"Xuan Shao, you're here!"

As soon as Li Xuan walked into the door of the game room, a horse boy sitting behind the cash register immediately got up and greeted him with a smile.

Li Xuan took out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, took out one and threw it over: "Cao Sheng is not there?"

In Cantonese, it is customary to refer to Mr. Sheng as Sheng, and Cao Sheng is the owner of this video game room, and his name is Cao Mingfa. When Li Xuan came to this game room for the first time, he happened to encounter a game console. The so-called fixed board is that the game is suddenly stuck on a screen and will not move.

It just so happened that the repairman couldn't come for a while, so Li Xuan said that Cao Mingfa, who was present at the time, agreed to let him disassemble the arcade motherboard and take a look. Li Xuan used an oscilloscope found from the warehouse to check the CPU first, and the result was really a CPU problem.

It took Li Xuan less than two minutes to figure out the problem, and the boss Cao Mingfa didn't believe it at that time. Later, it was said that it took half an hour for the repairman specially hired by the game room to finally determine that it was a CPU problem.

So when Li Xuan came to this game room for the second time, he was promoted from Xuan Tsai to Xuan Shao, and the boss specially instructed a few cashiers that he would play for free. Of course, Li Xuan didn't come specifically to play games.

In 1978, Taito Co., Ltd. released an arcade game called Space Invaders, which caused a huge sensation around the world. It was also at this time that Hong Kong began to introduce such large video game consoles from Japan, and had its first few game arcades.

"Space Invaders" is a shooting game, the player controls the plane to move left and right to fire bullets, destroy the rows of alien monsters that move slowly down on the top of the screen, the graphics are simple and rough, and compared with the arcade games of the Three Kingdoms, The King of Fighters, and Street Fighter that swept China more than ten years later, it is 108,000 miles worse.

But it is such a game that is extremely simple in Li Xuan's opinion, but in this era, it has attracted the attention of countless teenagers from all over the world, from Europe to North America to Asia, there are always a bunch of people gathered at the door of grocery departments and convenience stores in the streets and alleys.

Compared with the arcade market in the United States, which mainly comes from crowded places such as community convenience stores, grocery stores, gas stations, and movie theaters, Hong Kong is concentrated in specialized game arcades.

The main reason for this is that the price of the arcade machine is too expensive, and the import of a space invader game console from the Japanese company Namco costs 2,400 US dollars, equivalent to more than 12,000 Hong Kong dollars, and ordinary toast store owners are not willing to spend such a large price to introduce.

On the contrary, a small number of bosses who have the vision and are willing to take risks buy a dozen or twenty units in one go to open a special game room, and every day the customers are full and make a lot of money. Li Xuan believed that with these people who took the lead in eating crabs, red-eyed followers would soon pour in.

"Hehe, every time Xuan Shao comes, there is a Marlboro rub!" "The cashier's Ma Zai is called Ah Liang, "Cao Sheng has been here in the afternoon and has already left!"

"Oh, it's okay if he's not there!Is there a computer board in the warehouse that can't be used?" asked Li Xuan.

"Yes, two more broke down this week, only one was repaired, and the other was a problem with the computer board, and it had to be repaired by returning to the factory!"

Fighting Street is the repairman hired by the game room, and can only repair some relatively simple line problems.

"Well, I'll take a look in the warehouse first! Later, Brother Qiang from your soda hall will come to talk to me about things, and you can call me when he comes!" Li Xuan explained to Ah Liang that he asked Scar Qiang to come here to talk about things.

After Li Xuan discussed with his eldest brother just now, Li Ke personally went to invite him to the big guy, and he came to the game hall here first. As for why he chose such a noisy game room as the place to discuss business, Li Xuan also had his own considerations. He is young and easy to be looked down upon, and he needs to show his professional strength, and personally dismantle a game console in front of the big guy Scar Qiang to do popular science, which is more convincing than empty words.

"Eh, which strong brother?Scar is strong?" Ah Liang is also a member of Shuifangtang, Cao Mingfa's game hall was handed over to Sijiuzai, nicknamed Mad Dog, who was in charge of watching the game with He'an Tang, and Ah Liang was one of Mad Dog's younger brothers.

It is said that the names of these flowers taken by Hong Kong community figures are very vulgar, such as mad dog, Bo Tsai Li, Da Fei, Foot Picker, etc., few can be appreciated by both the elegant and the vulgar.

"In addition to Scar Qiang, have you had any other strong brothers in Shuifangtang recently?"

Scar Qiang can be regarded as the most vigorous and prominent big brother among a group of new generation figures that have emerged in He'an Tang in recent years. Two years ago, he was still an ordinary Sijiu Tsai with only a few younger brothers under him, and then he wanted to take the position, and the club sat in the hall to give him the opportunity to watch Xiàn, and assigned him two night venues that were located in Yau Ma Tei at that time, which were trampled by other words, but did not send him additional manpower, and it was all up to him to fight.

Scar Qiang took three or four of his younger brothers to cut down a bunch of rotten boys who came to make trouble, and snatched back the right to see the two nightclubs. Li Xuan's elder brother Li Ke was one of the few younger brothers who followed Scar Qiang at that time, and that night Li Ke was stabbed on his left and right hands and arms, and the wound on his right hand was even more profound, so he had more than 20 stitches and recuperated for more than half a year.

Li Xuan's old bean Li Haichuan also began to vigorously oppose his eldest son's mixed association because of this incident, and threatened to sever the father-son relationship. Li Ke had no choice but to ask the boss to arrange a video hall for him to watch the scene. Although the oil and water in the video hall are far less lucrative than the nightclubs of drunken gold fans, the chances of the same big mess needing to be slashed are not very high.

After that, Hele Hall expanded to Tsim Sha Tsui East, and Scar Qiang took the lead in planting flags for the club. It is said that he was born in Muay Thai, and he fought all over the East Tsim Sha Tsui at that time, and established a great reputation in West Kowloon, allowing Wo Lok Tong to gain a firm foothold in Tsim Sha Tsui, the most concentrated feng shui treasure in Hong Kong's night clubs. After that, the sitting hall of Hele Hall personally opened the incense hall to take up his post and promoted him to a double-flower red stick.

Such a ruthless and powerful person, but he has a good reputation in the prefix, and he is fair and righteous, and the younger brothers below are very convinced. It is precisely because of this big man's reputation that Li Xuan dares to use the mouth of his eldest brother to cooperate with him on game consoles.

The warehouse area is not large, only seven or eight square meters, and there are three game console frames in the corner of the side wall, and two of them have even removed the display screens on the frames. Under the incandescent lamp is a large rectangular workbench, on which are cluttered with some switches, hand cranks, resistors and other parts.

Next to the workbench is a game console with the lid removed. This is probably the machine that Ah Liang said before that he couldn't get it right. Li Xuan pulled the motherboard off the socket, and found various instruments and began to test them slowly.

The biggest difference between arcade motherboards and ordinary computer motherboards is that there are neat rows of chips on them, except for a few processor chips, which is what we call CPU, most of them are DRAM memory chips, the more exquisite the game, the more content there is, the more memory chips are needed.

Li Xuan looked at the number of the chip, most of these memories are Intel's 6116 and 6264 chips, the former has a storage capacity of 2kb, and the latter is 8kb. In 1979, Intel was still a semiconductor company focusing on three types of memory: DRAM, SRAM, ROM, CPU was not its main business because of the small market demand.

Later, with the fierce competition of Japanese semiconductor companies, the profit of memory became lower and lower, and IBM launched the PC with Intel's 8088 processor, which started the frenzy of the personal computer era. Intel seized this God-given opportunity and took advantage of the trend to transform into the CPU market after 1983, so it had a series of well-known CPUs such as 286, 386, Pentium, Celeron, and Core.

After a while, Li Xuan had already figured out the problem with this machine, and two of the neat rows of 6264 chips were estimated to have burned out due to poor heat dissipation. These memory chips all store game data, and if one piece is not used, it will affect the work of the entire machine.

In order to prevent the game from being pirated, the game company has strict control over parts. In well-established markets such as Japan and the United States, these tasks will naturally be handled by agents. Since arcade machines have just appeared in Hong Kong, most of them are imported directly from Japan by the bosses, and they need to go to Japan for maintenance, which is not only troublesome but also a waste of time.

Just when Li Xuan frowned slightly, the door of the small warehouse was pushed open. Li Xuan turned his head to see that a man in a dark suit, with a slab head and a Chinese face, took the lead and walked in.

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