Bullseye fruit machine

[TheKing]

I used to own a Bullseye fruit machine (Bullseye as in the "let's see what you WOULD have won!" TV quizshow)... I've run a search here but I can't find any references to it. Looks like a few of you are pretty up on things, don't suppose it would have had any special emptying methods would it?

I owned it for a few years and actually having the machine in my house destroyed my interest in it eventually, whereas before I got hold of it I would spend (and lose) a lot of money on it each week in the pub...

This place is an education... I never realised that there were real ways to make fruit machines pay. Sounds like a science!

[SteveDude2]

Hello The King!

Ah! Bullseye! Fond memories of this little beauty! What stake/prize was it on?

On the 5p £6 token versions there was an interesting trick where if you piled in loads of tokens (say £4 or so) the jackpot would roll in first credit and sometimes hold. Then you would get a few quid in cash back off the rest of the games, leave the machine for a few hours for muppets to play, and then go back and do it all over again. I believe that there was a bit of inter-related trickery involving the cash and token percentages that made this possible. Sometimes after heavy cash play (during which a token win was rare) you only needed to put one token in to see a jackpot first press. Not the best of earners but good fun in the evening when there was nothing else worth playing.

On the 20p £6 version were a couple of fantastic cheats. The first was if it started rolling in skillshots (position 3 on the trail). All you had to do was simply mess the skills up, and refuse all your wins apart from holds-after-nudges, collect these and they were free wins. Don't get on the feature whatever you do! The annoying bit was when you couldn't help but get on the board. At this point you were praying that you lost. Sometimes you would get Party Night where a win was forced on you and you had to plug the machine, which wasn't easy in a busy arcade! After so many free wins it didn't matter if you took a normal win or two. Sometimes it would stop rolling in skillshots for no reason, which was annoying, but the cheat was great for £50 or £60 cash and all the tokens you could eat, as long as you didn't fuck it up your end. You could usually get a decent bullseye main feature at the end.

The best trick on this was on the 20 for bull bonus, but you needed to have no credits in the machine. I can barely remember this, so bear with me. You got 20 for bull, hit the 20, and entered the £6/£3 big feature. Your first win would be £6 guaranteed, then you were out of credits. If collected your money out and waited for the attract mode to appear, you would see a demo of the feature board taking place. 73, 52, 30...and so on. If you put a token in when the display was counting down from between 40 and 20 and the credit registered at say 32, you would come back to 20 for bull again, except you had to hit 12 this time to be left with 20, then you had to hit 20 all over again. Once you had done that you started the big feature again, where your first prize was guaranteed £6 or £3, where otherwise you could have hit nothing. If you kept doing this properly you could end up with a £50 or £60 20 for bull feature, rather than £6 - £12. I think I have remebered it correctly - it was 10 years ago after all!

Any other old skoolers remember this trick?

[johnparker007]

Hi there,

Actually I do remember the "30" cheat - me and my mate from Grimsby used to drive around service stations and arcades looking for ones with the older roms, and empty em for about £70 in about 90 mins... it was a right pain when it forced you up onto the feature board.

I even remember we used to call it "thirtying", like 'Hey John, are you up for thirtying in Mablethorpe later?'

Fond memories of earning some pocket cash when i was on the dole