18 Jun
2007
18 Jun
'07
8:52 a.m.
On 6/18/07, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote:
I think they're talking about arcade games,
specifically.
I certainly have been.
Anyway, the newer ones are all on POWER-architecture
chips.
Interesting. I haven't dug into arcade game guts newer than about
1990, but I have noticed with MAME and friends that ROM images have
gotten *enormous* compared to "classic" video games (multi-megabytes
of ROM vs a few Kbytes). More speed equals more shapes equals more
storage, especially if you want to pre-compute textures, etc., for
faster rendering. I'm sure doubling the ROM space on an arcade
machine is cheaper than bumping up the CPU speed. It's an execellent
mileux for demonstrating how to trade space for speed, like we used to
do with 8-bit home computer games by substituting sometimes-largish
lookup tables for screen address translation or SIN/COS. This is just
on a grander scale.
-ethan