Hello

[hymness]

A new member here... and I mean new not only to the place, but also to all things fruit machines!

In fact, I found my way here mostly driven by curiosity. Arcade video games and pinball machines have been a hobby of mine for a long time, and a fellow british hobbyist and friend has spent the last months explaining to me how much fond memories he has from the fruit machines you could find in pubs (or everywhere else it seems) over there in the UK. He has just decided the next cabinets he'll build will be vintage fruit machines ones, and swears to me that they are a nice, even obligatory, addition to any private games room, including mine.

So I decided to check it in the end. I have written down a few names of vintage systems he says were nice, but I would gratefully take any advice about what's fun and what's to try. So if anyone has good advice or directions, well... thanks in advance!

[Geddy]

Welcome to the site and I'm looking forward to seeing some pictures of those cabinets..

[hymness]

Thanks for the welcome!

I suspect my friend's cabinets will be amazingly nice and polished. That guy is good his with tools: the last time we started a similar project together, he sent me some pictures of his work after three weeks. He was almost finished, just waiting for the printer to deliver the side art vinyl sheets. When he asked if things were going well on my side, I was like "well, I'm gonna go and buy some mdf very soon"... He had finished before I even started!

Fruit machines cabinets for me will be a long term project, if at all. For now it's not easy to say if they will feel super fun for someone like me, who has no personal memories about any of it. I've downloaded what my friend put on his ftp for me (there's almost 30 Gb of stuff, I haven't browsed through it all yet) and tried a few things. To be honest, many many things about fruit machines are still not that intuitive to me. Even how to play the various models... Is there a rulesheet or something for the various games? I didn't see anything like that in what I have yet, nor did I find any operator's manual anywhere. Did I just not look hard enough, or is "guessing the rules" part of the fun?

Sorry if these questions are somewhat silly. I do feel a bit clueless...