18 Jun
2007
18 Jun
'07
5:46 a.m.
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:
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.
On Sun, 2007-06-17 at 18:10 -0300, Alexandre
Souza wrote:
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). 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 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.