How did PCB design work?

Sectorseven

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Did developers have their own in house electrical engineers design them, or were they employed by the publisher? Or perhaps they were a third party company that was hired specifically for the game they were working on?

How closely did the game designers have to work with the hardware engineers, and which came first (pcb or game code)? Why did they come up with their own "systems" (e.g. cps1), was it just for simplifying internal development or did they want to license out their board designs?

Was hardware cost a big concern and did any games have features or graphics sacrificed to cut costs?
 
I would imagine it was all done in house due to not wanting their designs to get out to competitors. Hardware limitations and cost had a huge influence on the design. When they were new some of the cpu chips could cost 100 bucks or more.
 
When I talked to Owen Rubin about the Major Havoc pcb, he indicated that he didn't remember the name of the guy that did the layout, but it was done in house. They definitely had a harware engineer with each game.

Most of the hardware circuit was already predesigned like the vector generator, so the hardware engineer just put the big pieces together to make it work for the game changing minor circuit items as needed. I know this because in going over schematics for pcb reproduction I see the same circuits in a number of games.

Alot of the circuits for Atari originated in what they used to call "Grass Valley" or CYAN engineering. I guess they produced the original ideas like the VCS concept, or the vector output section circuit, AVG, etc.

Back then they did many of the pcb layouts with transparent film, black tape, and a xacto knife.
 
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I know for Berzerk/Frenzy, all the hardware was done in-house. Allen told me how fast bullets came into being, it was because the code couldn't handle the screen flip, he wanted them to add a $3 dollar chip to the video board to handle the flipping of the output, but made Allen modify the code instead because it was cheaper for Stern to pay Allen the time to get the screen to flip in the code than spending $3 on every board.
 
Don't forget that PC's were not there (or just barely there) in that era so all electronics and computers were by definition, custom. There are lots of games that use the same basic hardware... pinballs are especially good at that aspect of life.

cheers
/Tim
 
Back then they did many of the pcb layouts with transparent film, black tape, and a xacto knife.

That's how I was taught and did boards like that for years.

I would imagine the hardware was first, the code would need to be written for the platform it was on. The companies also would use the same hardware in a lot of games, so the hardware was already in place for the game coders to build on.
 
Don't forget that PC's were not there (or just barely there) in that era so all electronics and computers were by definition, custom. There are lots of games that use the same basic hardware... pinballs are especially good at that aspect of life.

cheers
/Tim

They did write the code on PCs though, right? I mean it's not like they were using punch cards...were they?
 
They did write the code on PCs though, right? I mean it's not like they were using punch cards...were they?

At Atari:
They had a VAX mainframe they used (well the terminals), then they would get the code converted to a paper tape that they would take over to a custom blue-box that would emulate the hardware so they could try out their game and debug it.
 
Paper tape, mainframe terminals, punch cards - feels like these games came out of the 1950s :)

So how did they create the graphic sprites with this tech?
 
Paper tape, mainframe terminals, punch cards - feels like these games came out of the 1950s :)

So how did they create the graphic sprites with this tech?

The graphics were drawn first, then converted to an 8-bit palette (sprite) by a separate person that only did the graphics. I believe it was David Theurer's (Tempest, Missile Command) wife Marilyn Churchill at Atari, not sure who it was elsewhere.

She describes this in her interview here:
http://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_marilyn_churchill.html
 
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Paper tape, mainframe terminals, punch cards - feels like these games came out of the 1950s :)

Punch cards were used extensively through the 1970s, and production continued up until the late 1990s or early 2000s, though I can't find a citation at the moment. Terminals connected to large central systems is more popular than ever — though a web browser is a much more advanced terminal than a VT100.
 
Punch cards were used extensively through the 1970s, and production continued up until the late 1990s or early 2000s, though I can't find a citation at the moment.

2000 election... Remember the "hanging chad" from punch card ballots?
 
PCB design-work would have most certainly all been done in house. Even now in most companies doing any significant R&D (even smaller companies) you do the PCB design in house.

Cost is and has ALWAYS been an issue in PCB design. You're always looking for creative ways to save on component count and real-estate.

As has been said a lot of the coding would have been done using terminals and emulators until you get the first prototype PCB run. After that you're typically working exclusively on the dedicated hardware.

This is all back in the pre-PC days. Every board was purpose built for the game it was going in. You didn't start getting any kind of "system" platforms until stuff like that Nintendo Vs. came out, but even that that was more the exception than the rule.

Even thought a board is purpose-built it is often largely just piecing together large sections of previous designs like a jigsaw puzzle. The same holds today for most PCB design excercises.
 
The systems I was referring to was like the MCR, MCR II and other platform systems that several games are built on. Tron and Satan's Hollow and several others were built on the same platform. Some games are just ROM swaps before Nintendo built he VS System. Williams Defender, Stargate and Robotron shared a lot of hardware with some changes along the way.
 
At Atari:
They had a VAX mainframe they used (well the terminals), then they would get the code converted to a paper tape that they would take over to a custom blue-box that would emulate the hardware so they could try out their game and debug it.

They would code by hand on a pad of paper. They would hand that off to someone who would type it in for them. They would get a paper tape that they could load into the development system and burn roms to try in the proto hardware.

Later, they had White/Blue boxes that allowed them to type on a terminal. They compiled the code there, and then they could download it to the proto hardware for testing. The white/blue boxes would plug into the ROM sockets, to simulate ROMS.

There was nothing powerful enough to emulate hardware at that time.
 
The most fascinating story about this stuff is the cinematronics story:

Basically, a genius invents a board setup, and a vector monitor setup, then pitches it to companies wanting 50% of the profits. Nobody bites and tells him to get bent, except Cinematronics, who had made a bootleg pong and had no new ideas. So they make Space War, and pay the guy 50% of the profit on each game. Meanwhile he doesn't do anything to help basically.

They design a few more games, and he leaves and starts Vectorbeam. He uses his own board design there as well, but still makes Cinematronics pay him 50% profit for all of their games, even though he doesn't work there.

Cinematronics, all along, instead of making a new board set so they don't have to pay him, KEEPS USING THE SAME BOARDSET! They buy Vectorbeam so they can shut it down, and pay the guy 50% profit on his boardset design for 5 or 6 years.


I'd like to read somehwere how they pivoted from that stuff, over to the laserdisc stuff.
 
This is all back in the pre-PC days. Every board was purpose built for the game it was going in. You didn't start getting any kind of "system" platforms until stuff like that Nintendo Vs. came out, but even that that was more the exception than the rule.

Are you sure about this? I'd cite Konami Classic as an example of a common pinout and lots of common hardware. Dozens of games used this starting from like 1980 or 81.

To me, that indicates at least one common platform was in use from nearly the start of the Golden Age.
 
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