Atari Coin-op Archive Footage | Hacker News Reader

Atari Coin-op Archive Footage

arcadeblogger.com

62 pointsvideotopia12 comments

Choice quote from Atari's early 1980s market research:

> Players want detail, movement, three dimensional effects, color & color changes, unexpected events, faster games with more realistic & dynamic sound

Good basic principles for any game developer, from the 1980s to the 2020s

Interesting that they did 100% incoming part inspection on their ICs going into the arcade machines. I’m not sure if ICs were less reliable then, or they just built a higher quality product.

That semi-automatic pick and place was neat.

> Interesting that they did 100% incoming part inspection on their ICs going into the arcade machines. I’m not sure if ICs were less reliable then, or they just built a higher quality product.

If memory serves, it was a little of column A, and a little of column B.

The recently-departed Chuck Peddle [1], designer of the MOS 6502, caused me to fall down a wiki hole for a bit and I learned that IC failure rates, right off production back in the 1970's, was something surprisingly dismal like... 70% were good? Can't find the original article but it illustrated that a LOT of silicon was melted back down and reused until MOS Tech came along, refined some of the processes to increase reliability and the industry followed behind.

Edit: found it... [2] tl;dr: MOS's advancements resulted in IC production success rates of 70% or more, and were markedly worse before (lows of a 30% success rate would still be considered profitable or successful).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847718

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology#Mask_fixing

They also had a much higher part count in their systems than is common today, so even a low rate of bad parts would result in a lot of malfunctioning systems.

Mobile phones and computers today have a pretty high IC count.

I mean, an arcade board is pretty big, but the parts density is also pretty low.

You might be surprised. Modern electronics are highly integrated; a modern smartphone is probably no more than a few dozen ICs. Vintage arcade hardware tended to rely heavily on discrete logic; even a simpler game like Asteroids had somewhere around a hundred ICs on its main board.

I'm no stranger to 74xx. ;)

iPhone X has 72 integrated circuits on the main board, and quite a few more on other assemblies.

I agree that Asteroids has approximately 100. We're really not too far apart in device count.

Then when you look at, say, pin count, there's no contest at all.

Dig dug made $2 million a console in 1982 dollars. $2 million! That would be fantastic today. $5.25 million in 2018 dollars. That was a staggering amount of money. Assuming a console today might cost a couple thousand to manufacture, imagine if you made $1 million after designing and programming a game per console sold. That was a golden age in many ways.

I did not know that Silicon Valley had that nickname even back in 1980. (About 9:30 in first video)

The Computer History Museum has a blog post -- https://computerhistory.org/blog/who-named-silicon-valley/ -- where they try to identify the origin of the nickname, which dates an in-print occurrence back to 1971, and probable use in the mid-to-late 60s.

The Chubby Checker recorded Dig Dug song is a terrific find.

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