Re: Target multi game - intersting info

"Scott Caldwell" <lscottcaldwell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:bGDmf.26948$BZ5.8503@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Seems like that could be sold
> for less than the existing Multi-Williams JAMMA
> PCBs, by a large margin.

Price is, of course, largely volume driven. In the case of the Target unit,
the very first shipment that left the factory was more total units than the
sum of every multigame kit, JAMMA adapter, pacman daughterboard, etc. that
I've ever sold in the last *ten* years combined. Suffice it to say that at
those volumes they can get a lot better deals on parts that the little guy!

They also kept the per-unit cost down by doing custom ASICs to integrate a
bunch of functionality down onto a couple IC's... Then they ran a lot of
product through high speed factories which gets good pricing (because the
setup/teardown expense on the line gets smaller when you run the line
longer). The problem for small volume products is that ASIC math just
doesn't pan out when you consider minimums and NREs. (Even if you just put
one wafer through on a small process you wind up having to buy 5-6K parts,
plus the engineering costs up front, plus the cost of the ASIC designer. ;-)

> Clay, is the sound 100% emulated too? The Target
> game I played sounded a little off.

Yep-- but the cabinet, speaker, and the audio output stages make a big
difference in the "sound" as you hear it. I can't imagine the TV has a very
beefy speaker in it. It's hard to get good bass without one, so higher
frequencies might seem more prominent. The original games also all have
slightly different analog filtering in their audio path, so we did have to
compromise a bit to try to get things as good as possible across all titles.
(Having a steep rolloff on a filter to make the old Williams games sound
'just right', resulted in the other games sounding too muffled, etc. We had
to pick something that was "good" for all, but probably not the best
possible for any one particular architecture. You could likely 'fix' that
with some DSP on the sound, but there wasn't that kind of budget in the
hardware.)

-Clay


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