books or articles on arcade tech history?

mrjason

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are there any good books or articles on the technical side of arcade history? i'm especially curious to read about the hardware and software development side of things for these games.

i see these threads on here about burning eeproms when one goes bad, and i have read a few upgrade stories where the difference from one vendor's game to the next was just the software on the eeproms. did certain vendors have their own motherboard hardware they'd use for a few years? was every game from certain vendors completely unique board/monitor/control wise?
 
Programming Reference manuals for old ATARI boardset

I'm very interested in this subject too.
I've always been looking for any kind of programming reference manuals for the ATARI boardsets, maybe Missile Command or some later games , such as Indiana Jones. One would think this material is sitting somewhere waiting to be scanned and posted online for those of use which like to patch the game and possibly even make news games. Much like what Clay did for the Pacman boardset. Even Sean did some work for the Defender boardset.

=Dan
 
i'm especially curious to read about the hardware and software development side of things for these games.

Have you read Jed Margolin's VAX mail collection from Atari?
http://www.jmargolin.com/vmail/vmail.htm

If a fully commented disassembly of a classic game is your thing, check out this page:
http://computerarcheology.com/spaceinvaders/spaceinvaders.html

Not by the creators, but reverse-engineered. But it can help understand what the code is and how it works.
 
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