MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Pokkén Tournament

> > > Check arcadeheroes.com.
> > >
> > > That said, I don't think they've mentioned what hardware this machine is; I think
> > > it's likely it's the often-rumored Wii U-based arcade board, but it could be
> > > something else too.
> >
> > ^
> > Not a single word about machine specs on their site ?!
> > I was thinking of arcadeheroes.com that they are serious technical site, perhaps I
> > was wrong.
> > I can NOT understand how is that possible ? - A new car on the market is revealed
> and
> > no info about its horsepower/speed/acceleration...
>
> It's come to the point where arcade hardware is more than good enough, so specs are
> really just a set of meaningless numbers.

More importantly, the R&D attrition of the 90's has finally come home to roost.

Up until around 1994/1995 or so, what had the best graphics and sound of any system? The answer is easily arcade machines, followed by consoles, followed by computers. The reason is easy to see, which is that that was the most profitable market at the time. It made the most sense, business-wise, to pour research and development funds into making the most powerful arcade machine, because that was where the money was.

When the mid-90's rolled around, the playing field had changed, and home game consoles became the most profitable thing to pour R&D money into. This is why, if you look at system16.com, you see a gradual shift of arcade game hardware moving towards Sony Playstation-based hardware. Sony realized that they had hardware that was "good enough", so to speak, for the arcade game manufacturers. So they licensed their chipset to anyone who had the coin to make it happen, letting companies make Playstation-based games that had all sorts of esoteric hardware, from encrypted ROMs to lock-and-key ICs to hard drives and DVD-ROM drives.

The best example of this is quite possibly the Sega Dreamcast, which provided the foundation for the Sega Naomi arcade platform. Many of the classic 3D arcade games that we remember were based on Naomi hardware, whether they were ROM cartridge-based or GD-ROM-based. I would be happy to wager that Sega probably made more money off of the Dreamcast as an arcade platform than it did as a home console.

Ultimately, however, the inexorable march of progress moved forward, and home computers took root among the gaming public. It's a small wonder, then, that the most powerful arcade hardware ended up being PC-based. You can almost see the tides of progress turning when you look at Midway's arcade hardware, which was PC-based as far back as the early 2000s, followed by Taito's Type-X hardware and the Sega Lindbergh platform from roughly 2005 onward. It simply came to pass that the most economical choice for an arcade game platform became a PC with some additional copy-protection hardware bolted on.

Thus there's no real point to documenting arcade hardware these days. It's pretty much just going to be modified game console hardware, or a PC. The days when a company could recoup its R&D costs for custom hardware are long gone. It kind of sucks, but as a developer, it also makes life infinitely easier.