is completely different from the half-hearted attitude towards the previous Keji company, Li Xuan is very attentive to Dongfang Electronics. The company was newly established with a lot of problems, and all kinds of things needed to be handled by him, the boss.

At the same time, Li Xuan is also responsible for the development of the arcade version of the hardware department, he is busy flying all day long, and he has a lot less time to talk to Zhong Chuhong on the phone, and many public classes in the school can also be escaped, and they have been caught missing class when several teachers are named.

The most important task of all things is definitely the design work of the new gaming computer board. A game console motherboard is the soul of the whole arcade machine, and a good motherboard can perfectly show the charm of a game.

Arcades are just beginning to become popular around the world, and the development of game motherboards by various game companies is still relatively primitive. The processing cores of early arcade games four or five years ago weren't even CPUs, but were based on transistor logic-level technology (TTL).

Simply based on the principle of electronic interference waves, simulating electronic signals and displaying simple graphics on the line of a television set cannot be regarded as a video game in the true sense of the word. It wasn't until the release of Sega's Snake Wars series of consoles that video game consoles fully entered the era of microprocessor substrates.

For the game console motherboard of Tank War, Li Xuan already had a mature plan in his heart. And his plan is not just for the game of tank battles, but also for a common substrate that will work on all new games of Dongfang Electronics in the next year or two.

In Li Xuan's plan, the first general-purpose arcade board developed by the company will be an eight-bit computer motherboard, and the main CPU will use the MOS6502 processor. This processor is the same CPU used in Apple's Apple2 personal computer, and it is also the CPU of Nintendo's FC game console in the future. It's powerful enough to run games like Tank Wars and Super Mario with simple graphics but classic enough.

Of course, if Li Xuan uses Motorola's MC68000 processor, it will definitely make the game picture made by the company more delicate and exquisite. But the price of a sixteen-bit processor is much more expensive than an eight-bit processor, so it is not in Li Xuan's consideration for the time being.

In the next few years, when the company is preparing to develop the second generation of general-purpose substrates, he estimates that it will use the MC68000, a classic CPU, which can almost drive many classic fighting games with its excellent computing power.

In addition to the CPU, there are also the all-important sound and video modules on the computer motherboard. Sound module, Li Xuan is going to install an AY-3-8910 processor made by General Electric Company of the United States as a sound effect chip on the arcade board.

The AY-3-8910 chip has four built-in mono channels, three of which are square wave channels for playing background music, and the remaining one white noise channel is used for special sound effects such as explosions and gunshots. In addition to the sound chip, there is also the option to equip a generic SP0256 speech synthesizer, of course, pure puzzle games like Hong Kong Blocks can naturally omit this part to save costs.

As for the video module, Li Xuan is ready to use the TMS9918 graphics processor developed by Texas Instruments, this GPU has B video memory, and the same screen can display a maximum of 32 colors of 64-color templates, supporting screen resolution 256*192.

The frame of the game console Li Xuan is also ready to be redesigned. The space invaders made by Taidong in Japan and the series of arcade machines that clone it are still very different from the arcade machines in Li Xuan's impression.

The frame of the genuine Space Invaders is about the size of an elementary school student's desk, and the horizontal LCD screen is at a right angle of 90 degrees to the player. This type of frame design has obvious flaws, and players need to bend their heads when playing the game, which can be very uncomfortable over time.

And the current LCD is not the kind of large-size TFT LCD screen of later generations, the screen is very small, and the resolution is not high, which greatly limits the picture of the game. Therefore, the arcade machine developed by Li Xuan must still use CRT displays.

"Hey, fat boy, it's okay for you to be a little more restrained, don't have a salty and wet face, the flight attendants on the plane were scared away by you, can you not embarrass the Hong Kong people!" Li Xuan was finally defeated by Du Wenqiang's pig brother, and in order to avoid losing face with him, he had to say helplessly.

"JAL's flight attendants are beautiful, convex and backward, more attractive than the top card of the night show on Balan Street!" Du Wenqiang looked unsatisfied.

"Qiang Zai, you hurry up and ask for Xuan Shao, let's stay in Tokyo for the night after getting off the plane. It is said that there is a Kabuki street in Shinjuku, and there are all kinds of girls in the custom shops in it, you can go to two big-hagaku-raw girls tonight to vent your anger first!" Liang Ning on the other side said with a smile, he has replaced the original explosive head shape with yellow hair, and now he is a polite urban white-collar image.

Li Xuan couldn't help but rub his forehead with his hand, he was a little speechless at these two living treasures.

Some time ago, Huo Sheng's Epson printer was finally listed in Hong Kong, and Li Xuan's former boss Huo Sheng sent Taiwan some time ago and had just been listed in Hong Kong, and he specially sent one to Li Xuan. A group of people in the company heard that there was a Chinese typing card invented by their own boss in the printer, so they instigated Li Xuan to disassemble the printer and show it to everyone.

As a result, after the printer was disassembled, Epson did not use the Chinese Hanka designed by Li Xuan. Later, he specially called Huo Sheng to find out about the situation.

It turned out that a new chip factory under Seiko Epson had just been completed and put into production, and it had obtained an imitation authorization of 6502CPU from MOS Technology in the United States. Therefore, based on the consideration of cost reduction, Epson decided not to use the Z80 Hanka designed by Li Xuan, but to redesign a Chinese Hanka with the company's own 6502 chip as the core.

Li Xuan can only sigh that large companies are capricious when they are rich, and the design fee of more than 100,000 Hong Kong dollars paid to him is in vain. He had already got the money anyway, and it didn't matter if Epson adopted his design or not. But after learning that Seiko Epson could produce 6502 CPUs, Li Xuan had some other ideas.

In addition to the chip factory, Seiko Epson also has its own PCB factory (printed circuit board), so Li Xuan considered whether he could ask Seiko Epson to produce arcade motherboards on his behalf.

In the past, Kee Kee purchased its own circuit boards and soldered chips to assemble them into arcade boards, and this kind of handicraft production method was only a stopgap measure, resulting in the unstable performance of game console motherboards, and the failure rate was much higher than that of standard products produced by large factory assembly lines.

However, Kekee's market is mainly in Hong Kong and Kowloon, and the company has specially compiled a troubleshooting manual, and also trained several electronic repairers for the agent Shao Yongqiang. Moreover, the price of Keke's copycat arcade machine is much cheaper than the genuine machine, so even if the failure rate is a little higher, the game hall owners can accept it.

But Dongfang Electronics is not targeting the small pond of the Hong Kong market, the United States and Japan are its future battlefields. Now the largest market for arcade machines is North America, Taidong's Space Invaders arcade machine, since its release last year, the sales in the United States have exceeded 150,000 units, and the sales in Japan and Europe are more than 200,000 units. This game alone has generated more than $100 million in profits for Taidong Company.

ps: In the late 70s and early 80s, it was really hard to find the various numbers of arcade motherboards, and as a liberal arts student, I was a perfectionist, and today I coded 2,000 words a day, and readers may still be saying in their hearts that I have a large section of information in this chapter.

It's not easy to write a book, so I ask you to collect and recommend votes to support! There are some pictures of various arcade machines in the early 80s in this book, if you are interested, you can go and see it.