Showbiz Pizza order display

Has anybody ever seen the hardware for one of these? It isn't a vector
game but I would be willing to bet that it had some hardware in common
with the vector games we know, love and obsess over.

I can only give a hazy 15+ year old description of what the display
looked like.

The function of the display was to show pizza order numbers. When a new
order came up, each digit (~1/2 the screen high) would cartwheel to the
middle of the screen. The spinning looked very rough and seemed to cause
everything else on the screen to flicker. Once the order number was
displayed, the lower 1/3 of the screen would be divided into 3 boxes
where the number that the previous big number would get bumped to.

19" monochrome B/W vector display. Something about the display screamed
Atari to my young brain but I had no way of confirming this.

The monitor was hung from the ceiling in a nondescript wooden box if I
remember correctly.

Judging from the simplicity of the display, I would suspect it used
*very* simple (i.e. cheap) hardware and would probably have used
available parts like the Atari monochrome vector displays.

Since there were at least two of these monitors at the Showbiz here in
Madison, the system would have had some way of remotely receiving the
double digit order number and RAM for the four displayed orders.

Yes David, I am wondering if your recent find may be this orphan of the
vector family (unless it turns out to be some bizarre pirate Asteroids or
Kevin's ever elusive Tempest 2...)

A dump of the ROMs should be interesting.

Virtu-Al

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Received on Fri Feb 20 00:14:21 1998