Inside old games machines, was: Re: Simulated CP/M-68K?

[Allison]

>
>Subject: Re: Inside old games machines, was: Re: Simulated CP/M-68K?
>   From: "Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com>
>   Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 08:29:55 -0400
>     To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>
>On 6/18/07, Gordon JC Pearce <gordon at gjcp.net> wrote:
>> On Sun, 2007-06-17 at 18:10 -0300, Alexandre Souza wrote:
>>
>> >     In arcade machines, this is already done in MAME. But it would be great
>> > for old computers and any kind of gear.
>>
>> Did any of the CPUs we know and love, like the PDP-11 CPUs, find their
>> way into commercial games machines?
>
>I would be interested to learn if this ever happened.  As far as I can
>tell (hardly authoritative), the arcade industry bypassed the T-11,
>probably primarily due to cost and availability.  The Z-80, 6502, and
>6809 were favorites in the 8-bit realm, but when they needed something
>with a bit more horsepower, I don't know what was common besides the
>68000 (as used in "Xenophobe", among others).

The T-11 offers PDP-11 archectecture but it's not very fast and not 
much for availability outside DEC As other than the FALCON card or KXT-11.
If any of the pdp-11 machines made it to games I'd expect it would have 
been a F11 (LSI-11/23) chipsets as they were faster and available before
the T-11.

>> I know a lot of the Atari vector
>> stuff had maths boxes based on AMD bit-slice parts.
>
>Yep.  I helped a friend fix his Battlezone with a couple of 2901s I
>desoldered from a dead KA730 board.
>
>> It seems like the J11 processor would have been a good fit for some of
>> the more advanced games.
>
>Perhaps, but it wasn't a cheap chip.  20 years ago, I could afford
>used F-11-based gear (11/23, 11/24) because it ran around $300 for a
>barebones or lightly-loaded system (disks and controller extra, etc).
>I couldn't touch J-11 stuff because it was still in use commercially.
>
>In the mid-1980s, the 68000, then 68020 was just too cheap compared to
>the J-11, I'd estimate.

Same for the 6502/6581x series and they were fast enough for the price.
Games for the most part were judging from their construction a very 
price sensitive product.


Did the RISC CPUs (arm, strongarm, and friends) make it in games?


Allison