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In the late 60s/early 70s Nolan Bushnell became aware that students of some of the most prestigious colleges in the USA, such as MIT were using spare processing time on the huge mainframe computers those institutes owned to play games, such as 'Space War'. He reasoned that there might be a market for those games in arcades worldwide (which at the time were full of Pinball and other electro-mechanical games and amusements). The one problem was that the cost of CPUs at the time was prohibitive. He then realised he could put video games together not using a CENTRAL processing unit but instead use decentralised processing in the form of relatively inexpensive TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic) circuits spread over the whole PCB and his version of 'Space War' - 'Computer Space' was born, he then formed Atari, produced 'Pong' and the rest, as they say, is history! Now MAME is a marvelous and slightly miraculous program isn't it? All the arcade games in history documented and preserved as a historical document for future generations! All that is except these early Discrete Logic games, MAME emulates games at the CPU level which is difficult to do when there isn't a CPU there! While it may be technically possible to simulate each and every circuit and document these early games in a playable fashion the huge amount of work it would take to get even one of these games up and running means that this may never happen and these games may be forgotten and that would be a great shame, though these games were primitive and simplistic they were, never the less, the first games, the pioneers, this was Genesis! This is where this site comes in - a museum of these early games preserving as much technical detail, documentation and game play/artwork information as possible, ideally as a resource for those attempting simulation but otherwise just lest we forget... |
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March 9th 2009
April 7th 2005
April 4th 2005
April 3rd 2005 NEW PAGE! - PSE (Project Support Engineering) well that's a couple of big entry taken off of the 'Rough Page' anyway! Additional photos cropped out of the flyers at TAFA as always. Found that there was only one game out of the 5 that I didn't already have materials for (Knights in Armor) so I went ahead and made a full 'finished' page rather than make a 'work in progress' page like I threw up for Fun Games before. March 31st 2005
March 29th 2005 TAFA's moved to a .net so I've updated all the flyer links accordingly! Also added MAME.net to the links section - a glaring omission and added descriptions to Trap Shoot (renamed from 'Trap Shooting') and Play Ball by Gremlin on the rough page thanks to Greg's long memory - turns out these aren't actually video games in the strictest sense as the player responds to lights on a printed facade rather than a proper video display by they do use discrete logic components to make a game so I guess they can stay... March 27th 2005
March 15th 2005 Greg spotted a couple more auctions going on resulting in me upping proper photos of 1 of the 2 Computer Space Ball Cab variants to the Nutting Associates page as well as a game called 'Tournament Time II' by National Entertainment Co. which seems to have been licensed from Atari in some way March 13th 2005
March 6th 2005
March 1st 2005
February 27th 2005
February 25th 2005 Updated the 'Pong Doubles' entry on the Atari page with a photo set that Greg found February 22nd 2005 Added PCB shots to the Indy 800 entry on the Atari page, (slightly) more interesting than it sounds as it is actually an impressive collection of PCBs housed in a rack, if you read the manual though you'll see that this is still only about half of the PCBs that an Indy 800 Cabinet would have possessed! Oh, thanks, as always, to Greg for finding these shots! February 21st 2005 Upped a photo set of 'Survival' by US Billiards, that Greg found, to the rough page February 16th 2005 Made a page for a small company that started out life as 'National Computer Systems' then changed it's name to 'Fascination Inc', only 2 known games both Pong clones and, to tell you the truth, it could that both games are actually one and the same, go look at the flyers on TAFA and make your own mind up. Anyway the main reason for putting this page together is to present the photos of '600 Handicap' that Greg found February 9th 2005 Just tidied up the main page today
February 8th 2005 Whoa OK, trying to make some sense of what's to be done around here after so much time away - sorry about that DisLog fans (ie Greg) - updates to Rough page
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