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Re: Your thoughts on destroying a working arcade machine?
Posted: Fri May 19, 2017 11:33 am
by Hojo_Norem
Drag wrote:I wonder how many people have made brand new Pacman PCBs (for example), given the current tend of people remaking the C64 and ZX Spectrum.
I can't speak for Pacman, but somebody has managed to
recreate Space Invaders on breadboard.
Re: Your thoughts on destroying a working arcade machine?
Posted: Fri May 19, 2017 3:30 pm
by Memblers
Drag wrote:I wonder how many people have made brand new Pacman PCBs (for example), given the current tend of people remaking the C64 and ZX Spectrum.
From the purist point of view, that you could drop into a factory original cabinet, probably nobody. But if you do a search for "60-in-1", there is an extremely common bootleg board that uses standard JAMMA wiring that you can buy for maybe 30 bucks (at that price I was tempted to buy one until I heard the sound emulation is terrible in some of the games I was interested in). So there have been quite a few people converting their Pacman's and other classic games to JAMMA run this bootleg board. So there is probably an oversupply of Pacman boards (and quite a few of those boards from BITD were bootlegs also). I'm pretty sure you can set it to boot into a game and hide the menu. So if you see a Pacman game in an arcade, you might never know if it's an original or not.
FWIW, people actually have made brand new reproductions of Pacman and other cabinets. I mean just the wood cabinet itself, BYO paint and internals.
What I have seen though is some people have made reproductions of individual ASICs on some of the classic games, I believe the chip that generates the starfield in Galaga was one, since they apparently fail sometimes. And someone was plugging an FPGA into Pole Position board to work on reproducing every custom chip on there, with the goal of making an entirely new PCB. Because that game seems to be notorious for it's massive power consumption and board failure.
Re: Your thoughts on destroying a working arcade machine?
Posted: Fri May 19, 2017 3:41 pm
by tepples
Perhaps the time has come to strike.
1. Put an NES emulator on a cheap JAMMA computer (search for raspberry pi jamma).
2. Add coin modes to homebrew games.
3. Hold location tests to refine each game's balance.
4. Sell the homebrew multigame as a conversion.
5. Snitch to the owners of copyright in the games commonly appearing on multis, claiming that terrible emulation is making the classic games look bad.
Re: Your thoughts on destroying a working arcade machine?
Posted: Fri May 19, 2017 4:31 pm
by mikejmoffitt
tepples wrote:
5. Snitch to the owners of copyright in the games commonly appearing on multis, claiming that terrible emulation is making the classic games look bad.
Would you not agree that poor emulation, especially with regards to input latency, damages the impression one might have on a homebrew game at such a location test?
Re: Your thoughts on destroying a working arcade machine?
Posted: Sat May 20, 2017 6:07 am
by tepples
That's why you use a good emulator, one optimized for latency on the particular hardware, as opposed to the "they just didn't care" mentality of some of the pirates.
Re: Your thoughts on destroying a working arcade machine?
Posted: Sat May 20, 2017 3:52 pm
by mikejmoffitt
tepples wrote:That's why you use a good emulator, one optimized for latency on the particular hardware, as opposed to the "they just didn't care" mentality of some of the pirates.
I agree, but I bring up that point in direct contrast with most "it just works" solution available for the Raspberry Pi.