessary. I don't know who makes the MPUs but I'm sure that JPM and BFM do their own or it is technology licensed from another hardware manufacturer. The one that Barcrest use seems to be more generic but I've never checked who makes it.
Overall compared to other software & embedded development (such as telephone systems for example or aircraft flight control systems), I do not believe that it is that complicated stuff for an already experience developer to attempt. However, if you are actually wanting to market what you produce then that's an entirely different ball game, and I could easily see £1M+ being eaten up by all the stuff that you'll need to consider like the entire development cycle, launch events, account management / getting new business, marketing collateral etc. etc. of your first product range.