About

Back in 2006, whilst between jobs, I purchased a Japanese fruit / slot machine. At the time, I was heavily into DDR and Japanese dance stuff, so my first purchase was a machine called "Dance Night" from a seller on eBay. The machine arrived about a week later and I rigged it up, shoved the tokens in and started playing...

Many hours later (I think it went dark outside at some point) I'd had my first experience of pachislo. I was hooked and wanted to know more. The guy I bought the machine from suggested a forum called PachiTalk. So I joined up. Hundreds of people all over the world talking about pachislo and pachinko. It was brilliant. I was playing almost everyday at that time.

I'd noticed the ticking noises in the machine when I stumbled upon a thread about 'battle counters'. These things track the coins in and out of the machine as well as bonus rounds and the like. The only ones created at that point were all in Japanese... Despite being able to have a conversation with people in the language, I couldn't understand the kana at all, so had no idea how on earth to wire it up to my machine... That's when I started making my own.

Spurred on by the members of the PachiTalk forum, I quickly hooked the machine up to the parallel port of an old computer and started creating a program to track that machine's stats. It worked quite well in real time on a single machine, but then I wanted to expand the system and my collection. So I got another pachislo. This one was from one of the PachiTalk members who sold me a Hanabi Hyakkei at a very reasonable price. Once it arrived, I quickly hooked it up and changed the programming to take inputs from both machines. As Borat would say: Great success! The system was working and it just needed a refinement in the front end.

Unfortunately, about that time, I got another job... This one was in China (I'm still here 4 years on) and the pachis went into storage whilst the connector cable and CD with the software were thrown into a cardboard box in a shed. The cables and CD perished. The system was lost. Or so I thought... I hadn't thought about pachis for a long time and it was on a day when I was going through my old hard drives to tidy them up a bit that I fouound the original source code and schematics! It was at that point I decided to head on back to PachiTalk to see if they were still up and running. Lo and behold, they were! I'd also got a private message asking about the connector cable, too!

With a renewed fire in my belly, I vowed that the system will be completed. I will finish what I started and bring a battle counter to the masses that everyone can use! In the year before returning to England, I'm brushing up on assembly, investigating different microprocessors that will do the job and looking to create a system that's cheap and easy for anyone to use for tracking their pachi career.

The visions of grandure also kicked in and the thought of creating a community of pachis that relay their stats through the internet in a way that can be used for international comparison with friends and strangers, competitions, tournaments and all kinds of cool stuff. Welcome to Pachi 2.0!