Video Game Empire

Completely different from the half-hearted attitude of the previous Keji Company, Li Xuan is very attentive to Dongfang Electronics. The company was newly established, and all kinds of things needed to be handled by his boss.

At the same time, Li Xuan is also responsible for the development of the arcade version of the hardware department. He is very busy all day, and he spends much less time talking on the phone with Zhong Chuhong. Many public classes in the school can also be escaped. The teacher was caught missing class when he called his name.

The most important task of all is definitely the design work for the new gaming board. Game console motherboard is the soul of the entire arcade, only a good motherboard can perfectly show the charm of a game.

Now arcades are just beginning to become popular around the world, and the development of game motherboards by various game companies is still relatively primitive. The processing core of the early arcade games four or five years ago was not even a central processing unit (CPU), but based on transistor logic level technology (TTL).

Just based on the principle of electronic interference waves, by simulating electronic signals and displaying simple graphics on the TV's walk-through line, it cannot be regarded as a real video game. It was not until the release of Sega's Snake Wars series of game consoles that video game consoles fully entered the era of microprocessor substrates.

Li Xuan already had a mature plan in mind for the game console motherboard for Tank Wars. And the solution he planned is not just for the game of Tank Wars, but a general substrate that all new games of Dongfang Electronics can run in the next year or two.

In Li Xuan's plan, the company's first general-purpose arcade board will be an 8-bit computer motherboard with a MOS6502 processor as the main CPU. This processor is the CPU used in Apple's Apple II personal computer and the CPU of the future Nintendo FC game console. It has enough processing power to run simple but classic games like Tank Wars and Super Mario.

Of course, if Li Xuan uses Motorola's MC68000 processor, it will definitely make the game screen produced by the company more delicate and delicate. But the price of the 16-bit processor is much more expensive than that of the 8-bit processor, so it is not in Li Xuan's consideration for the time being.

In the next few years, when the company starts to develop the second-generation general-purpose substrate, he estimates that he will use the MC68000, a classic CPU. With its excellent computing power, it can almost drive many classic fighting games.

In addition to the CPU, there are also vital sound modules and video modules on the computer motherboard. For the sound module, Li Xuan is going to install an AY-3-8910 processor made by General Electric Company of the United States on the arcade board as a sound effect chip.

The AY-3-8910 chip has four built-in mono channels, three of which are square wave channels used to play background music, and the remaining white noise channel is used to express special effects such as explosions and gunfire. In addition to the sound effect chip, you can also choose to be equipped with a general-purpose SP0256 speech synthesizer. Of course, pure jigsaw puzzles like Hong Kong Square can naturally omit this part to save costs.

As for the video module, Li Xuan plans to use the TMS9918 graphics processor developed by Texas Instruments. This GPU has 16KB of video memory, and can display a maximum of 32 colors of 64-color templates on the same screen, supporting a screen resolution of 256*192.

The frame of the game console, Li Xuan, is also about to be redesigned. The Space Invaders made by Japan's Taito and a series of arcade machines that cloned it are quite different from the arcade machines in Li Xuan's impression.

The frame of the genuine Space Invaders is about the size of a primary school student's desk, and the horizontal LCD screen is at a 90-degree right angle to the player. This type of frame design has obvious flaws. Players need to bow their heads and bend over when playing games, which will be very uncomfortable over time.

And the current liquid crystal display is not the large-sized TFT liquid crystal display of later generations. The screen is very small and the resolution is not high, which greatly limits the screen of the game. Therefore, the arcade developed by Li Xuan must still use a CRT display.

"Hey, fat boy, can you restrain yourself, don't be so salty and wet, the flight attendants on the plane were scared away by you, can you not embarrass the people of Hong Kong!" Li Xuan was finally defeated by Du Wenqiang's pig brother. In order to avoid losing face along with him, he had no choice but to say aloud.

"JAL's flight attendant is pretty, with a front and a back, more attractive than the top card of the night show on Bolan Street!" Du Wenqiang looked like he was still not satisfied.

"Qiangzi, hurry up and ask Xuan Shao. After we get off the plane, we will spend the night in Tokyo. It is said that there is a Kabuki Street in Shinjuku, and there are all kinds of girls in the customs shop. You can find two big-bodies tonight. Xue-shengmei vent your anger first!" Liang Ning on the other side said with a smile, he had replaced the original afro hairstyle with yellow hair, and now he is a gentle urban white-collar image.

Li Xuan couldn't help rubbing his forehead with his hand, and he was rather speechless about these two living treasures.

Some time ago, the Epson printer represented by Huo Sheng was finally listed in Hong Kong. Li Xuan's former boss, Huo Sheng, sent one to the Hong Kong market some time ago, and he specially sent one to Li Xuan. A group of people in the company heard that there was a Chinese typing Chinese card invented by their own boss in the printer, so they instigated Li Xuan to disassemble the printer and show it to everyone.

As a result, after the printer was disassembled, Epson did not use the Chinese Hanka designed by Li Xuan. Later, he specially called Huo Sheng to understand the situation.

It turns out that a new chip factory under Seiko Epson has just been completed and put into production, and it has obtained the imitation authorization of the 6502CPU from the American MOS Technology Company. Therefore, based on the consideration of cost reduction, Epson decided not to use the Z80-centered Hanka designed by Li Xuan, but to redesign a Chinese Hanka with the company's self-produced 6502 chip as the core.

Li Xuan can only sigh that big companies are self-willed when they have money, and the design fee of more than 100,000 Hong Kong dollars paid to him is a waste. He had already got the money anyway, and whether Epson adopted his design had little to do with him. But after learning that Seiko Epson can produce 6502CPU, Li Xuan has other ideas.

In addition to the chip factory, Seiko Epson also has its own PCB factory (printed circuit board), so Li Xuan considered whether he could ask Seiko Epson to produce arcade motherboards on his behalf.

In the past, Keji Company purchased circuit boards and welded chips to assemble them into arcade boards. This manual workshop-style production method was only a helpless expedient. The result was that the performance of game console motherboards was unstable, and the failure rate was higher than that of large-scale factory assembly lines. The standard produced is much higher.

However, the market of Keji Company is mainly in Hong Kong and Kowloon. The company has specially compiled a manual for troubleshooting, and also specially trained several electronic maintenance personnel for the agent Shao Yongqiang. Moreover, the price of the counterfeit arcade machines of Keji Company is much cheaper than that of the genuine machines, so even if the failure rate is a little higher, the game hall owners can accept it.

But the target of Dongfang Electronics is not the small pond in the Hong Kong market. The United States and Japan are his future battlefields. Now the biggest market for arcade machines is North America. Taidong Company's Space Invaders arcade machine has sold more than 150,000 units in the United States since its release last year, and more than 200,000 units in Japan and Europe. This game alone has created more than 100 million US dollars in profits for Taidong Company.

PS: It is really hard to find all kinds of data of arcade motherboards in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As a liberal arts student, I am a perfectionist. Today, I wrote 2,000 words a day. The readers may still be in their hearts. Say that I am making up the data with a large piece of information in this chapter.

Writing a book is not easy, I ask everyone to collect and recommend tickets for support! In this book, there are some pictures of various arcade machines in the early 1980s. If you are interested, you can take a look.