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Old 3rd Oct 2017, 10:07 am   #29
cmjones01
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Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Warsaw, Poland and Cambridge, UK
Posts: 2,669
Default Re: Old arcade games

Quote:
Originally Posted by Argus25 View Post
One other thing I could have mentioned in my last post, is that the way the old arcade games played also had a lot to do with the player interface. In pong for example it was two Allen Bradley 5k pots with large knobs. In Tank it was a dual control handle pairs.

When these games are adapted to computers the Joystick interface is often hopeless compared to the original Arcade system. It can be worse...

I was contacted by a fellow coding a Pong game into a PIC microcontroller for use with an LCD screen. He had read my paper on how Pong worked, but he was baffled about one thing.....what was it that controlled the speed of the paddles ? So I explained it was the speed that the player themselves rotated the physical control pot which related to the skill of the player. That was a shock because all he had for the interface were two up-down buttons to move the paddles and no pots.

So not only are there many deficiencies in the way many original Arcade games get coded that don't match the functionality of the original game, the player interfaces are not the same either.
Yes indeed. I have a collection of original (and bootleg) arcade PCBs which I can play by plugging them in to a JAMMA harness. One of the challenges has been recreating the original control methods: a diagonal joystick for Q*Bert, for example. My most recent addition has been Atari Super Breakout, which originally used an analogue paddle like Pong. Since I'd added an FPGA to generate the screen colours and indications which would have been done by light bulbs on the original machine, I added some logic to encode a quadrature trackball (or mouse, indeed) and emulate the original paddle. It works really nicely. The code I wrote also supports using a joystick for the same job, but it doesn't feel right: direct control of the paddle position is a must!

Chris
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