XII
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF
MICROPROCESSORS IN COIN-OPERATED GAMES
CHARLES MC EWAN
Ramtek Corp.
Sunnyvale, California.
Electronics first began to move into coin-operated games in the late 1960's. DTL was used successfully in a game developed in 1969 but the big move to electronics didn't occur until 1972 and 1973 when ping-pong type video games were brought by Atari, Ramtek and many other companies. During the following years, electronics was employed in many other kinds of games -- for example baseball. Some of these games were later redesigned to use DTL control logic or microprocessors.
The coin-operated game market is quite different in size from the home video game market. The worldwide market for coin-operated amusement games, not including pinball or flipper-type games and also excluding gambling games is about $75,000,000 a year. This marketplace consists of arcades, lounges, boardwalk amusement centers, etc. To the electronics industry, this represents about $14,000,000 of vendor-supplied electronics -- not an exceptional large market by itself.
If the pinball market is included, an additional $125,000,000 retail equipment business is involved. The pinball machine field is still holding out as far as electronics is concerned. A few companies have built some semi-electronic pinball machines, a few of much contain microprocessors. But none of the major manufacturers have produced a coin-operated microprocessor-controlled pinball machine.
When pinball machines make the switch to microprocessors the coin-operated game marketplace for electronics will increase to about $50,000,000.
All of the four or five different coin-operated games per year being developed by Ramtec are microprocessor controlled. There are several reasons for this.
The coin-operated game has a very short lifetime. Building time for a product if 90 to 120 days. The way a game is evolved is -- a breadboard is built, it is field tested or tested in-house, it is then redesigned and retested, taken into the field, two or three models are tested in several locations, more redesign and testing follow -- and then the decision is made whether or not to produce the machine. Every other product is cancelled at this point. If you're using DTL logic, this process takes a lot of time. Keep in mind, also, that not only electronics is involved, other changes, such as cabinet modifications may also be required.
By designing with microprocessors, particularly if a universal board is being used, the designer has a great advantage. Programs can quickly be changed and a large amount of the software is reuseable from game to game. It's not unusual, using microprocessors, to go from start to finish in two weeks. The player interaction and the game are carried out in new software.
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