
Atari Coin-op Archive Footage - videotopia
https://arcadeblogger.com/2019/12/26/atari-coin-op-archive-footage/
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doomlaser
Choice quote from Atari's early 1980s market research:

> _Players want detail, movement, three dimensional effects, color & color
> changes, unexpected events, faster games with more realistic & dynamic
> sound_

Good basic principles for any game developer, from the 1980s to the 2020s

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madengr
Interesting that they did 100% incoming part inspection on their ICs going
into the arcade machines. I’m not sure if ICs were less reliable then, or they
just built a higher quality product.

That semi-automatic pick and place was neat.

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duskwuff
They also had a much higher part count in their systems than is common today,
so even a low rate of bad parts would result in a lot of malfunctioning
systems.

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mlyle
Mobile phones and computers today have a pretty high IC count.

I mean, an arcade board is pretty big, but the parts density is also pretty
low.

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duskwuff
You might be surprised. Modern electronics are highly integrated; a modern
smartphone is probably no more than a few dozen ICs. Vintage arcade hardware
tended to rely heavily on discrete logic; even a simpler game like Asteroids
had somewhere around a hundred ICs on its main board.

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mlyle
I'm no stranger to 74xx. ;)

iPhone X has 72 integrated circuits on the main board, and quite a few more on
other assemblies.

I agree that Asteroids has approximately 100. We're really not too far apart
in device count.

Then when you look at, say, pin count, there's no contest at all.

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NotSammyHagar
Dig dug made $2 million a console in 1982 dollars. $2 million! That would be
fantastic today. $5.25 million in 2018 dollars. That was a staggering amount
of money. Assuming a console today might cost a couple thousand to
manufacture, imagine if you made $1 million after designing and programming a
game per console sold. That was a golden age in many ways.

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psim1
I did not know that Silicon Valley had that nickname even back in 1980. (About
9:30 in first video)

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pm215
The Computer History Museum has a blog post --
[https://computerhistory.org/blog/who-named-silicon-
valley/](https://computerhistory.org/blog/who-named-silicon-valley/) \-- where
they try to identify the origin of the nickname, which dates an in-print
occurrence back to 1971, and probable use in the mid-to-late 60s.

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mcenedella
The Chubby Checker recorded Dig Dug song is a terrific find.

