Gotch Technology discusses their work on the emulated arcade games contained in Taito's Space Invaders Invincible Collection dengekionline.com/articles/24945/🇯🇵
Gotch does almost no press & I can't recall them ever being interviewed in this fashion, they didn't even offer a name for whoever answered these questions
most of the talk is super in-depth discussion of turn-of-the-80s arcade hardware, idk if I can competently summarize it
most of the talk is super in-depth discussion of turn-of-the-80s arcade hardware, idk if I can competently summarize it
one small tidbit: on whether they learned anything interesting about the construction of particular games by working on this collection, the Gotch interviewee says this about Space Invaders DX: it runs on Taito B-System hardware, which uses 68000+Z80 & has the typical sprite (>)
& background functions you'd expect of that era of hardware, but DX ignores all of them—they converted the 1979 Space Invaders 8080A code to 68000 and it writes graphics the same way, by drawing directly to the frame buffer & bypassing the in-built sprite display functions
at the same time, the game logic seems to have been recreated by eye rather than converted, so while whoever did it was definitely trying to be comprehensive, there are some small differences that would probably be imperceptible to anyone not working on the games in this manner
one more small story: because the earliest Space Invaders hardware uses dedicated audio circuits with analogue parts, it can be tough to ascertain whether they're being correctly emulated or not—for instance, they got a bug report saying SI wasn't making the loud noise that (>)
usually occurs before the invaders appear, but the board Gotch had been given by Taito didn't make that noise & just examining the circuit diagrams didn't clarify whether or not the noise was intended
they recreated that noise in the end but who knows which choice was "correct"
they recreated that noise in the end but who knows which choice was "correct"
