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Comment by reassembled | Hacker News Reader

This is something I've been thinking about lately with regards to the early arcade game developers in Japan, not just in regards to the artwork and music but also the decades of technical knowledge and R&D that have gone into creating bespoke arcade boards. Individual game companies developed or commissioned unique hardware dedicated to playing sometimes a single game in an arcade setting. The MAME devs have done a lot of great work unraveling these boards. Some books and websites have compiled artwork, interviews and technical info from certain arcade developers. I just wish the world could see more from that period of time.

I think about this same kind of thing with regards to the company I work in. We create video hardware and so much of the development knowledge will be lost to the sands of time. This is inevitable but a sad part of any large creative undertakings.

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A lot of companies deem the knowledge obsolete. There's no real reason to read 35 year old, 500-page hardware documentation books, or ancient assembly code from 25 year old tapes and floppies... if they even still exist! Much cheaper and easier to re-create the game.

This sounds interesting - do you have any links to examples of these early bespoke works?

Games weren't getting individual custom CPUs or anything that exotic, but from roughly 1980-2000 the industry was still riding the peak of Moore's Law, where chips were getting faster and cheaper seemingly every day, and arcade developers were constantly trying to leapfrog each other. Each game system really only needed to run a single game, so there was no real barrier to having unique boards per game -- if a particular game needed a few extra RAM chips, or the CPU maybe needed a higher clock, there wasn't much barrier to that.

NOTE: System16 is a treasure trove of information in general, but it looks like their main landing page at https://www.system16.com has some kind of hijack ad situation going on? The links below seem unaffected.

Konami was kind of the poster child for bespoke hardware; they're famous/infamous for seemingly every single game having some kind of weirdo bespoke hardware iteration: https://www.system16.com/museum.php?id=5

Sega had a more typical approach. They would typically have a minimum of several games per arcade system, and sometimes dozens: https://www.system16.com/museum.php?id=1

But, even then, there are lots of variations to the rule. Taito operated more or less like Sega, but (to choose one at random) you might see things like this where one game on this particular board (Cadash) was equipped with a faster CPU than the others: https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=652

There are some fun exceptions to what I've written though: truly one-off hardware.

Namco's Thunder Ceptor, with its mode7-ish backgrounds... in 1986! https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=523

Gaplus/Galaga3 had its own board for some reason: https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=518

Pole Position I and II (essentially the same game) had its own hardware: https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=515

I think a lot of Midway's late-80s/early-90s boards (let's say, NARC through MK) tended to evolve from game to game.

Thanks for providing some details!

glad to share. it's such a fun topic!

I just thought of this conversation when I saw this video this morning!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei1RJ19IriU

it runs through a variety of Sega Model 2 arcade system games. theoretically there were about a dozen "Model 2" games.

buuuuut, as the video details, the "Model 2" moniker refers to an entire generation of Sega arcade boards and there were significant hardware upgrades and new chips added throughout the lifetime of Model 2. with the result actually being something close to bespoke per-game hardware.

also there's this hilarious (to me at least, from an engineering perspective) look at the extremely unique Popeye arcade hardware, with three different graphics chips each drawing different layers on the screen. that was some bespoke-ass hardware

https://nicole.express/2023/yes-popeye-the-sailor-man.html

>and so much of the development knowledge will be lost to the sands of time

This is when you put on your Assange mask and start saving documents to leak later. Capitalism is going to eat itself, along with all of our technical and institutional knowledge, unless people put that continuity of expertise before the company or even their own jobs. One of the many Boomer habits that we simply cannot carry on into the future is, "Retiring without passing on what we know because it's less trouble and more job security."

It got figured out, and people will figure it out once more, if needed. I wouldn't worry too much about it. A lot of it has never been seen as knowledge to be preserved and passed on, but something that somebody did based on a deeper understanding of the subject.

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