Quote:
Originally Posted by Demon-Mask
Quite a nice little article. I love how the caption for the schematics to Space Race says "Pictured: Black magic."
How did anyone ever figure out how the lay out the components to create a game?
If you didn't already know how to, it'd be a bunch of luck/trial and error.
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Demon mask, the design is split in simpler parts. For example, in the first page of space race we can see (from top-left to bottom-right)
- Power supply (convert mains to 5V) (8-7 D)
- The start-game mechanism (6-3 D)
- Player 1 and 2 score counters + mutiplexer (8-7 C)
- Oscillator (clock generator) + screen horizontal and vertical reset circuitry (6-2 C + 6 B)
- "3D Video Card!!!" (5-3 B)
I could go on... The thing is, we engineers dont like complicated things. We prefer to split a big problems in smaller parts, and solve each of them separately.
Randomly placing components would just frustrate everyone...and besides...who likes to do things without knowing what is doing?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Demon-Mask
Yeah, analog circuits are prone to errors with voltage and making sure you have the resistance just right. Too high, and it doesn't work, too low and you can completely ruin anything after that point in the circuit.
Coin counting and signal generation, I know are reused, it's how they discovered that the other combinations of components would make Space Invaders that impresses me. They didn't have many games to use as an example.
Finite-state machines aren't all that good for much, at least not anymore.
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Thats why a marvellous thing, called feedback, was invented. [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback"]Negative feedback - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]
The problems of analog circuits are:
- Size
- Power consumption
- Noise, in noise sensitive applications (this is taken care in modern analog noise-sensitive applications using cooled electronics)
- Harder to connect stuff (impedance matching).
Cheers
---------- Post added at 03:46 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:36 PM ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kong
Interesting. I think if you do more then you should also chronicle the evolution of development teams. How we got from this
To where we are today with multi-million $ projects made by hundreds of people over several years.
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That one is simple: there was more money involved (more players). The rest comes automatically (more companies, more competition, etc...)