[evincarofautumn]

A recent Twitter thread about this game, which goes into a little more detail on a couple points: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1054907948852342784

Something that stuck out to me as cool:

> It used a dual-processor system using 8mhz 68000s, and for graphics it used a custom Taito tile-mapping chip, the PC080SN. They just used three of them, in fact, one for each screen. These were all mapped into the same memory space, so the three-screen display “just worked”.

First of all, it’s curious that it was cost-effective at all to invest in all this custom hardware for one game. But thanks to this hardware mapping, on the programming side, they could mostly treat the three CRTs as a single large display.

[groby_b]

1) Hardware magic was often how you could distinguish yourself.

2) General purpose CPUs were very weak.

3) An arcade machine could easily cost 5-figure amounts of money. Suddenly, custom hardware is possible.

4) The PC080SN was custom, but not just for one game. E.g. Rainbow Island used it as well. (I think Bubble Bobble did, too, but memory is weak)

[joezydeco]

There are countless games with large investments in mechanical design and/or hardware. Think about all of those Sega motion games.