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How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8-bit home computers

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Re: How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8-bit home computers

#21

Post by dzdt »

pkiller wrote: post #4
axilmar wrote: post #3

I will forever wonder why 8-bit computers of the 80s didn't have more powerful video hardware. It's not that the technology wasn't available, since most arcade machines at the time had a lot more powerful graphics hardware than 8-bit home machines. (I will also forever wonder why Sega's 16-bit console didn't have hardware sprite scaling and rotation, since that was the main attraction of Sega games at the time...) I…

It's my understanding, that the reason why arcade boards were so much more powerful was because they were a lot more complex thus much more expensive to design, source components and produce in large scale. More colors, background layers and sprites with slow CPUs and graphics chips in the 80s usually meant having several RAM chips to have multiple memory buses and parallel accesses to video memory and more video mem…

The hardware budget for an arcade machine could be higher because the economics are to sell a relatively small number of units at relatively high unit cost. On the other hand the hardware development budget was more limited than for consumer home computers or consoles, as that is spread over only the small number of units.

The effect is arcade machines almost never had custom chips, but often had duck-taped-together designs that threw in extra chips to accomplish tasks.

Contrast to a machine like the Commodore 64 or Nintendo which had custom sound and graphic chips but where the overall chip count and unit cost was ruthlessly controlled.

Re: How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8-bit home computers

#22

Post by tenebrisalietum »

axilmar wrote: post #3

I will forever wonder why 8-bit computers of the 80s didn't have more powerful video hardware. It's not that the technology wasn't available, since most arcade machines at the time had a lot more powerful graphics hardware than 8-bit home machines. (I will also forever wonder why Sega's 16-bit console didn't have hardware sprite scaling and rotation, since that was the main attraction of Sega games at the time...) I…

Some 8-bit arcade systems also had multiple CPUs; IIRC Galaga had 3 Z80 CPU's working together and I think Qix had 2. Would have loved an dual or triple CPU 8-bit computer in the 80's.

Re: How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8-bit home computers

#23

Post by jandrese »

laumars wrote: post #20
okyougotmenow wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arcade cabinets are the wrong comparison. Better are home consoles, in particular the NES/Famicom. A fine-scrollable tilemapped background + hardware sprite multiplexing made it trivial to develop games for the Famicom that would be technological marvels on contemporary home computers, yet no western computer manufacturer came up with that design, despite being small additions on top of text-mode graphics and hardwar…

Some western micro computers did have some of that though. The C64 did have hardware scrolling, which is why you see a higher calibre of scrolling games on that machine than you would on the Amstrad CPC 464 (which did not have hardware scrolling). It all comes down to expense though. You could throw the whole kitchen sink into the computer but then how much would it cost to manufacture and how much would you need to…

That sprite hardware also gave the C64 a reputation as a "game machine" in an era where the big money was in business sales.

There was a lot of "serious business only" attitude in many of the computers those days.

Re: How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8-bit home computers

#24

Post by tinus_hn »

axilmar wrote: post #3

I will forever wonder why 8-bit computers of the 80s didn't have more powerful video hardware. It's not that the technology wasn't available, since most arcade machines at the time had a lot more powerful graphics hardware than 8-bit home machines. (I will also forever wonder why Sega's 16-bit console didn't have hardware sprite scaling and rotation, since that was the main attraction of Sega games at the time...) I…

The sprites and backgrounds use the same memory as the main CPU so more sprites and more complicated backgrounds means the CPU gets stalled more.

On the C64 for instance the first line of a character (so one every 8) is when the graphics chip fetches the list of characters on that line and that line is a ‘bad line’ where the CPU has much less cycles. And then the CPU is stalled for 50% of the rest of the time so the graphics chip can fetch the character bitmaps indexed by the data fetched during the bad line.

Re: How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8-bit home computers

#25

Post by bluedino »

axilmar wrote: post #3

I will forever wonder why 8-bit computers of the 80s didn't have more powerful video hardware. It's not that the technology wasn't available, since most arcade machines at the time had a lot more powerful graphics hardware than 8-bit home machines. (I will also forever wonder why Sega's 16-bit console didn't have hardware sprite scaling and rotation, since that was the main attraction of Sega games at the time...) I…

Don't forget that arcade machines capabilities could be specialized. Consoles, and even more so, home computers, had to be a lot more general-purpose.

Re: How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8-bit home computers

#26

Post by wolfspider »

I've always been interested in the 128-bit Naomi hardware which Sega used around the time of the DreamCast. Cabinets were hooked together via fiber supposedly- this is how at Disney all the Daytona USA machines were connected together. There is a picture of two motherboards connected on this site: http://sega-naomi.com/hardware.htm and I wonder how different their protocol is from actual computers.

Re: How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8-bit home computers

#27

Post by cmrdporcupine »

axilmar wrote: post #3

I will forever wonder why 8-bit computers of the 80s didn't have more powerful video hardware. It's not that the technology wasn't available, since most arcade machines at the time had a lot more powerful graphics hardware than 8-bit home machines. (I will also forever wonder why Sega's 16-bit console didn't have hardware sprite scaling and rotation, since that was the main attraction of Sega games at the time...) I…

Well it almost certainly was cost. Memory was expensive. Address space was limited to 64k. And most importantly, user's displays were color TVs with terrible resolution. Arcade games shipped w/ high quality CRTs. Back in the 80s very few of us had that luxury. My display on my VIC-20 was a 9" B&W TV that my parents had lying around.

Also if you look at something like the Atari 800, it had at least a subset of what you're talking about as far back as 1979. As a result it was more expensive than the competitor machines, and also many software developers didn't make good use of the features that were there.

Re: How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8-bit home computers

#28

Post by dingby »

wolfspider wrote: post #26

I've always been interested in the 128-bit Naomi hardware which Sega used around the time of the DreamCast. Cabinets were hooked together via fiber supposedly- this is how at Disney all the Daytona USA machines were connected together. There is a picture of two motherboards connected on this site: http://sega-naomi.com/hardware.htm and I wonder how different their protocol is from actual computers.

What is supposed about it? There are pictures right there. That hardware is mostly off the shelf components (SH-4 cpu, PowerVR Gpu, arm based sound dsp), the thing is basically just an “actual computer.”

Re: How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8-bit home computers

#29

Post by ggambetta »

> And then for the rest of the year spend all my after-school time trying to build rather poor impressions of those arcade games on my home computer, not unlike a cargo-cult worshipper on a post-WWII pacific island trying to build a US military radio station from wooden sticks.

Hahaha, this matches my own experience exactly :) Playing the likes of Dragon Ninja / Bad Dudes and then trying to reproduce them on the Spectrum. The few arcade games that did have Spectrum versions were disappointing - thinking of Green Beret for example.

Best memory might be finding a POKE for infinite lives in Commando, playing it for 3 days straight until level 70-something (the levels just looped every 5 or 10 stages, I think?), and ending up with a burned CRT. I'll never know whether the infinite lives POKE also made the game loop, or the developers never thought of including an ending in the Spectrum port.

Re: How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8-bit home computers

#30

Post by Grazester »

wolfspider wrote: post #26

I've always been interested in the 128-bit Naomi hardware which Sega used around the time of the DreamCast. Cabinets were hooked together via fiber supposedly- this is how at Disney all the Daytona USA machines were connected together. There is a picture of two motherboards connected on this site: http://sega-naomi.com/hardware.htm and I wonder how different their protocol is from actual computers.

Daytona USA used the Sega Model 2 arcade hardware while Daytona 2 used the Model 3. None used the Naomi(a beefed up Dreamcast of sorts modified for arcade use). Multiple machines could have been networked together I dont know how the older model boards did it but the Naomi used standard R45 network port(at least for Netboot) and it was standard TCP IP stuff.
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