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Old 3rd Oct 2017, 2:36 am   #27
Argus25
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Join Date: Oct 2016
Location: Maroochydore, Queensland, Australia.
Posts: 2,679
Default Re: Old arcade games

That is a very lovely pcb !

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.
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