Chapter 27

Unlike the half-hearted attitude he had towards the previous Keji Company, Li Xuan was extremely dedicated to Oriental Electronics. With the company newly established, there were countless tasks that required his attention as the boss.

At the same time, Li Xuan had to take charge of the development of the hardware department's arcade version, keeping him extremely busy. He had much less time to chat on the phone with Zhong Chuhong, and he skipped many of the public classes at school, already being caught absent by several teachers.

Among all the tasks, the most important was definitely the design work for the new game computer board. The motherboard of a game machine is the soul of the entire arcade, and only a good motherboard can perfectly showcase the charm of a game.

At this time, arcade games were just beginning to become popular worldwide, and the game motherboard research and development of various game companies were still relatively primitive. Even the processing core of early arcade games from four or five years ago was not a central processing unit (CPU), but rather based on transistor logic level technology (TTL).

Simply using the principle of electronic interference waves to display simple graphics on the scanning lines of a TV through analog electronic signals could not be considered a true electronic game. It was not until the release of Sega's Snake series of game machines that electronic game machines fully entered the microprocessor board era.

Li Xuan had long had a mature plan for the motherboard of the Tank Battle arcade game. His plan was not just for Tank Battle but for a universal board that could run all new games Oriental Electronics would develop over the next one to two years.

In Li Xuan's plan, the first universal arcade board the company would develop would be an 8-bit computer motherboard, with the main CPU being the MOS6502 processor. This processor was the same one used in Apple's Apple II personal computer and would later be used in Nintendo's FC game console. Its processing power was sufficient to run simple but classic games like Tank Battle and Super Mario.

Of course, if Li Xuan used Motorola's MC68000 processor, it would certainly make the game graphics more detailed and refined. However, the 16-bit processor was much more expensive than the 8-bit processor, so it was not currently within his consideration.

In a few years, when the company was ready to develop the second-generation universal board, he planned to use the classic MC68000 CPU, whose excellent computing power could support many classic fighting games.

In addition to the CPU, the computer motherboard also had crucial sound and video modules. For the sound module, Li Xuan planned to install an AY-3-8910 processor made by General Electric in the United States as the sound chip.

The AY-3-8910 chip had four single-channel channels, with three square wave channels for playing background music and one white noise channel for special sound effects like explosions and gunfire. In addition to the sound chip, a general SP0256 speech synthesizer could be optionally equipped, although pure puzzle games like Hong Kong Blocks could skip this part to save costs.

For the video module, Li Xuan planned to use the TMS9918 graphics processor developed by Texas Instruments. This GPU had 16KB of video memory, could display 32 colors on the screen, and supported a resolution of 256*192.

Li Xuan also planned to redesign the arcade cabinet. The Space Invaders cabinets manufactured by Taito in Japan and its clones were quite different from the arcade cabinets he remembered.

The original Space Invaders cabinet was about the size of a primary school desk, with a horizontal LCD screen at a 90-degree angle to the player. This design had obvious flaws, as players had to bend down and lean forward to play, which could become very uncomfortable over time.

Moreover, the LCD screens of that time were not the large TFT LCD screens of later years; they were very small with low resolution, greatly limiting the game's graphics. Therefore, Li Xuan's arcade machines would definitely use CRT monitors.

"Hey, fatty, can you tone it down a bit? Your lecherous face is scaring away the flight attendants. Can you stop embarrassing us Hong Kong people?" Li Xuan finally couldn't take Du Wenqiang's lecherous expression and had to speak up to avoid being embarrassed himself.

"The JAL flight attendants are so beautiful, with great figures, even more alluring than the top performers in the Lan Kwai Fong nightclubs!" Du Wenqiang said with a lingering look.

"Qiang, you should ask Young Master Xuan to let us stay in Tokyo for a night after we land. I heard there's a Kabuki street in Shinjuku with all kinds of hostess bars. You can find a couple of big-breasted college girls to let off some steam tonight!" Liang Ning said with a grin, having already changed his spiky yellow hair to a more refined urban white-collar look.

Li Xuan couldn't help but rub his forehead, feeling somewhat speechless about these two clowns.

Recently, the Epson printer that Huo Sheng's agency had finally launched in Hong Kong, and Huo Sheng had sent Li Xuan one of the newly launched printers. When the company's employees heard that the printer contained a Chinese character card invented by their boss, they urged Li Xuan to disassemble the printer and show everyone.

However, after disassembling the printer, it turned out that Epson had not used Li Xuan's designed Chinese character card. He later called Huo Sheng to understand the situation.

It turned out that Seiko Epson had just completed a new chip factory and had obtained the right to replicate the 6502 CPU from MOS Technology in the United States. To reduce costs, Epson decided not to use Li Xuan's Z80-based Chinese character card but to redesign a Chinese character card using their own 6502 chip.

Li Xuan could only sigh that big companies were indeed capricious, and the tens of thousands of Hong Kong dollars in design fees he had received were wasted. Since he had already received the money, whether Epson used his design or not was not a big concern. However, learning that Seiko Epson could produce the 6502 CPU gave him some new ideas.

In addition to the chip factory, Seiko Epson also had its own PCB (printed circuit board) factory, so Li Xuan considered whether they could have Seiko Epson produce the arcade motherboard for him.

Previously, Keji Company had to purchase circuit boards, solder chips, and assemble them into arcade boards, a makeshift solution that resulted in unstable performance and a higher failure rate compared to standard products produced by large factory assembly lines.

However, Keji Company's main market was in Hong Kong and Kowloon, and the company had specifically written a troubleshooting manual and trained several electronic repairmen for the agent, Shao Yongqiang. Moreover, the price of Keji Company's cloned arcade machines was much cheaper than the original ones, so even with a higher failure rate, arcade owners could still accept them.

But Oriental Electronics' target was not the small pond of the Hong Kong market; the United States and Japan were his future battlefields. The largest market for arcade games at the time was North America. Taito's Space Invaders arcade machine, which had been released last year, had sold over 150,000 units in the United States alone, and with sales in Japan and Europe, it had exceeded 200,000 units. This single game alone had generated over 100 million US dollars in profit for Taito.

PS: It's really hard to find data on arcade motherboards from the late 1970s and early 1980s. As a humanities student, I'm a perfectionist, and I spent the whole day writing 2,000 words. Readers might think I'm just padding the chapter with a lot of data.

Writing a book is not easy, so I hope everyone can support me with favorites and recommendations! There are some photos of various arcade games from the early 1980s in the related sections of the book. If you're interested, you can check them out.

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