MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: VDP or equivalent for Capcom Commando hardware

> The graphics performance of Commando was nothing special for the time, as far as
> arcade machines went, particularly for 1985. Compared to contemporary computers like
> the Amiga, it was actually on the fairly weak side.

Amiga was a powerful machine but (IMHO) it lacked many of the best titles - maybe we can't say the same of Sharp X68000, for instance.

Almost all home computers at the time were highly limited. Colors, simultaneous sprites and others led us to admire even more the arcades with their big PCBs.

Anyway, probably the best developers and artists were in the arcade business.

> The thing about it is that the hardware was pretty much entirely bespoke for Commando
> and Space Invasion, although it has an obvious functional lineage to the year-earlier
> 1942 hardware.

1943's quality is really good, specially at the time - scenario layers, sounds, the whole thing still is a work of art

>
> That said, arcade machines tended to lead the top of the pack in the 80's and early
> 90's for pretty much two reasons: First, the hardware was typically developed with a
> specific game in mind, and any subsequent games released on the same hardware were
> then tailored to that hardware. Second, arcade operators would drop multiple
> thousands of bucks on a new arcade cabinet with no questions asked, because for the
> most popular games they could make their money back within a few weeks to a few
> months. As a result, arcade manufacturers could and did use technology that was
> wildly out of reach of the average home computer or home game console that had to
> meet a price point just a fraction of what a single arcade cabinet would cost. Most
> of the cost of the cabinet was never really the wood-working, or the controls, or the
> CRT. It was the beefy PCB - sometimes multiple ones - riddled with enough components
> that a lot of them couldn't even hope to fit in a compact home computer or game
> console profile.

Good points - I agree

> I could do a deep dive into how the hardware for Commando works, but I'd need a link
> to the schematics so I can ensure that I'm not just talking out my posterior. Think
> you can oblige?

I'm asking all of this because to my understanding I've always seen hardware - processors/chipsets - dedicated for sprites, tiles, etc., and the schematics that I've provided in a previous post wasn't detailed enough, at least for me, a tech savvy but not on a dev level...

So, I was surprised to what Vas Crabb said previously here on how features was obtained at the time:

> A lot of older arcade hardware doesn’t have a “VDP” as
> such. Video hardware was often built up with TTL logic
> chips, or sometimes mask-programmed gate arrays (ULAs).