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Grandmother Buys Old Building In Japan And Finds 55 Classic Arcade Cabinets
An anonymous reader writes A grandmother agreed to purchase an old building in Chiba, which is just outside of Tokyo. When her family arrived to check out the contents of the building it was discovered that the first two floors used to be a game center in the 1980s. Whoever ran it left all the cabinets behind when it closed, and it is full of classic and now highly desirable games. In total there are 55 arcade cabinets, most of which are the upright Aero Cities cabinets, but it's the game boards that they contain that's the most exciting discovery.
Boards include Donkey Kong, Street Fighter Alpha 2 (working despite the CPS2 lockout chip's tendency to kill old boards), and Metal Slug X.
It wasn't; although there are '80s cabinets in there, the hardware in a lot of the pictures is late '90s or early 2000s vintage, and one of the articles suggests it has been closed for about ten years. Given that there's been a recession on that entire time, it might be that the value of the space didn't justify the cost of clearing out all those machines.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
A lot of old programs relied on some very specific behaviour of chips to perform accurately. They'd exploit bugs in the microcode or timing imperfections to make their games small and efficient. Older games did a lot of very weird crap to get around limitations of the time. I remember reading quite fondly how the makers of Monkey Island 2 hacked their way around the scene where you dive to the bottom of the ocean to make the blue fade to black scene work despite not having a colour palate setup to do so.
What typically happens is if you faithfully emulate what an old console is supposed to do then at best a game plays with minor bugs, at worst it becomes completely unplayable. Correctly emulating an old console on the other hand is a processing nightmare which can bring multicore 3GHz machines to their knees. What really happens is that the people who write emulators figure out how the original game exploited the hardware configuration and then code the emulator to look at which game is currently being played and apply an appropriate hack to make it work. I.e the emulator works differently depending on the game.
Trivial nonsense would actually prevent you from playing the game at all in some cases.
For a lot of reasons really. First of all, the article doesn't say where in Chiba prefecture this find was made, while there is a small part of Chiba prefecture that is close to Tokyo(including the part that is home to Tokyo Disney), the prefecture itself is quite large and includes a large peninsula that is quite a long distance from Tokyo.
Secondly, even in Tokyo proper if you travel to any point in the city that is more than a 10-15 minute walk from a station(and there are plenty of them) you will find plenty of run-down and abandoned buildings. Property in Tokyo seems to follow an inverse square law, the value is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the closest station.
Monstar L
Thank you. I hope that you never need neurosurgery either.
She came to drink tea and kick ass. And look, she's finished her tea.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I haven't seen one of those old arcades in ages. You could walk into any mall in the 80's and hear the centipede game from halfway across the mall. The one I spent a lot of time in had a very distinctive smell of electronics and carpet cleaner. I could play Spy Hunter as long as I wanted to on one quarter, and my sister could do the same thing with Galaga. I remember being horrified the first time I wandered into a mall in Florida and realized they didn't have an arcade. That situation became more and more common as time went on. I think the demise of the American mall is in some way linked with the demise of the American video game arcade.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
For those of you who aren't aware, this is true. Older games, especially from the 80's, used graphics systems that used very little RAM, instead the graphics all being stored in EPROMs. The background images were one layer, with hardware that usually supported scrolling, and the foreground (or 'motion graphics') images in another set of EPROMs, with specific hardware to place said objects at specific locations on the screen, and yet another layer of graphics just for text images like player scores. Completely different from the bitmap graphics that everything uses now. The reason was the price of RAM. The exception to the rule was Williams games like Defender, Stargate, Joust, Robotron 2084, Bubbles, and other similar era titles, that used 3 banks of 4116's for a total of 48kB of bitmap graphics memory, with DMA used to move graphics data from EPROMs to the screen buffer. Since there was no 'standard' for any of this hardware you'd have to write an emulator for each and every different game. Then there's sound. Pacman/Ms. Pacman used a very simple discrete sound generator using a couple bipolar ROMs; you'd have to code specifically for that, or cheat and use PCM samples. Galaxian actually had a hardware PRNG connected to a simple resistor-ladder DAC and some low-pass filtering to generate white noise for things like explosion noises. Really, I learned a hell of a lot about electronics back in the day from having to learn how these boards all worked, so I could repair them effectively (not like there was tech support for repairing any of this stuff or troubleshooting manuals!)
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