Quote:
Originally Posted by Philips210
The original TTL ICs were quite power hungry but seemed to be a very robust technology. Industry standard ICs that can be sourced (in their day) from most countries so component accessibility and repairs should not be a problem.
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Symon,
This is exactly right and it is the thing I admire most about vintage TTL based video games, you can repair them anywhere in the world and the generic TTL chips are still available (with some exceptions see below).
I have everything for Tank, working PCB's the original monitor, control handles, even the plexglass face with the artwork, the wiring loom and the original coin mechanism all nos. All I'm lacking is the wooden cabinet. But a fellow in Canada sent me the stencils so I just have to have the cabinet manufactured and I will have an NOS arcade Tank from 1974, but it is in the "to do box".
I'm a bit of a fanatic for spare parts and I found for the Tank pcb's I could get every IC except one tricky one, the 8277N otherwise known as a 9328, a type of shift register as I recall. I finally found some in Germany so my spare parts bin for Tank is complete.
I have all the original service documentation for arcade Tank. It was much better than the limited amount of data released by Atari for Pong. It comes with circuit explanations/ descriptions circuit theory and and oscillograms.
In their (Kee games) 1974 technical manual I found the attached paragraph, an odd but frank remark in a technical manual, about the behavior of human beings, somewhat disturbing and it was picked up by video game makers very early in the dawn of the video gaming industry and they could make money out of it.
Later, as you are aware, uP/computer supported video games became very detailed and violent in character and clearly these do have some detrimental effects on the development of young and impressionable minds.
But looking back at the early arcade games like Pong, Asteroids, GranTrak etc, it all seemed so charming and innocent.