Not everyone wants to live in urban areas with multiple broadband options. Not everyone needs to run a web server or play quake online at all hours of the night. Sometimes they just want to get some mail or look up some data.
There are people in areas that have crappy telephone service. There are people in areas with no telephone service at all. So you can thumb your nose at the target market for the satellite services, but for certain markets it's their only option right now.
I realize 99% of the users here want to be on the bleeding edge, but there's a large contingent of people out there that would just like to get basic web and e-mail services. Frankly I think it's a small miracle that VSAT services exist and are usable in the consumer sector.
I've used Starband for an extended period of time, and I think it works just fine for most applications. Yes, the upload pipe isn't that great, but it's no worse than a 33kbps dial-up modem (which don't usually work that well in rural areas).
Board piracy was a HUGE problem in the early 80s, not only for Atari but all the other popular coin-op factories as well.
Coin-op games were expensive, but they also took in huge amounts of money to the point where ROI was made in *weeks*. The more games you could get on the street, the richer you got. Except that popular games were quite scarce, and distribution was subject to the economic and political whims of the factory-distributor system.
So pirate boards started showing up. Remember, there wasn't much to these early coin-op boards. A microprocessor, some ram, some TTL. The custom chips in early games were as much for hardware copy protection as they were for graphics improvements.
Touch Me was a real arcade game, circa 1974 (I'm guessing that was before you were born). This rendering on Safestuff is probably one concept of the final cabinet, the production one looks different.
The game was redone in 1978 by Baer/Glass/Milton Bradley as a portable game called Simon. You can still buy Simon in stores today.
A good first step would be to get all of you Slashdot readers to close Quake, drain the LN2 from your 40x overclocked P233, shut down your machines, and go out into the sunlight.
That would go a long way towards bringing arcades back.
The only machines to use Intel-class chips were the Williams Pinball 2000 series, and those actually used the Nat Semi MediaGX pentium-compatible chipset.
The majority of games from 1977 to 1990 used Motorola 6800s (an 8-bit chip), games from 1991 to present including the recent Stern games use Motorola 6809s. 8-bit data bus, 16-bit address bus, 2Mhz, custom kernel, nothing else needed.
Actually, I should make one big plug for the Wiretap archive, a great coin-op history repository.
http://www.spies.com/arcade
and more specifically
http://www.spies.com/arcade/info/
Re:The neverending life of a microcontroller
on
History of Video Games
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I know of one set of docs, relating to the history of Cinematronics games and their related hardware. VERY detailed stuff, and pretty amazing when you read it and find out some of the early games like Armor Attack used TTL-only systems, no microprocessor at all!
http://www.spies.com/arcade/info/CineHistV2.0.tx t
After being in the coin-op biz for a while, you hear the same microprocessors mentioned over and over: Z80, 6800, 6809, 68000, 6502. That pretty much covers arcade history from 1980 to 1987. Sure, there were custom chips for I/O, sound, video, what have you, but it seems that most of the hardware designers pulled out their Moto or Zilog book and went from there. Remember that cost is king, and if you can find a commodity chip that will make your design even cheaper that's a good thing. Being cutting-edge and exotic didn't win you any fans upstairs, or from your technicians that had to field repair these things.
I have to let out a loud Sigh every time I see someone trot out Nolan Bushnell and worship him as the "father of the coin-op industry".
I wish the interviewer would ask him about all the failed companies he's been involved with since Atari/Chuck E Cheese. Axlon, Sente, Aristo, Playnet, and the soon-to-be-doomed uWink (aka HoodWink, thanks Steve!). Every single time the scamsters COUGH COUGH I mean visionaries running the company bring Nolan on board as a Director or something, and parade him around the trade shows as the Guy Who's Going To Save The Industry. The company usually folds a year or so later, or gets delisted off the stock market.
Maybe someday someone will bring up names like Higinbotham, Nutting, Jarvis, DeMar, Halley, and Logg as the real fathers of the arcade business.
>All the 'automatic' games are computer controlled. A casino is required to give back a certain % of their profits, so for example, if it's a busy night, you are more likely to make money off the slot machines.
That's a false observation about how casinos really run their slots. I worked for a slot manufacturer for 6 years, here's how it works:
Every individual slot machine is set up with a payout table encoded in ROM. The hard-coded table decides the payout percentage for that particular machine over a large number of trials (usually in the millions of pulls). The ROM is checksummed and verified against a registered chip stored with the state gaming board. The ROM is also verified by an independent laboratory hired by the state gaming board to make sure the math works out correctly. The payout percentage *CANNOT* be changed on the fly, depending if it's a hot or cold night in the casino.
But here's the catch: slot machines in casinos are required by state law to pay out an *average minimum* award percentage. In Nevada it's 75%, in New Jersey it's 83%. So in NV that means for every machine you have programmed to pay out 90%, you can have another somewhere in the casino set to 60%. So guess what casinos do? They take the high roller slots (like the $1/$5/$10 slots), and program them a little higher. Then they take the low roller slots (0.05, 0.25, 0.50) and lower them a little bit. But THEN they'll take some of the low-roller slots and sprinkle them with high-paying tables next to the low-paying ones. Games by the door, for example, may pay slightly better to let passers-by think the casino is paying out big that night.
The magic of desigining a slot floor is a skilled art, and they actually teach it at UNLV.
The tracking systems, however, cannot decide or change the pre-determined math in slots. That's the law.
My Echostar 4000 Dish Network satellite tuner/receiver gets it's firmware upgrades via satellite all the time. Dish has been doing this for years. I think Hughes/DSS does this as well.
Tog may not like the unrequested features, but is he complaining about the bugs that were also fixed in the firmware upgrade?
I kind of like the idea that embedded devices can easily get bug fixes over networked systems, instead of the old way of burning EPROMS and flashing EEROMs.
And Gates said 640K was enough RAM for a PC...
on
Bluetooth Bombs
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· Score: 1
Why not put ethernet in everything? If we want the embedded device world to be universally compatible with everything else, why jump between two standards?
When I was at the University of Illinois in 1987, Apple Computer had a student contest to design the "Computer of the Year 2000". The winning team came from Illinois (woo!) and their result was pretty much what everyone else has been trying to design for the last thirteen years.
Tablet was the name of the winning entry, and it pretty much predicted all of the technology that Microsoft (and Apple, in their failed Newton pad project) were going to use: thin LCDs, wireless networking, lithium power sources, etc.
QUBE, a prototype cable system run by Warner-Amex Cable in Columbus, Ohio had live online polling back in *1977*.
From http://www.media-visions.com/itv-qube.html:
"The row of five buttons [on the QUBE remote control] were reserved for responses to Qube's original interactive programming. Each of the five buttons could be assigned a meaning at the headend, allowing up to five answers to a question -- at least 'yes, no or undecided'. The headend could poll all the boxes, collect all the reponses, and immediately report to viewers the percentages for each of the possible answers."
That seems to imply an authoring system, a real-time response table, and a means of tracking the user's state as to whether he voted or not yet.
If the patent isn't web-based, or even if it is, I'd look into QUBE.
It's currently going for $518.29 at Mercata (goes cheaper if more people place orders). Take the $100 Mercata new member bonus, and the $100 rebate ReplayTV/Panasonic is offering (see Panasonic's website), and that brings your final price in the $300 range...
Slashdot Mirror
Thankfully, you're in the minority.
Not everyone wants to live in urban areas with multiple broadband options. Not everyone needs to run a web server or play quake online at all hours of the night. Sometimes they just want to get some mail or look up some data.
There are people in areas that have crappy telephone service. There are people in areas with no telephone service at all. So you can thumb your nose at the target market for the satellite services, but for certain markets it's their only option right now.
I realize 99% of the users here want to be on the bleeding edge, but there's a large contingent of people out there that would just like to get basic web and e-mail services. Frankly I think it's a small miracle that VSAT services exist and are usable in the consumer sector.
I've used Starband for an extended period of time, and I think it works just fine for most applications. Yes, the upload pipe isn't that great, but it's no worse than a 33kbps dial-up modem (which don't usually work that well in rural areas).
Board piracy was a HUGE problem in the early 80s, not only for Atari but all the other popular coin-op factories as well.
Coin-op games were expensive, but they also took in huge amounts of money to the point where ROI was made in *weeks*. The more games you could get on the street, the richer you got. Except that popular games were quite scarce, and distribution was subject to the economic and political whims of the factory-distributor system.
So pirate boards started showing up. Remember, there wasn't much to these early coin-op boards. A microprocessor, some ram, some TTL. The custom chips in early games were as much for hardware copy protection as they were for graphics improvements.
Touch Me was a real arcade game, circa 1974 (I'm guessing that was before you were born). This rendering on Safestuff is probably one concept of the final cabinet, the production one looks different.
The game was redone in 1978 by Baer/Glass/Milton Bradley as a portable game called Simon. You can still buy Simon in stores today.
Pat was never head of Engineering at Williams, and virtually nothing to do with Monster Bash.
A good first step would be to get all of you Slashdot readers to close Quake, drain the LN2 from your 40x overclocked P233, shut down your machines, and go out into the sunlight.
That would go a long way towards bringing arcades back.
The only machines to use Intel-class chips were the Williams Pinball 2000 series, and those actually used the Nat Semi MediaGX pentium-compatible chipset.
The majority of games from 1977 to 1990 used Motorola 6800s (an 8-bit chip), games from 1991 to present including the recent Stern games use Motorola 6809s. 8-bit data bus, 16-bit address bus, 2Mhz, custom kernel, nothing else needed.
Actually, I should make one big plug for the Wiretap archive, a great coin-op history repository.
http://www.spies.com/arcade
and more specifically
http://www.spies.com/arcade/info/
http://www.spies.com/arcade/info/CineHistV2.0.t
After being in the coin-op biz for a while, you hear the same microprocessors mentioned over and over: Z80, 6800, 6809, 68000, 6502. That pretty much covers arcade history from 1980 to 1987. Sure, there were custom chips for I/O, sound, video, what have you, but it seems that most of the hardware designers pulled out their Moto or Zilog book and went from there. Remember that cost is king, and if you can find a commodity chip that will make your design even cheaper that's a good thing. Being cutting-edge and exotic didn't win you any fans upstairs, or from your technicians that had to field repair these things.
How can you cool down the mouse with those vent holes when your hand is going to be blocking most of them most of the time?
Donald Norman described an idea like this in his 1992 book "Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles" amazon link to book.
My copy is packed away but maybe someone else can dig it out and see if Norman's concept beats the 1996 application of this patent.
I wish the interviewer would ask him about all the failed companies he's been involved with since Atari/Chuck E Cheese. Axlon, Sente, Aristo, Playnet, and the soon-to-be-doomed uWink (aka HoodWink, thanks Steve!). Every single time the scamsters COUGH COUGH I mean visionaries running the company bring Nolan on board as a Director or something, and parade him around the trade shows as the Guy Who's Going To Save The Industry. The company usually folds a year or so later, or gets delisted off the stock market.
Maybe someday someone will bring up names like Higinbotham, Nutting, Jarvis, DeMar, Halley, and Logg as the real fathers of the arcade business.
IBM's Millipede project is supposed to be viable within the next 5-10 years. So who cares about the clunky old magnetic technology anymore?
>All the 'automatic' games are computer controlled. A casino is required to give back a certain % of their profits, so for example, if it's a busy night, you are more likely to make money off the slot machines.
That's a false observation about how casinos really run their slots. I worked for a slot manufacturer for 6 years, here's how it works:
Every individual slot machine is set up with a payout table encoded in ROM. The hard-coded table decides the payout percentage for that particular machine over a large number of trials (usually in the millions of pulls). The ROM is checksummed and verified against a registered chip stored with the state gaming board. The ROM is also verified by an independent laboratory hired by the state gaming board to make sure the math works out correctly. The payout percentage *CANNOT* be changed on the fly, depending if it's a hot or cold night in the casino.
But here's the catch: slot machines in casinos are required by state law to pay out an *average minimum* award percentage. In Nevada it's 75%, in New Jersey it's 83%. So in NV that means for every machine you have programmed to pay out 90%, you can have another somewhere in the casino set to 60%. So guess what casinos do? They take the high roller slots (like the $1/$5/$10 slots), and program them a little higher. Then they take the low roller slots (0.05, 0.25, 0.50) and lower them a little bit. But THEN they'll take some of the low-roller slots and sprinkle them with high-paying tables next to the low-paying ones. Games by the door, for example, may pay slightly better to let passers-by think the casino is paying out big that night.
The magic of desigining a slot floor is a skilled art, and they actually teach it at UNLV.
The tracking systems, however, cannot decide or change the pre-determined math in slots. That's the law.
Tog may not like the unrequested features, but is he complaining about the bugs that were also fixed in the firmware upgrade?
I kind of like the idea that embedded devices can easily get bug fixes over networked systems, instead of the old way of burning EPROMS and flashing EEROMs.
Why not put ethernet in everything? If we want the embedded device world to be universally compatible with everything else, why jump between two standards?
Tablet was the name of the winning entry, and it pretty much predicted all of the technology that Microsoft (and Apple, in their failed Newton pad project) were going to use: thin LCDs, wireless networking, lithium power sources, etc.
Read the winning team's report at http://www3.shore.net/~kht/text/cacm/cacm.htm. It's pretty neat, considering it was written over a decade ago.
QUBE, a prototype cable system run by Warner-Amex Cable in Columbus, Ohio had live online polling back in *1977*.
From http://www.media-visions.com/itv-qube.html:
"The row of five buttons [on the QUBE remote control] were reserved for responses to Qube's original interactive programming. Each of the five buttons could be assigned a meaning at the headend, allowing up to five answers to a question -- at least 'yes, no or undecided'. The headend could poll all the boxes, collect all the reponses, and immediately report to viewers the percentages for each of the possible answers."
That seems to imply an authoring system, a real-time response table, and a means of tracking the user's state as to whether he voted or not yet.
If the patent isn't web-based, or even if it is, I'd look into QUBE.
It's currently going for $518.29 at Mercata (goes cheaper if more people place orders). Take the $100 Mercata new member bonus, and the $100 rebate ReplayTV/Panasonic is offering (see Panasonic's website), and that brings your final price in the $300 range...