So the myth was true after all! Buried ET cartridges found. Illegal dumping of trash?

The cabinets themselves cost relatively little, except for the really custom ones with force feedback steering wheels and/or hydraulics and/or other gimmickry. They were basically made of particle boards housing transformer, CRT, speakers, input panel and the PCB.

What cost REAL money was the mostly custom computing hardware actually running the game. There were no off-the-shelf components in the 80s (other than CPUs, typically) that could match required performance characteristics of the arcade industry. All of that had to be developed in-house, at enormous expense. And then after a couple games and technology had progressed, it was time to do it all over again.
 
But that complexity is what made the arcades so appealing, because you couldn't get that experience anywhere else. The tech was bleeding edge. Kids today with their tech fixes from tiny computers in their pocket would be beholden to monstrous feats of electrical engineering in the 80s, which is why kids flocked to them like moths around a lightbulb.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
But that complexity is what made the arcades so appealing, because you couldn't get that experience anywhere else.
Click to expand...
Exactly!

Jeez, the nostalgia of the colorful, scanline-adored raster graphics of the golden arcade era. Nemesis, Ghosts'n'Goblins, Alien Syndrome, Psychic 5, Gauntlet... OMG. Kids today, they don't know what they missed, and if you show 'em the games now they'll never understand.

It was a different time then. A different world even it almost feels like!
 
Yes Shifty, I remember as a kid my best friend's Super Nintendo looked amazing but I wondered why the arcades looked so much better, if it was the TV or the CRT in the arcade cabinets. The resolution wasn't much bigger on arcades after all.

Grall said:
Exactly!

Jeez, the nostalgia of the colorful, scanline-adored raster graphics of the golden arcade era. Nemesis, Ghosts'n'Goblins, Alien Syndrome, Psychic 5, Gauntlet... OMG. Kids today, they don't know what they missed, and if you show 'em the games now they'll never understand.

It was a different time then. A different world even it almost feels like!
Click to expand...
A different time indeed where programmers tried to play around limitations. Plus, they were kinda funnier 'cos some artists maybe were more amateurish or weren't looking to sell like

For instance, there is this game that Nestoracebo tried in his "With a single quarter" channel, and it's one of the worst arcade games ever. It's called Buccaneers. :smile:


Around the 2:30 min mark in you can see a peg legged guy :smile: which is an enemy and then just after him, the final boss of that level, which is effin' hilarious.

Nestor calls him Caotico Fanegas (Chaotic Fanegas -the latter is a surname, has no translation whatsoever) :D.

I was crying with laughter when he called him that despite having no clue who the hell Chaotic Fanegas was, then the guy's design and animation, etc.. I just couldn't help it.

But back then fun wasn't constrained by budgets where you have to excel. So those fun designs were plausible.

Buccaneer used the Vigilante engine and music, according to Nestor, but it was wayyyyyyyyyyyy worse. It had no ending (you just restarted the game if you had beaten it), in fact. Still... hilarious.
 
Cyan said:
Yes Shifty, I remember as a kid my best friend's Super Nintendo looked amazing but I wondered why the arcades looked so much better, if it was the TV or the CRT in the arcade cabinets. The resolution wasn't much bigger on arcades after all.
Click to expand...
The SNES' standard resolution is quite low - around 256*224 pixels only or somesuch. Arcade games were usually around the usual 320*240, give and take. Also, arcade-class hardware had more resources of course, more on-screen colors, more/bigger sprites and so on. SNK Neo*Geo had amongst the best sprite hardware of the early 90s, although there were some pretty wicked sprite games in SEGA's superscaler series of games too (starting with games like Space Harrier, Outrun, Top Gun, and then a number of others.)

A different time indeed where programmers tried to play around limitations.
Click to expand...
On home systems, yes. Not so much in the arcade, where there wasn't time to do that. It cost too much money to try and push the systems, instead they just threw in another CPU (!) if they needed more power... Some arcade games had as many as 3 CPUs which had to be painstakingly synchronized when the system boots, plus another CPU for the sound subsystem (typically an older Z80 or the like)...

Certain more esotheric hardware like the multi-board Sega System 1 (Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter) had one main CPU coupled to four DSPs that handled the 3D rendering. Then chain together as many as eight of those in a networked multi-cabinet setup, plus a 9th set of boards for the announcer/spotlight screen... Ugh! Hardcore! :D That's like a couple hundred Ks (US$) worth of arcade hardware, back in that day.

Today you'd be in deep shit if you owned one of those systems; the DSP program code was held in unreadable on-chip static RAM, kept alive by a battery backup when the power is turned off. If the battery ever goes out, the SRAM is wiped and the system is dead, impossible to boot ever again... Hardcore for sure, but this time, as a piracy deterrent.
 
One thing I learnt is that "better" is a matter of tastes.

For instance, my first Street Fighter 2 game ever was Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo on the PC. I purchased it in 1997 and it had both a floppy disk version and a CD version. I got the CD version.

The game was amazing, I felt like playing an arcade machine at home for the first time in my life.

I loved it. Problem is... The CD featured the SSF2 Turbo soundtrack with CD audio quality, which sounded arguably better.

It sounded great, I can tell you. The instruments felt real.

But SF2 songs are originally MIDI compositions (heck, even Doom 64's songs are MIDI), :smile2: and I love MIDI, as it is the most flexible music format (though totally dependable on your hardware or software synth quality) ever, in my opinion.

I was used to listen to the soundtrack at my friend's house who had the SNES and I was amazed at first but I ended up thinking they sounded off (fortunately, I switched to MIDI afterwards)., like great but... they lacked that something...

My sister (she is 26 now, and not a gamer) told me a year ago that one of the most amazing songs he had heard in a game was one from a Castlevania game, as it gave her the goosebumps.

She began to hum it and it turned out to be Simon's song from the Castlevania series.

The key to me is that the music is catchy, MIDI'd and makes you feel certain sensation of terror and fearfulness when you play Castlevania.

You could enhance the effect with an orchestral version perhaps, but the point is that it was originally a MIDI song, and the organ fitted the style perfectly.

This depends on your taste, but would you rather have music that is very good and fun and catchy but not super high quality or truly symphonic or music that is beautifully atmospheric and orchestrated but the tunes don't stick in your head after playing them?

This is SSF2 played using the original tunes -no CD- and it sounds great:

http://youtu.be/Sn4TazzlkSQ?t=10m17s

I for one loved Halo 4 music, because orchestral music works well with the atmosphere of the game most of the time. But would it be catchy and memorable in a Mario Kart game? I don't think so, and in that case I'd rather prefer MIDI music.

Games like Gears of War would also work better with a good quality MIDI like soundtrack rather than orchestral, I think. Maybe that's just me.
 
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One of the best arcade tracks EVER, Magical Sound Shower from Outrun...as judged, by The Entire Universe. :D
 
Grall said:
The SNES' standard resolution is quite low - around 256*224 pixels only or somesuch. Arcade games were usually around the usual 320*240, give and take. Also, arcade-class hardware had more resources of course, more on-screen colors, more/bigger sprites and so on. SNK Neo*Geo had amongst the best sprite hardware of the early 90s, although there were some pretty wicked sprite games in SEGA's superscaler series of games too (starting with games like Space Harrier, Outrun, Top Gun, and then a number of others.)


On home systems, yes. Not so much in the arcade, where there wasn't time to do that. It cost too much money to try and push the systems, instead they just threw in another CPU (!) if they needed more power... Some arcade games had as many as 3 CPUs which had to be painstakingly synchronized when the system boots, plus another CPU for the sound subsystem (typically an older Z80 or the like)...

Certain more esotheric hardware like the multi-board Sega System 1 (Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter) had one main CPU coupled to four DSPs that handled the 3D rendering. Then chain together as many as eight of those in a networked multi-cabinet setup, plus a 9th set of boards for the announcer/spotlight screen... Ugh! Hardcore! :D That's like a couple hundred Ks (US$) worth of arcade hardware, back in that day.

Today you'd be in deep shit if you owned one of those systems; the DSP program code was held in unreadable on-chip static RAM, kept alive by a battery backup when the power is turned off. If the battery ever goes out, the SRAM is wiped and the system is dead, impossible to boot ever again... Hardcore for sure, but this time, as a piracy deterrent.
Click to expand...
Quite interesting explanation in your last paragraph.... That way it's easy to understand how messy and powerful those systems were, and if you add to that how expensive RAM was in the late 90s.... My parents boutght me a PC back then which would cost around 200.000$ these days, if you make a like for like conversion. A megabyte of RAM cost 50$ when Windows 95 came out :smile: -I dont know but maybe your PC has 8GB or more RAM these days (mine has 6GB), you make the math.

A Pentium 100 alone cost almost what you pay for a decent notebook or a PS4. An average printer, nothing exceptional, was about 400$ or so. A good AWE32 or similar SoundBlaster card was super expensive too, and even the crappiest GPU, like a Trident, was almost as expensive as a P100.

I remember reading that CPS1 machines alwayd died, fortunately the ROMs were kept alive and the encryption system got hacked, quite late though.

Surprisingly enough, the arcade cabinets of the time had crazy good encryption systems. I remember reading that a company called Gaelco for instance, had an arcade machine from the early 90s which was one of the most popular arcades to date, World Rally Championship, which never got hacked until they voluntarily gave the encryption keys 3 or 4 years ago.

Perhaps the encryption system was included in the price, so that's another factor that could explain why those machines cost that much.:rolleyes:
 
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Grall said:
One of the best arcade tracks EVER, Magical Sound Shower from Outrun...as judged, by The Entire Universe. :D
Click to expand...
This! That song is precious. I actually had the original Xbox version of Outrun and in that game the classic songs got the digital treatment, but aside from amazing drums and instruments, they kept the spirit of the original alive, the songs were catchy and it was always fun to play the game.

Now that you mention it, a game like Super Hang On does have one of the best video gaming soundtracks ever, in my opinion:

Winning Run


Outride a crisis


Hard Road


Sprinter

 
Another cool one, from Afterburner (this one was used as the introductory song in some radio programmes): :smile:


Japanese version:


The original MIDI version :love: /arranged in FL Studio, my preferred DAW along with Synthfont/:


 
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For those interested, there is a channel where a guy always complete games with a single credit:

https://www.youtube.com/user/michaelpf08

I found it referenced in a comment on one of Nestor's videos, although from the very little I've seen of his videos, he makes no comments at all...

Which leads me to the point that Nestor's merits with his channel are many. Sometimes he suffers a bit and complete the games on the very edge (there resides a lot of charm, btw, as most people playing those games use tool assisted features), but he also has the gift of the gab, explains everything in great detail and in an entertaining manner, and that helps a lot while encouraging you to try the games.

Gotta add that the developers of Buccaneers were called Duintronic, which sounds fairly familiar to Gin Tonic, :smile: and it makes a lot of sense since, as one of the worst arcade games ever made, the game seemed to be programmed while they were drunk.

In fact it was probably programmed in 5 minutes, if not less.
 
I've watched a few more videos in Nestor's Youtube channel, and what can I say... Let's put it this way. It's the most entertaining channel yet made! :oops:

His truly genuine LOVE for the arcade machines shows, and some games are overly difficult, yet he manages to beat them because of that love for those games.

Although as he points out at times, some of them aren't just difficult but unfair in some cases and it can be frustrating to go through then, those make him want to weep.

Being authentic, genuine, and different is what makes his channel so special, and I am a firm believer that if his channel existed in english it would have had million views worldwide, and deservedly so.

It's not just the content, though. It's the attitude of the guy, his kindness, intelligence, his openness on his methods, the eloquent ways in which he explains his ways, very very few people share all those traits.

Anyways... I thought it would be a good idea to pay tribute to him and share a couple of his videos with you fine people.

I mean, especially for those who are curious to know about who is him in real life.

From those interested, at the 44:47 minutes mark in you can see him doing sport. : -D


Below, in the next video (more on that later), you can see him showing the place where he plays and record the videos. And most importantly, the arcade cabinet that he built. :smile: Truly impressive stuff!!!

What impressed me the most is that he built the everything, from the arcade cabinet to the software. :oops:

In order to build the frontend, he created a database with Access where he has some panes and windows showing a list of all the arcade games.

If you select a game before launching it, one of the panes automatically shows a video of the game, :smile2: in another window he has very specific info about that game; number of players, company, genre, year, etc etc etc!!

In addition, he can filter the results and search for games in that frontend, and with it you can look for games from certain year, company, and genre, and what have you.

Plus the frontend is also built with games from classic consoles and systems like Amstrad (he used a 3rd party database for the Amstrad and so on) and the like in mind. So he has also classified those games and systems. : -)

As for the arcade cabinet, he built the sticks and buttons based on a hacked SNES controller. He has 4 arcade sticks, two attached to the arcade cabinet, and another two to play when he hangs around with some extra real life friends and they play some of the titles together.

The arcade cabinet has a trackball and spinners and he can choose between either of those using a switch he built for that purpose. :)

The arcade cabinet runs on Windows XP and uses a dual monitor configuration (for those parties when he ends some of the games using a single credit with more than 2 friends)

In this video you can see the room and the arcade machine he built. He explains everything in great detail but language aside, you can see the result. :oops: -the link should lead you to the moment he shows the arcade cabinet and talks about it in the video-

http://youtu.be/Epf8VZWnjBM?t=27m30s

He even added some extra buttons to the machine, a couple of guns that ceased to be made and are the most precise ever (much more than the Wii's gamepad and without needing an infrared bar) and he even added a ball shooter from a pinball machine (he has Visual Pinball and Future Pinball).

Truly awesome! What struck me the most is the frontend built with Access.
 
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