Why do arcade boards have so many fucking chips? What do they

>>3617914

For one thing, this is hardware that predates the NES. Also, the cartridges are generally just the ROM data plus maybe an enhancement chip, this has to cover not just the ROM data, but also the processor, sound, etc. Also, yes, a lot of times arcade games were more powerful than equivalent home consoles at the time.

>>3617914
Lets talk production. Let's take Ms. Pac Man for example. You'll need about 35KBs of storage space for graphics, code, and sound, some amount of RAM, a CPU, controller interface, power handling, and some audio and video hardware on the board itself to create the right signal for the speakers and monitor. A 64K ROM chip cost around $500 back in 1981. 1K, 2K, and 4K ROM chips were far cheaper, even moreso when bought in bulk. Hence it made more sense financially to produce Ms Pac Man boards with 8 4K chips, 1 2K chip, and 4 1K chips than to use a single 64K. PCB space is cheap, large capacity chips are not. This is still true to this day, where many video cards will have 8-16 chips for RAM rather than 1 or 2.

Those consoles came out about years later, when you could get 256K chips for the price 64K used to be. Memory in general was 10 times cheaper than it was in '81, at which point it was cheaper to get chips larger than 4K.

File: Atari-6-Switch-Woody-Sunnyvale-CA-Standard-009-Motherboard[1].jpg (513KB, 1600x1200px) Image search: [Google]

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>>3617914
>The home console releases could come fairly close on a technical level with maybe 5 chips total.
1) There are a bunch of additional chips in the console that execute the code stored on the cartridges
2) Home console ports in the early 80s are not fairly close and especially not on a technical level

>>3617932
>For one thing, this is hardware that predates the NES
By like a year. The NES's design was finalized by 1982.

>>3617914
Well for starters, the board itself is a computer.

>>3618081
Well yeah. The boards in all home consoles are computers too.

>>3618121
Yes, but those don't have games on them.

The NES had like 2kb of RAM, too.

Simple, they are the system+game, not just the game like console cartridges. Also they were a lot more advanced than consoles most of the time.

Remember how your last phone wasn't as good as the phone you have now?

File: schematic.gif (15KB, 807x487px) Image search: [Google]

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>>3617914
What is "TTL, RAM, and ROM" for $1000, Alex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor%E2%80%93transistor_logic

Some of those chips are just a handful of discretely packed logic gates (think 4 ANDs on a single chip), while others are mask ROMs holding game data, and others are RAM chips to hold working memory.

It's actually not at all hard to identify most chips on this boards outside the custom mask ROMs. For instance, TTL chips are labeled 74xx where the xx gets replaced by a short string of digits and letters. Looking up a data sheet online will let you know exactly what you are looking at.

So why so may chips? Memory used to be a lot lower density and more expensive. Lots of chips were just a way of extending stock parts to larger and larger architectures. Some other chips (like the TTL stuff) is used for implementing basic logic, for use in stuff like memory mapping and basic functionality implemented in hardware and not software.

File: original IC.jpg (172KB, 1843x853px) Image search: [Google]

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>>3618175
Ayyyyy, speaking of which:

The Apollo Guidance Computer was 2,800 chips with 2 Nor gates each, plus some magnetic rings woven into wires for RAM.

>>3617914
>kids react to: arcade boards
Teh chips are necessarily to do electronically stuff that's magic liek magnets.

>>3618420
Core was fun. The other day I met another guy who used to make it. Haven't met anyone else who did for about 25 years.

>>3617914
Anon in >>3618175 answered most of it, but roughly:

Shit in upper left corner with grey heatsink - audio amplifier. That was done in analog back then. Volume pot is black/brownish (was originally white/clear plastic that has browned with age)

Big orange caps? Power supply. Original Pac-Man took an AC voltage (!) and rectified it on the board. (diodes above the big black heatsink). Lots of people have jumped over those to run the game off +5VDC from switching power supply.

ROMs, well, you know what ROMs and EPROMs look like. Big 24-pin chips. Whopping 2K per chip!

Those fucked up daughterboards? There were custom chips that they wanted to use there to take the place of the TTL chips -- but for whatever reason (cost, or more likely in 1980, they couldn't get enough time on a fab to build the damn custom chips), they went with daughterboards that plugged into those sockets.

For custom chips, the original motivation here was copy protection as much as it was reducing chip count.

If every component was a TTL chip, there was no custom hardware, and you could literally reproduce the hardware by desoldering every chip, making a glorified phtoocopy of the solder mask, and populating the bootleg boards with chips you bought in bulk from hardware suppliers. It was expensive, but much cheaper than paying $2000+ for a motherboard that was basically the equivalent of a high-end 8-bit machine (think, $2000 Apple ][, and $500 19" color TV, in 1980 dollars, so - about $5000+ worth of hardware in 2016 dollars).

>>3621561
To add to this, referring back to my schematic of a Super Mario World cart in >>3618175, you can already make out both stock and custom chips.

The 74139 is a simple TTL demultiplexer used in a memory mapping circuit, while the GM76C28A is a stock SRAM for saving.

The M23C4001 is the custom mask ROM, and for added protection, the custom Nintendo D411A lockout chip appears in the lower left, and serves no purpose but to act as a primitive anti-copying technology.

>>3617914
>The home console releases could come fairly close on a technical level with maybe 5 chips total.
Yeah, nah.
Your pic is literally an entire console.