Power supply question

obitus1990

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I'm curious about old cabinet power supplies (excluding the reason for the isolation transformer). Why are they seemingly so complicated (to a non-engineer such as myself) and large in older games? Were SMPS not available when games like Tron, Joust, Jungle King and other golden age machines were made, while games like Gyruss which were made just a couple years later had a switcher?
 
those games were made at the same time.

Williams and Bally(/Midway) were pinball companies first. for them it was just a natural evolution into the video game market. so the power supplies were linear like their pinball games.
 
I think each company wanted there own type of power supply this way you basically had to buy it from them and they made money off the expensive parts (which parts weren't cheap from manufacturers) Centuri used switchers probably due to the fact most of there games were made using different companies boards (konami, Techan, nichibutsu) and didn't have the engineering compared to other companies Atari, Bally, Sega, Gotlieb that made the game board hardware
 
my assumption is that they used linear power supplies for cost saving purposes. Probably cheaper to slap some dumb generic parts on a PCB and calling it a day instead of buying a switcher from another company. Or they could do what atari did and try to make their own SMPS like on irobot, I heard that it didn't go very well in that case.

I also guess in some cases like atari's AR/AR2 they could slap some generic components like an audio amp on the psu and reuse the same design for years instead of designing a new audio amp section on every game board.
 
my assumption is that they used linear power supplies for cost saving purposes. Probably cheaper to slap some dumb generic parts on a PCB and calling it a day instead of buying a switcher from another company. Or they could do what atari did and try to make their own SMPS like on irobot, I heard that it didn't go very well in that case.

I also guess in some cases like atari's AR/AR2 they could slap some generic components like an audio amp on the psu and reuse the same design for years instead of designing a new audio amp section on every game board.
Atari got a lot of mileage out of those. I'm not the biggest Atari fan, but I do appreciate their engineering. and some may find this strange, but I enjoy more of their games than Williams' games. :p

except this Tempest cabaret I've been working on. he should be shunned.
 
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