Game Development Giant

Plans cannot keep up with changes.

The Atari arcade factory that Jester's father contacted, which had originally promised to manufacture it, needed temporary overhaul, which would take about three days.

This immediately disrupted Jester's entire plan.

After Jester learned the news, he could only curse twice, but he had no other better way.

It's just that he can't afford to waste time. If he delays for three days now and another five days in the future, how can he have time to do anything?

Now his time is too tight. It is already mid-June of 1984, and Nintendo's FC will invade the United States in a year. If he cannot successfully develop his home console before and cannot make enough quantities, And if the quality of the game is good enough, it will simply not be able to withstand Nintendo's attack.

Jester instantly felt shuddering when he thought about the huge number of games and the terrifying R\u0026D teams of Nintendo and the six giants under his command.

He clearly understood what a terrifying opponent he was about to face.

But the more he got to know his opponent, the more Jester felt that his opponent was invincible.

To fight against such a powerful opponent, everything requires money, a lot of money. Money is needed to recruit reliable game designers, money is needed to recruit reliable hardware developers, money is needed to develop games, and everything in the future will need money.

And my biggest problem now is that I have no money.

"American Cube" is indeed a hen that can only lay golden eggs, but it also requires this hen to lay the eggs.

Jester knew that he couldn't wait any longer. If he seizes all the time, three days would be enough for him and his father to hand-make at least ten arcade machines.

Based on five units in each city, ten arcade machines can be placed in two cities.

How many large cities does Jester plan to conquer in the entire California? There are only twelve of them.

Two is one sixth!

When Jester told his father about his plan, his father completely agreed. Mark Seney happened to be there too, and he also voluntarily joined Jester's plan to make hand-made arcade machines, especially after Jester heard that When I came up with the marketing plan, I also admired it and praised it repeatedly.

Just call Jester a genius.

During this period of time, the "American Cube" games in Jester's supermarket are still continuing to be popular. Although there is no spectacular scene of tens of meters of queues like the first few days, you still need to queue if you want to play. It's almost impossible to say There are people playing this game all the time.

With a stable daily income of US$1,200 to US$1,500 per unit, I have also accumulated tens of thousands of US dollars these days, so there is no problem in purchasing materials.

To make an arcade machine, the price of materials alone is only over three hundred US dollars, regardless of labor.

The baseboard of this arcade machine was specially made by Jester's father for "American Cube". The configuration is quite low. Apart from a CPU, a few memory chips, and input and output interfaces, there is no specialized peripheral circuit image processor ( ppu), there is no special sound wave processor, no noise processor, only a pcm digital sound generator.

It's really crude to the extreme.

However, in order to reduce costs, it is also a last resort.

And if you don't do this, it will be very difficult to make an excellent general-purpose substrate with a 16-bit processor such as 6800 or z80 as the core in a very short period of time. Just the circuit structure of the substrate is enough to make a large number of The hardware engineers experimented for several months.

Perhaps in the era where Jester was in the future, integrated circuit boards could still be welded by hand. Perhaps it was a synonym for technology geek, but in the 1980s, this technology was not only used by domestic hardware engineers, but also by all those engaged in hardware research and development around the world. One of the abilities that an engineer must have.

Jester's father may have inherited the dexterity of the Chinese and was very good at hand-soldering circuit boards. Even in this era when hand-soldering circuit boards was considered a basic skill among engineers, his hand-soldering skills were outstanding. Wait for one to be strong.

In fact, the arcade machine looks huge and advanced, but the structure inside is actually very simple.

It's just an enlarged home console.

Basically, today's arcade machines are divided into three parts, and these three parts were the standards set when the arcade first appeared, and have hardly changed at all over the years.

And Jester knows that even in the future, these three elements of arcade machines will not change much.

These three parts are the frame, the machine board and the display device.

Display equipment is as the name suggests. Atari's former arcade factory originally produced upright or slanted displays for arcade machines. There is still a large amount of inventory stored in the warehouse. Jester's father got a lot of it at a very low price. .

The frame is also easy to understand. It is the frame on the outside of an arcade machine, which serves as support and protection. Most of the frames are made of plastic, and a few are made of pure wood.

The composition of the frame does not need to be explained in detail. Anyone who has played it will know it clearly. Accessories such as coin holes, heat dissipation holes, and rockers are all part of the frame.

Jester's father had ordered five frames for the arcade machine equipped with "American Cubes" before. After Jester's plan was made yesterday, his father called and ordered a hundred more. This kind of plastic Products are made very quickly when there are molds, and it basically takes less than half a day to make one hundred of them.

And next is the machine board.

To be precise, it should be the substrate, the circuit substrate.

What is a circuit substrate? As the name suggests, it is a circuit board equipped with circuits.

For example, in our computers, the motherboard that contains all the hardware is the circuit substrate.

In computers, we call it the motherboard, but in arcades, it’s called the machine board.

This is the core of an arcade machine, including the central processing unit, graphics processor, sound processor, memory, video memory, digital sound generator, input and output interfaces, and even games, etc. Everything looks like this. An inconspicuous circuit board.

And put these three together to form an arcade machine.

Although they have their own division of labor, Jester, Mark Saini and Jester's father still have different tasks.

The heaviest task is definitely Jester’s father. In addition to concentrating on welding the entire set of circuit boards by hand, he also has to assemble the frame of the arcade machine together.

Of course, the tasks of Jester and Mark Saini, who are mainly responsible for the assembly work, are not easy. There are many types of arcade frames, and they are all very large. Even if they are made of plastic, they are not light.

For example, the frame head is the highest part of the arcade machines we see. It has the name of the game on it, and the display device is also placed inside. Of course, there are also speakers. This part alone weighs more than ten kilograms.

Another example is the frame belly. This can be said to be the most technical part of the entire arcade machine except for the machine board, because the coin acceptor used by an arcade machine to make money is installed on it. This part has a total of twenty or thirty catty.

There are seven or eight similar frame components on an arcade machine, and they all weigh more than 200 kilograms in total.

Assembling such heavy parts is naturally not easy.

Speaking of the coin acceptor earlier, some people may be curious about how the coin acceptor works? And why can’t game coins from other places be used on machines in this arcade?

In fact, the principle is very simple.

There is an integrated block next to the arcade circuit board. This integrated block is responsible for determining whether the coin is successful. At the beginning, this integrated block is not connected to the circuit board.

In other words, this is a disconnection.

The ingenious design of the inventor of the coin acceptor is that this integrated block is connected to a thin iron wire. When your coins are put into the coin acceptor along the guide rail, the game coins will hit this iron wire and then be activated. The circuit generates an electrical signal, which displays a coin.

As for how to distinguish game coins, it is actually simpler. There are two main types. One is more advanced. There is a groove on the coin acceptor, where the mother coin can be placed. It will be detected when you insert the coin. What to test? The weight of the coin, detecting the material of the coin by cutting the magnetic field, etc.

If it is the same as the mother coin, then it passes, enters the guide rail and touches the iron wire to activate the circuit. If it fails the test, the coin you put in will be withdrawn. This is called a comparative coin acceptor.

However, this method will be used more in the future. For now, it is not that Jester knows that it is not available in the United States, but that this kind of coin acceptor is relatively expensive and requires a built-in CPU. Generally, there are only Sega and Capcom. Only Japanese manufacturers use them. American manufacturers, such as Atari, still use mechanical coin acceptors.

The mechanical coin acceptor is much cheaper than the comparative coin acceptor, but its detection level is also much lower.

Pass or fail can only be judged by the thickness, size, weight, iron or non-iron quality of the coin, so some people can use some iron pieces of similar size and thickness to show the success of the coin.

With the machine board and frame in place, Jester and the three of them could assemble it relatively quickly. They just routed the cables through the base board and then used screws to assemble the frame.

Jester and the three of them just spent most of the day assembling seven machines, and the remaining three can definitely be assembled before dinner.

The three of them were in high spirits and joked with each other from time to time.

Perhaps due to an inspiration, in addition to the seven patterns of "American Cube" on the promotional poster posted on the arcade, Jester also creatively printed the words "This game comes from Mars" and joked, If we open a company in the future, we will use the name Mars Entertainment. Of course, it is a sure thing to leave a contact number on the box.

This naturally made his father and Mark Saney laugh.

Jester's original plan was to find some of the young people who often played "American Cube" to see if they had free time, recruit a few temporary salesmen, and then ask them to help sell these arcade machines in various places. Go to the city.

Then promise them that these arcade machines will be given to the arcade arcades free of charge, and they can be tried for free for three days. If they feel good, they will discuss the purchase.

As for the income generated by this arcade machine in the past three days, let everyone negotiate with the arcade hall they contacted. This is their reward. Jester and the others will not take any penny.

Jester thinks about it, seeing how prosperous these arcade machines are, it must be easy to find someone, because all fools know that even half of the profit from five "American Cube" arcade machines in three days is nearly 10,000 yuan. US dollars, such a generous reward, who doesn't want it is a fool.

In fact, it was the same, but there were too many people coming, far beyond Jester's expectation.

As soon as the notice was posted, people lined up to apply for the job, and as a result, no candidate has been decided yet.

Jester's father meant to let him wait for two more days, and it would not be too late to sell the person after selecting him.

Although no one was available, time was too tight for him, and he couldn't go into too much detail.

So Jester decided to go to Los Angeles himself. After all, he studied there and was familiar with it, and he also wanted to see if his plan was feasible.

Although he has verified and thought about it countless times in his heart, this plan is definitely feasible.

Mark Saini also volunteered and said that he could go to San Francisco on his behalf. He also laughed and said that the reward would be the same as what Jester posted on the notice. He also said that he actually got a big advantage. After all, ten thousand dollars is not a bargain. How common.

When Jester was preparing to leave the next day, he specifically asked Mark Cerny: "Are you interested in joining my game company when you come back?"

Although Jester doesn't have a company yet, he has decided to register a company of his own after returning from Los Angeles. After all, it feels unjust to start work without his own company. As for the name of the company, it was also named before. He joked about Mars Entertainment.

The name seemed pretty good to him.

After hearing this, Mark Saini just grinned and said something complaining.

"I have been waiting for your words for almost a week. I have been thinking that if you don't come to me again, I plan to go to Silicon Valley to see if there is any job suitable for me."

Finally, Mark Saini said to Jester in a somewhat mysterious manner: "I will give you a surprise when you come back."

As for what the surprise was, Mark Saini didn’t say anything.

Jester could only set out on the road with doubts.