Re: Sega Multigame

>Mark Jenison wrote:
>
> Clay,
>
> I'm not trying to rain on your parade here, but maybe you should hold off your
> release until you can make it a TRUE multi-game. I mean, what do you really
> buy from doing the menu system if you still have to do manual switching of the
> sound boards?

This sounds suspiciously like the debate raging here at work. One on
side:

"idealists" aka, Best of breed:
Build each component to do its job and work well with others

On the other:

"Realists" aka, been burned once too many times:
We'll never have time to mix and match things, or ever come back to
them, so we need it done close to right in one big package

Of course, both views are right.

My view:

Clay's proposal is near ideal for a multi-game *cpu* board (only thing
I would add is support for a 27080, with a jumper to strap it for a
27040...may as well make absolutely certain that you will never need
more EPROM space)

I like his standardization on a 5 bit id "bus" for game select. Lets
others mix and match. If someday, someone makes a universal sound
board with speech support, plug into this. For those of us who are
cheap but want the convenience of the menu system, we'll swap in sound
boards.

For the control input beast, that could have any of 5 flavors right
now (Tempest encoder, buttons to encoder, sega encoder, eliminator 4
player, encoder wheel 4 player [for future games]). Let each market
segment design their own little conversion PCB for inputs and plug it
into the game select bus. For instance, all I need is the 4p eliminator
circuit.

Only semi-generic feature that could be tossed on there is the vector
signal conversion circuitry for WG monitors, which could almost be
considered a "cpu" function (may be part of the spec and I missed it)

Anyway, Clay sign me up for one and toss it into my ever growing
box collection in your garage ;-)

Ray
Received on Mon Oct 6 17:26:31 1997