The history of the technology of embedded engineers who supported the unknown Japanese arcade game, and what is necessary now?

The market of arcade game in Japan is known to be big in comparison with each other, but Mr. Koji Miibami who is a technical advisor of Taito Co., Ltd. talked about what is necessary for developing an embedded engineer of arcade game It was.

Changes in technology of arcade games and training of "embedded engineers"

My name is Three Division of Technical Advisor, Taito AM Project Division, Taito Corporation. Today I will tell you that this kind of things are necessary for nurturing arcade game engineers.


My self-introduction. I entered tight in 1979 and have been doing various activities in this industry for about 33 years.


It is the main content of today. I will show you how the technology of arcade video game has changed mainly because of the transition of arcade game technology. Next, in nurturing arcade game embedded technicians, I will tell you what you need to train technicians and the way you think about engineers.

In today's lecture, the word "embedded engineer (engineer)" comes out, but here is the definition of an engineer who is familiar with both hardware and software technology.


First tight - is an introduction. Taito was founded in 1953, is the first company to publish original video games in Japan.


Tight - the biggest thing in the business is the operation of the game center.


This is part of the game machine we developed.


So, I would like to take a look at the game market. It is data of 2007, but there was a market of about 5 trillion yen at that time. Here, there is a characteristic thing, but the arcade market in Japan is abnormally large. Once in the United States there was a very big arcade market, too.


How is the Japanese game market changing? The market in this material is the sum of money that customers put into the game machine. For household use is the total sales of software. About 300 billion yen for household use, there is more market in arcade.


What are the necessary roles in developing arcade games? What is specific to the arcade is that there are mechanics and hardware here. Basically arcade games design hardware and mechanics for each game. I think that there are various possibilities here.


Various things are derived from arcade games. As you can see, there is an arcade game at the root point. The thing which does not change from thirty years ago is the element of graphics, CPU and sound. This is a must-have technology for arcade games.


Here we introduce the art of arcade games in the 70s and 80s.

I made an invader gameTomohiro NishikagaMr. is. At that time, one person from hardware to software was making it. Then, how did you make it?


It is a document on the development of invader games. Although the invaders' graphics are painted with pencils, there are 8 bits in length and width, which means that human beings read with eyes and drop them into data.


It is a program at that time. I was making software with assembler. It is 8080 CPU. Invaders were made with 8 KB program, so there were about 100 such lists. It was at that time to write it by handwriting and baking it to Rom.


This is the board of the invader. One is made up of 3 pieces, about the size of A4 size. At that time, a tremendous number of copy boards came out.


It is the details of the board. The display memory is 8 kilobytes.


Sound is made with intermediate existence between analog and digital. There is also a volume for adjustment.


This is the CPU (8080). At that time the invader was running at 1 MHz.


Mr. Nishikawa made these by myself. The point is that you need to be prepared to do whatever you want to produce new things. I can not do it because there is not this, so nothing starts.


Also, various tools are needed to develop video games. At that time, the people who were developing games around were doing their own tool development environment while doing.


This is the development environment at the time, is not it? Although it is a poor debugger - you can run the program and see the contents of the CPU. The game and debug screen are the same. It was a digital cassette that made a program and temporarily saved it. Animator is a tool for making pictures. Perhaps this is the first tool to make pictures for games.


From here it will be slightly specialized, but this part is the essence of embedded engineers.

Invaders were the first to incorporate a CPU and made a big hit. Before that, it worked with a combination of logic IC called TTL. After that, in the 1980 's, a technology called sprite which was also used for Nintendo was developed, and in 2000, polygon technology came in.


Here, we will review the basics of the video signal. Since I will put the picture on the cathode ray tube, operate the electron beam sideways and place the point where I am operating. It is raster that you manipulate and brighten up. I will move it from left to right. This is the basis of display.

The horizontal display time is 53 μs. It is 15.3 milliseconds that the vertical direction ends. The black place is the time when return is coming back.


In the case of a video game, I will make a synchronization signal by myself. We will make signals with the configuration of horizontal counter and vertical counter. This is an important point.


It is a circuit block in the TTL era. This is a drive game, but turning the steering wheel goes to the right or goes to the left and operates so as not to touch the enemy. At that time, we used around 200 TTA of around 16P - 20P and realized this kind of thing.


It is a circuit of invaders. It is pretty simple compared to the previous one. When displaying the screen of the game, images are displayed according to the data of the video display counter. The CPU sews the gap and writes the data. In addition, it writes when it is horizontal or vertical.


This is a sprite type circuit block made in the 1980s. There is an attribute table, here 16 types are displayed. Horizontal position, vertical position, number of pictures to display sprites in this one block are included. The video display counter advances and it is always checking whether there is data to be displayed on the next horizontal line. If you think that there is data to be written at the horizontal line, repeat writing data to the memory for one horizontal line.


This is still the mainstream polygon. In the case of polygons, we have to do various calculations to change the shape. DSP is used. It is a way to calculate and write the state of the polygon while sharing data with the main via shared RAM.


Although it is a small history of polygons, business makers, including tight - in 1990, independently made polygon hardware. In 1994, PlayStation came out, the design became complicated, and it became a conclusion that we should concentrate on making contents. From around 1994, including us, even Namco or even Sega, the original hardware has disappeared.


The introduction has become longer, but here is the main theme of today. I will talk about training engineers.

The educational situation of engineers at the time was as follows.


It seems that this was not only for us but also for other companies in the same industry.


So, I searched for textbooks, but I did not have it.


Because we had no choice, I decided to make textbooks by themselves. There are 250 pages, if you master this, you will be able to make the hardware at the time.


This is the hardware that became the basis.


It is a rough block. The sprite I mentioned earlier is the expression OBJECT, and the background is SCREEN. There is a video display counter on the left.


This is the basic signal of the video display.


There are many circuit diagrams in the textbook, but it is part of it.


I also write about software. This is handwriting.


So, I decided to do the training. This is to see a textbook and try to make a ping-pong game.


It was a training to make software in such an environment.


Actually, I understood that there is a lack of understanding of basic things.


It is a game made by a trained engineer.


At that time it was a video game heyday (red circle part), so I made a lot. Other (blue part) is a crane or a medal game. The human being who received the training of the previous time made hardware of the video game of this era.


I also made communication karaoke.


From now on, the story changes a bit and I will talk about after 2000.


Crane machine


A medal machine. The combination of mechanical and electricity is getting important.


This is a development scenery, but unlike TV games, moving various motors, turning on / off the lamp, etc. will come in a lot.


As a result, since 2000, one chip microcomputer has become an important element for embedded engineers.


Analog input can be put in one chip microcomputer, and of course switch input can also be done. You can also connect to the net.


However, what is definitely different from TV games is that they are always next to noise, as there is a mechanism and there is an analog input. For example, if the motor turns, some noise will come out. It is very important to make one chip microcomputer and surrounding hardware while fighting such disturbance.


Current in-house training is done in this way.



The one-chip microcomputer we made uses Renesas's microcomputer.


This is a model that our senior engineers made.



What I wanted to tell at this time, apart from publishing or not,Let's make a textbookThat. This is very important.

next,Let's have a whole course experienced even simpleThat. Then you can be conscious of what you should do in the future.

Then,To acquire a habit to learnabout.

Also, I did not talk much about today,If you can read English, the world will spreadThat. Now I am in the age of the Internet and I hope that I learn the custom of "reading" English. Seniors feel that it is important to make textbooks and nurture juniors so as to make room for their own time.


The following is a pickup of the technology that will be necessary for arcade games in the future. As for 3, the current one-chip microcomputer has come to be able to handle a lot of data, so it is becoming an era where various things can be done on behalf of human beings.


For example, although this was awarded at last year's CEDEC a camera was built in the punching machine, and when you detect a dangerous play that kicks off with a foot, runs and hits it, the score is not displayed . In this, statistically processing what I learned images of dangerous play is done.


that's all.