Plans can't keep up with the changes.

The Atari arcade factory that Jester's father had contacted that had promised to be an OEM needed to be overhauled temporarily, and it would take about three days or so.

This disrupted Jester's entire plan.

Jester could only scold twice when he heard the news, but he had no other better way.

It's just that he can't afford to delay time, three days now, and another five days in the future, so how can he have time to do things?

Now his time is too short, it is now the middle of June of '84, and a year later, Ren Hell's FC will invade the United States, if his home machine can't be developed successfully, and he can't make a game with enough quantity and good quality, he won't be able to resist Ren Hell's attack at all.

The thought of the huge number of games and the terrifying R&D team of Nintendo and his Big Six made Jester shudder instantly.

He knew exactly what a terrible opponent he was going to face.

But the more he got to know his opponent, the more Jester felt that his opponent was invincible.

If you want to fight against such a powerful opponent, you need money, a lot of money, you need money to recruit reliable game designers, you need money to recruit reliable hardware developers, you need money to develop games, and you need money to develop games in the future.

And my biggest problem now is that I don't have money.

"American Cubes" is indeed a hen that can only lay golden eggs, but it also needs this hen to lay eggs.

Jester knew that he couldn't wait, and if he grabbed a few more minutes, three days would be enough time for him and his father to make at least ten arcade machines by hand.

Based on five machines per city, ten arcade machines can be placed in two cities.

Are there only a few large cities in the entire California Jester that you plan to attack? It's only twelve when it's full.

Two, that's one in six!

When Jester told his father about his plan, his father completely agreed, and it happened that Mark Seni was also there, and he also volunteered to join Jester's plan to make a handmade zuò arcade machine, especially when he listened to Jester's marketing plan, he was also impressed and praised.

Call Jester a genius directly.

During this period of time, the "American Cubes" in Jester's supermarket are still popular, although there is no spectacular scene of queuing for dozens of meters in the first few days, but you still need to queue up if you want to play, almost at any time, there are people playing this game.

The income of $1,200 to $1,500 per unit per day is stable, and tens of thousands of dollars have been saved these days, so it is completely fine to buy materials.

To make an arcade machine, the price of materials is only more than 300 US dollars, regardless of labor.

The base board of this arcade machine is also only specially made by Jester's father for "American Cubes", the configuration is quite low, except for a CPU and a few pieces of memory, the excuse of input and output, there is no special peripheral circuit image processor (PPU), no special sound wave processor, no noise processor, only a PCM digital sound generator.

It's really rudimentary to the extreme.

However, in order to reduce costs, it is also a last resort.

And if you don't, it is very difficult to make an excellent general-purpose substrate with a 16-bit processor like 6800 or Z80 as the core in a very short period of time, but the circuit architecture of the substrate is enough for a large number of hardware engineers to spend a few months.

Perhaps in the era when Jester was in the future, it may be synonymous with technology nerds to be able to solder integrated circuit boards by hand, but in the eighties, this technology was not only one of the capabilities that domestic hardware engineers and all engineers engaged in hardware research and development in the world must have.

And Jester's father may have inherited the characteristics of the Chinese's craftsmanship, and the hand-soldered circuit board is very good, even in this era when hand-soldering circuit boards is considered a basic skill among engineers, his hand-soldering technology is also first-class strong.

In fact, it looks like the arcade is huge and advanced, but in fact, the structure inside is very simple.

It's just a zoomed-up home console.

Basically, the current arcade machine is divided into three parts, and these three parts are also the standards that were determined when the arcade first appeared, and there has been almost no change over the years.

And Jester knows that even in the future, the three elements of the arcade machine will not change much.

These three parts are the frame, the board and the display device.

As the name suggests, Atari's former arcade factory originally produced upright or oblique arcade displays, and now there is a large amount of inventory in the Zài warehouse, and Jester's father got a lot of it at a very low price.

And the frame is also very understandable, it is the skeleton outside an arcade machine, which plays a role in support and protection, most of the frames are made of plastic, and a small number are made of pure wood.

The composition of the frame does not need to be carefully explained, and everyone who has played it knows it clearly, and the accessories such as coin holes, heat dissipation holes, and joysticks are all part of the frame.

Before the frame of the arcade machine equipped with "American Cubes", Jester's father found someone to order five, and after Jester's plan was made yesterday, his father called and ordered a hundred, this kind of plastic products are made very quickly in the case of molds, and it basically doesn't take half a day to make these hundred.

And then there's the board.

To be precise, it should be the substrate, the circuit substrate.

What is a circuit board? As the name suggests, it is a circuit board that carries an electrical circuit.

For example, in our computer, the motherboard with all the hardware in it is the circuit board.

In the computer we call it the motherboard, in the arcade we call it the board.

This is the heart of an arcade machine, the CPU, GPU, sound processor, memory, video memory, digital sound generator, input and output interfaces, and even games, all of which are on this seemingly inconspicuous circuit board.

And put these three together to form an arcade machine.

Despite their respective divisions of labor, Jester, Mark Seny, and Jester's father had different tasks.

The heaviest task was Jester's father, who had to concentrate on soldering the entire circuit board by hand, and also assembling the arcade frames together.

Of course, Jester and Mark Saini, who are mainly responsible for the assembly work, have a difficult task, and there are many types of arcade frames, and they are all very large, even if they are plastic.

For example, the head of the box, this is the highest part of the arcade we see, with the name of the game on it, and the display device is also put inside, of course, there are also speakers, but this part, there are more than a dozen pounds.

Another example is the belly of the frame, which can be said to be the most technical part of the entire arcade machine in addition to the board, because a coin machine used by the arcade machine to make money is installed on it, and this part has a full twenty or thirty pounds.

There are seven or eight kinds of similar frame components on an arcade machine, all of which weigh more than 200 pounds.

Naturally, it will not be easy to assemble such heavy parts.

Speaking of the coin flipper earlier, some people may be curious about how the coin flipper works? And why can't the game currency in other places be used on the machine in this arcade?

In fact, the principle is very simple.

Next to the arcade board is an integrated block, which is responsible for determining whether the coin is successful or not, and at the beginning this integrated block is not connected to the circuit board.

In other words, it is a broken circuit.

The inventor of the coin flipper is cleverly connected to a thin wire in this manifold, when your coin is put into the coin along the rail, the game currency will touch this wire, and then the circuit is activated, generating an electrical signal, which shows a coin.

As for how to distinguish the game currency, it is actually simpler, there are mainly two kinds, one is a little more advanced, there is a groove on the coin insertor, on which the mother currency can be placed, when you put coins, it will be detected, as for what to detect? The weight of the coin, the material of the coin is detected by the magnetic field of the cut, and so on.

If it is the same as the mother coin, then it will pass guò, enter the guide rail to touch the wire, activate the circuit, if it can't pass the detection, then the coin you put in will be withdrawn, this is called a comparative coin flipper.

However, this method will be used more in the future, for now, Jester himself knows that it is not without it in the United States, but this kind of coin explanator is more expensive, and it needs to be built into a CPU, which is generally only used by Japanese manufacturers such as Sega Capcom, and American manufacturers, such as Atari, still use mechanical coin dispensers more.

Mechanical coin-frayers are much cheaper than comparators, but comparatively, they also have a much lower level of detection.

It is only possible to judge whether the coin is successful by the thickness, size, weight, ferrous or non-ferrous quality of the coin, so some people can use some iron pieces of similar thickness to show the success of the coin.

With the board and the frame, the three of Jester still assemble it relatively quickly, but they just use the guò substrate to wiring and then assemble the frame with screws.

Jester and the three of them only worked hard for most of the day, and they assembled seven machines, and the remaining three were sure to be assembled before dinner.

The interest of the three of them is also relatively high, and they also say a few jokes to each other from time to time.

It may be a flash of inspiration, in addition to the seven patterns of "American Cubes" on the promotional sticker posted on the arcade machine, Jester also ingeniously printed the words "This game is from Mars", and jokingly said that if we start a company in the future, we will use the name Mars Entertainment, of course, leaving a contact number on the box is also a sure thing.

Naturally, his father and Mark Saini laughed.

Originally, Jester's plan was to find a few young people who often played American Cubes to see if they had free time, recruit a few temporary salesmen, and then ask them to help loosen these arcades to various cities.

Then promise them that you can give these arcade machines to those arcade arcades for free, so that they can try them for free for three days, and if they think they are good, they will discuss the purchase.

As for the income generated by this arcade machine for the past three days, let everyone talk to the arcade hall they contacted, this is their payment, and Jester they don't take a penny.

In Jester's mind, it must be easy to find someone when he sees these arcade machines so popular, because fools know that five arcade machines of "American Cubes", even half of the profit in three days, have nearly 10,000 US dollars, such a generous reward, whoever doesn't want it is a fool.

In fact, it was the same, but there were too many people coming, far beyond Jester's expectations.

As soon as the notice was posted, there was a long queue of applicants, and as a result, no candidate had yet been decided.

Jester's father meant to make him wait two more days, and it wouldn't be too late to sell it after the people were chosen.

Although no one was available, time was too short for him to go into too much detail.

So Jester decided to go to Los Angeles himself, after all, he was studying there, he was familiar with it, and he wanted to see if his plan was feasible.

Although he had already thought about it countless times in his heart, this plan was definitely feasible.

And Mark Saini also volunteered that he could go to San Francisco on his behalf, and laughed that the remuneration was just like what Jester posted in the notice, and said that he actually took a big advantage, after all, $10,000 is not very common.

The next day, when Jester was about to leave, he asked Mark Sainey: "Are you interested in joining my game company when you come back?" ”

Although Jester doesn't have a company yet, he has decided that he will register his own company after he returns from Los Angeles, after all, it feels unjustified to do things without his own company, and the name of the company is also what he joked about Mars Entertainment before.

The name is still very good in his opinion.

Mark Seni just grinned and said with some complaint.

"I've been waiting for you for almost a week, and I'm thinking, if you don't look for me again, I'm going to go to Silicon Valley and see if there's a job for me."

Finally, Mark Saini said to Jester with some cryptography: "When I come back, I will surprise you." ”

As for what the surprise was, this Mark Seni didn't say anything.

Jester could only go on the road with doubts.