As folks have asked, here's where the arcade ambience is from! ua-cam.com/video/KNVdREXnOLM/v-deo.html This is a great channel that has several long arcade ambience vids for different years, so check 'em out. It's here mainly to try and make the best out of a mistake -- I accidentally left my mic on in OBS while capping literally every bloody bit of footage, meaning all the audio got reverbed to hell. Soooo I put it in to try and give the audio more of a "actually playing the game in an arcade" sound.
Anybody else notice the faint sounds Streetfighter 2 in the background of the video capture? Took me back to the misspent days of my youth hanging around the dark, dingy smoke filled local arcades, totally mesmerised by the sights and sounds of the awesome machines!
When i was a little kid I managed to play Galaxy Force a couple of times on the large sim like cabinet that rotates and spins. At the time it felt dreamlike to play with a "toy" like that and now when I remember it those old arcade games and cabinets feel like something out of an alternate reality or something you'd see only on a film. The same with, Dactyl Nightmare (a game from one of the previous VR fads). Having memories of playing those games feels like a mix of cool and extravagance or ridiculousness. Like something out of Johnny Mnemonic.
Same here. I knew some shooting gallery games and the traditional carnival style mechanical games, but until recently I never knew of all those weird electro-mechanical arcade cabinets that existed especially in Japan and some of the bigger venues in UK. Where I used to live almost all the arcades went from Atari type games straight to fighting, shooter and beat 'em up games, with just a few odd looking cabinets and carnival games in some arcades to call the attention of passersby. Now that I think about it in my country even those famous Sega games like Space Harrier and Outrun weren't even famous until the 90s but by then everyone's attention was into fighters, beat 'em ups and Shooters. Even Pinball machines and racing games almost disappeared after things like SF2 and TMNT showed up.
The only indication I had was watching the original "Dawn of the Dead" movie. There's a scene where they play a bunch of 70s coin-ops in the mall arcade.
I've often wondered why there aren't more modern superscaler fangames. I don't know anything about programming but there are so many retro fighters, platformers , metroidvanias etc. I for one would definitely welcome some new ones into my life. I think they could pull off some really amazing stuff today!
I don't know what you mean? The reason superscalers existed is that it was used to simulate a 3d environment without all the tedious and computationally expensive calculations. It is EASIER to do 3d graphics programming than to scale up and down sprites to get the illusion that you're getting closer or further away from whatever the sprite represents. I can appreciate your nostalgia for superscaler games, but why code for this now? Just do 3d. Just like we don't use sprites anymore, we have CONCEPTUAL sprites, but they aren't sprites. They are overlay images, and we completely redraw the screen every frame. In the BAD OLD DAYS, the sprite could be moved and the graphics data under the sprite didn't have to be redrawn by software. Superscalers are a clever trick to get around the fact we couldn't do 3d in real time, back then. What you're asking is similar to asking "why don't people still do vector graphics? Those were cool" - and they were cool. At the time. Wireframe graphics were amazing, but it was replaced by 3d polygons, and later 3d polygons with textures. Now we can have some many 3d polygons we can PROBABLY render Toy Story One one a typical computer in REAL TIME. When it was done, an entire server farm was dedicated to rendering it. Sometimes people DO do vector graphics, but really, it's 3d polygons where the fill color is transparent. It looks the same. Hardware can handle a lot of stuff you had to be really brilliant to get around or figure out, in the bad old days.
I still remember pumping £5 into a sit down Outrun in a Minehead arcade in 1987. That music! I’ve still got the cassette of the music that came with the Atari ST version
Oh my god, such fantastic work at the start. I love when people acknowledge the real early arcade games and don't just suggest pong and computer space appeared out of nowhere.
A meticulously well researched video and arguably one of your very best. As a kid, these arcade boards were enigmatic, arcane things that inspired awe and fired the imagination. Having them laid bare and demystified like this has been hugely educational and, of course fun.
Space Harrier's "Get Ready" is legendary, that, and "Operation Wolf" barking out takes me back (As well as the horse racing ear worm betting thing where it plays a jingle and then goes 'Place your bets now please'! I was shit hot with Space Harrier as a kid, lol, 42 now, replayed it on Sega Classics on the PS4 and yeah... I'm shite! :D hehehe Happy days though, which sadly, have gone, but, certainly not forgotten! :)
I could ace the space harrier hydraulic version at my local arcade as a teen, used to get a crowd of people round the machine watching lol. Im also crap at it now, although I still have every enemy movement pattern memorised. I think the combo of my aging reflexes+lcd and emulation lag mess up my performance nowadays. Its still my favorete arcade game though, at the time there was nothing even remotely as impressive in the arcade.
I loved the Star Trek game in the arcade. It came housed in a huge captains chair with thrust and fire controls. Looked amazing, and really felt like you were in charge of the enterprise.
You just sent me back through time on a nostalgia rush of a trip with this video. My god so many games that were such a huge deal to me growing up. Seeing each new one in the arcades was so exciting. Those enormous moving cabinets and even just the huge sitdown ones with great feeling controllers. One memory you really triggered was the holographic game. I remember seeing that for the first time and declaring it was the future of all games to come. It had to be because it was so amazing to see these little people almost alive in front of your eyes. You could look around too and even though the play area was super tiny it was extraordinary. I still hadn't grasped at this point that it was what we now call FMV games. I just thought the graphics had gotten this good. The fact it was never seen again really baffled me. The weird thing was unlike say Dragons Lair that attracted crowds of people who would watch layers deep. This game was always free to play, no one seemed to get how amazing it was. It reminded me of the hologram R2D2 projects of Leia in Star Wars and all my life really I've been waiting for that to become a thing in our world. Even today its prohibitively expensive to do something like that. Shame really.
The VCO boards had what was basically analog sprite zooming no high speed math chips were involved. There was a bank of 8 voltage controlled oscillators that provided the clock pulses that were used for reading images from the object ROMs on the board. Instead of using clock pulses that ran at a fixed buss frequency, the speed could be adjusted by changing the frequency of the VCOs. Sprites were read out of the object rom as lines were drawn on the CRT and by changing the speed at which they were read out from ROM their size on the screen could be controlled. The longer it took to draw the object the more area of the screen it would be drawn across and the larger it would appear.
I get how that works across a scanline to get horizontal scaling, but how is vertical scaling achieved? I feel like you probably already said how but I'm just missing something lol
@Darth Wheezius Thanks Darth, its come along quite a way now and I have built an engine that gets the look of the old late 80s games quite nicely. Looking to put it out on steam at a low price, making sure all content is 100% oringinal too :) (or at least licenced where it needs to be!)
I absolutely love these Sega arcade videos. Brings back loads of memories. They’re very informative too. Love your whole style of presentation. Seriously 10/10. You’ve made an old man very happy!! 😜 Keep em coming!!
Excellent of you to cover Sega's EM games. I used to snuck into the local bird zoo which had an arcade that was mostly EM games. These games are even more nostalgic to me than computer games, but they get little recognition. Although simple games, they are technical marvels, and it's impressive to see and hear them in action (which unfortunately is a rare occurrence, nowadays).
I grew up in Newquay, Cornwall a town full of arcades. Loved Space Harrier and Outrun and remember being so excited when these titles were released on the ZX Spectrum. Many hours spent on the speccy reliving the arcade experience :)
@Jamie McLaughlin hmm, either way it was less than the virtual reality machine they had. Which was the 4 player WW2 flight simulater/shooter. If I remember rightly there were two of these large arcades near each other.
You do such an amazing job on these videos my friend. It’s just incredible the amount of research and work that you put into everyone of your videos. Thank you do all you do for our community.
Great video again and a great nostalgia trip but the C64 conversion of Thunder Blade deserves some credit, it's a true feat of programming talent by the great Chris Butler.
Another cracking video, Kim... nice one. As a matter of interest, I note that you like Asteroids games, and also the vector versions of Star Trek and Tac Scan. Well, during the first lockdown of this crazy year I made a fun version of Asteroids and stuffed it full of sound effects from those games above (as well as others - see if you can tell which ones). The game is Coronaroids, and it's over at coronaroids.com if you fancy a blast. Again, top video superbly researched..... well done my friend.
Playing an R360 was indeed an experience - a short one! I was lucky enough to stumble across this in Blackpool in 1991. After queuing to play (!) the operator was ensuring that each player only played the `limited time' game were you scored as much as possible in 60 seconds (boo). That was my one and only minute with the machine... but I HAVE played it!
Remember spending my childhood running around all the arcades in Bognor Regis. Space harrier, G-loc, Thunderblade and Virtua Racing among many others. Always looked forward to my school holidays and heading down from sunny Wales. Ah...rose tinted glasses and all that.
The look at the electromechanical era was truly a neat watch - didn't really know much about 'em (partially because they're just not seen), and I learned a great deal about 'em. Monaco GP has a fond spot in my heart - probably because I played it in more recent years, thanks to encountering it a few times when I wasn't expecting it. I kind of wish it'd get another chance - there's a neat Saturn version in one of the Ages packs, but of course that requires one to have a Japanese Saturn :(
I played Periscope in an arcade in Penarth. The middle scope had a faulty torpedo track that sent it over to the side every time. Have you seen Sega's Space Tactics? That was a beast of a sit in cabinet! Oddly enough, I player AB Cop about a week ago. Got to the third boss fist go :)
What a special episode. Just filled with some of my favorite games. Space Harrier is my first, and still favorite video game experience. Outrun is my 2nd favorite racer after Outrun 2, but even that changes with my mood. While I can find Galaxy Force II to be frustrating at times, it's still one of the most, if not the most beautiful game I've ever seen. That game demanded everyone's respect whenever it was spotted at an arcade. I definitely haven't seen Last Survivor before, the name sound familiar, but this is my first time seeing it. Looks interesting.
Galaxy Force was blanked from my memory until I just watched this. It all came back but my memory of it is never having £1 to just splurge on one go. I may have tried it once but I remember someone was always posted next to the machine and they would show you what to do and make sure you were locked into the seat properly. and I was really shy back then so missed out on one of the arcades greatest games.
This was so dope and informative. Also, I've been subbed for years now (Kimble days) but i haven't seen your vids in a while, i come back and here you are at 60k subs!! Good on ya love. I'm glad you're getting the recognition your work deserves.
Really cool video, and really nice to just do this big run through so many amazing games...a decent number of these are in my top 20 arcade games ever. Tac Scan is my personal favorite vector game ever...from any publisher/producer, with Star Wars, Battlezone, and Tempest not far behind. Galaxy Force 2, Thunder Blade, Rail Chase, and Outrun are my personal favorites from the Super Scaler games. I was really fortunate to have an arcade near me about 17 years ago that had good condition examples of both arcade cab versions of Thunder Blade and a flawless Rail Chase machine (they also had some really cool and often rare arcade machines unrelated such as Pyros, Bonze Adventure, Avenging Spirit, Duramold Sinistar,In the Hunt, Crazy Balloon, and Thunder Jaws).
Great Video! I looked at the late 80's/early 90's SEGA arcade machines in awe. No way could my humble Megadrive compete. By the time home consoles could ape these games convincingly, they were old hat. Such a shame.
I played Time Traveler in the arcades back in the 90's, had no idea what i was doing either, couldn't help but notice, most of the other guys had their attention elsewhere as well.
brilliant as usual Kim, watching your docus is like a warm hug. just like Simon Schama or David Attenborough (oh yes really), your enthusiasm and knowledge shines.
A common misconception about AfterBurner (and other X Board games, and Y Board too) is that it had HW sprite rotation. Any sprites that needed to be rotated were pre-rotated and in AfterBurner's case that's through 90 degrees in ROM and then the full 360 rotation completed with horizontal and vertical flips of the sprites. The sprite data has to be fairly symmetrical to pull it off with such few angles. Note that the canyon runs and the landing areas have no rotation. The ground and sky separation is with BG tiles and the horizon fade is a long line of sprites with many more rotations than the rest.
Oh it was G-Loc! I played it few times at the local amusement park arcade as a kid. I always wondered what it was called... It certainly was an experience one doesn't forget easy. But I would've had to play it dozens of times to actually get used to it. It's not easy to focus on the gameplay when you're quickly rotating around. It didn't help that one credit cost like 20 times more than the other arcade games, so naturally I only had a chance to play it few times.
Most of these were made way before my time so they're really interesting. Also, vector graphics are so pretty. They look 10x better than most games from that era.
Vector graphics are just a series of math calculations drawing lines between points instead of displaying images. It's much less CPU intensive so they were able to do interesting pseudo 3d effects and particles. It also helps that vector graphics looking the way they do as a necessity ended up giving them a very unique art style that you could only see in arcades!
Sitting in a Star Wars cockpit back in the day was the nuts........those vector graphics looked amazing at the time, and there were speakers right behind your head blasting out sound effects, and a sample of Obi-Wan reminding you to use the force (Luke) !
I remember reading about Survivor in the coin op section of either CU Amiga or The One magazine back in the early 90s. Was waiting for it to appear in MAME for years, as I never saw it anywhere else. Anyway, enjoyable & education video Kim!
I remember playing on a 'time traveler' machine in our local leisure center, so it must have been fairly well distributed. I don't remember it staying there very long though. I remember reading about it in one of the UK multiformat mags at the time too.
Yeah it came and went fast in Blackpool arcades. It was annoyingly expensive as were any of the larger games so I never really got to play it properly. Only watched the attract mode it had over and over and would hang around it waiting for someone to have a go so I could watch but you couldn't really see it from too far back. You had to get your face right down into it. I already wrote a comment about it but I'll echo it here that it really did blow me away. I only got about £2 a week pocket money so had to really plan out how that got spent. 10p machines were the key to getting decent long games so these 50p/£1 a go games really shot themselves in the foot and were often just empty while rows of Mr Do! and dig dug etc were all in pretty much constant use. You had to wait for a go is how I remember it. But I could get straight into super hang on if i had the cash.
i was fascinated by these superscalers games since the first time i saw hang on cabinet.Since then, i was looking to play the same experience in home, but i then i saw how advanced these machines were for the time.Even outrun to run a properly "arcade perfect" port was on sega saturn.
I was literally just thinking the other day how much i missed your lovely accent and dry british humor and here you are talking about some of my favorite games
My local roller rink (RIP Roller World) had a simple joystick-and-screen cabinet for AfterBurner, but man, I must have spent more time and money on that thing than I did anything rollerblading related. The whole thing absolutely blew me away, and this was in goddamn 1996 or so too. Ten years later and home consoles still had yet to deliver anything like it.
You did a TON of research for this video. Freaking excellent job!!! Super scalar games have always been my favorite and I’m ecstatic that there is a sudden new interest in them.
its got me in the mood to track them down and get them emulated up on my PC. The research was pretty staggering, it just kept coming and I really thought I knew a fair bit. I didn't know shit lol
Alys, a little errata: The Master System port wasn't the first port of After Burner (one or two). The Video Challenger came before it ;-) Also the Master System port wasn't the "only" port of the first game. It was ported in 2003 for the Game Boy Advance.
I love to listen to your long form docs on video games / developers while I practice programming in python. I've no idea why lol anyway, CHEERS! and thanks!
Oh on the subject of holoseum, I do remember playing this in the arcades. It blew me away, and remember seeing it in several locations. Now I am interested in tracking down time traveler
One of the arcades I used to frequent had time traveller. The holographic effect was pretty impressive but the gameplay was unfair and not much fun. As kim said in the video, just a load of quicktime events strung together. Its such a pity Sega didnt use the tech for a more traditional game (imagine something like zaxxon or hang on in full 3d) or even porting Astron belt to it. Very much a wasted opportunity although im guessing the display tech limited what it could do.
The only place I ever saw the full motion GLOC game was in DIsneyland back in the 90's. Back then it cost $5 to play the game and it had its own attendant. Was the game worth 5 buck to play? HELL YES! That thing was fun! Only played it once and that game had a huge line too.
I remember the seedist most run down arcade in Ingoldmells having a Sega electro-mechanical machine (it may have been one of the shooting ones?) waaay after they'd been sacked off by everywhere else, they also had that weird Sonic 2 machine.
Ingoldmells was like that... I seem to recall it being somewhere between Royston Vasey on Sea and something that Ramsey Campbell in his high-Lovecraft era would have written. Sort of a sense of ill concealed horror to the place (although the last time I visited was the week that Elvis died, I doubt it's improved in the intervening years since 1977)
Kim!!! This is the Most Awesome vid bout Arcade History i have seen from the YT 2006. Big Respect from Ukraine fans! Youre an Arcade Chronicals Monster! How did you get all this Footage and Information? Nobody could do this till this time! All the Same Wiki-Articles and Sega History facts even my grandma knows everywhere on all channels. But you did it! WOWWWW!
I played Gloc in the arcade. I put 4 quid in, and 30 seconds later i was dead. 4 quid would've gotten me hours of use of OTHER machines in the same arcade... I didnt even get to go upside down!
Power Drift was an amazing game. I always had the feeling that Outrun ported the game over but not the feeling when playing, Power Drift on the other hand was good to play on home computer and I will throw Chase HQ in also as it ported over pretty good.
First time I played Sega games was on the Colecovision. There were quite a few of them made for it,Space Fury ,Zaxxon and Turbo were all really well done for the system. The Star Trek arcade was really impressive especially the sit down cab. Sega has always made good arcade games that are pretty fun and cool to see. Super Monaco GP was amazing for the time, it's a shame the Mega Drive version didn't look as good as the adds made it seem,even though it played great. Until the Sega Saturn nothing was able to touch Galaxy Force 2. Of course their 3D efforts were just as groundbreaking but I suppose that's another video entirely.
Amazing knowledge. I mean I grew up with most of these and lived close enough to a huge arcade scene that I could walk there every night and weekends and I didn't even know about a bunch of these and certainly had no idea about the innards to this kind of detail. That's some super sleuthing to get all that mapped out. Why isn't this getting hundreds of thousands of views? Grrr
I really would have loved to see more titles making use of the hologram cabinets. Never got to play Holoseum, but I certainly remember a local arcade having TimeTraveler. Would have been cool to have seen more swapable boards manufactured by Sega for them, like a take on Space Harrier or a traditional arcade platformer.
This electromechanical shit is fucking awesome and I wish more of it was still around. Big-screen LED Pac-Man seems to be the closest you're getting in arcades.
I was blown away by Outrun, Afterburner and especially Thunderblade when they came out. Still love Outrun and Thunderblade, but I find Afterburner a bit repetitive.
As folks have asked, here's where the arcade ambience is from! ua-cam.com/video/KNVdREXnOLM/v-deo.html
This is a great channel that has several long arcade ambience vids for different years, so check 'em out. It's here mainly to try and make the best out of a mistake -- I accidentally left my mic on in OBS while capping literally every bloody bit of footage, meaning all the audio got reverbed to hell. Soooo I put it in to try and give the audio more of a "actually playing the game in an arcade" sound.
I never thought I'd see the Fonz arcade game and R-360 in the same informational thing. That was something I didn't believe could be done.
Nice job with this video. Great work!
Legend!
I was wondering why I could hear "HADOUKEN" during Turbo OutRun.
Anybody else notice the faint sounds Streetfighter 2 in the background of the video capture? Took me back to the misspent days of my youth hanging around the dark, dingy smoke filled local arcades, totally mesmerised by the sights and sounds of the awesome machines!
I LOVE the arcade ambient noise you have playing in the background.
When i was a little kid I managed to play Galaxy Force a couple of times on the large sim like cabinet that rotates and spins. At the time it felt dreamlike to play with a "toy" like that and now when I remember it those old arcade games and cabinets feel like something out of an alternate reality or something you'd see only on a film. The same with, Dactyl Nightmare (a game from one of the previous VR fads). Having memories of playing those games feels like a mix of cool and extravagance or ridiculousness. Like something out of Johnny Mnemonic.
How the hell have i never heard of those mechanical arcade games in my 41 years on earth. This was fascinating.
We had an arcade in my town that was nothing but the mechanical games, I played the crap out of them back in the early 80’s when I was around 10.
Same here. I knew some shooting gallery games and the traditional carnival style mechanical games, but until recently I never knew of all those weird electro-mechanical arcade cabinets that existed especially in Japan and some of the bigger venues in UK. Where I used to live almost all the arcades went from Atari type games straight to fighting, shooter and beat 'em up games, with just a few odd looking cabinets and carnival games in some arcades to call the attention of passersby.
Now that I think about it in my country even those famous Sega games like Space Harrier and Outrun weren't even famous until the 90s but by then everyone's attention was into fighters, beat 'em ups and Shooters. Even Pinball machines and racing games almost disappeared after things like SF2 and TMNT showed up.
The only indication I had was watching the original "Dawn of the Dead" movie. There's a scene where they play a bunch of 70s coin-ops in the mall arcade.
I've often wondered why there aren't more modern superscaler fangames. I don't know anything about programming but there are so many retro fighters, platformers , metroidvanias etc. I for one would definitely welcome some new ones into my life. I think they could pull off some really amazing stuff today!
I don't know what you mean? The reason superscalers existed is that it was used to simulate a 3d environment without all the tedious and computationally expensive calculations. It is EASIER to do 3d graphics programming than to scale up and down sprites to get the illusion that you're getting closer or further away from whatever the sprite represents.
I can appreciate your nostalgia for superscaler games, but why code for this now? Just do 3d. Just like we don't use sprites anymore, we have CONCEPTUAL sprites, but they aren't sprites. They are overlay images, and we completely redraw the screen every frame. In the BAD OLD DAYS, the sprite could be moved and the graphics data under the sprite didn't have to be redrawn by software. Superscalers are a clever trick to get around the fact we couldn't do 3d in real time, back then.
What you're asking is similar to asking "why don't people still do vector graphics? Those were cool" - and they were cool. At the time. Wireframe graphics were amazing, but it was replaced by 3d polygons, and later 3d polygons with textures. Now we can have some many 3d polygons we can PROBABLY render Toy Story One one a typical computer in REAL TIME. When it was done, an entire server farm was dedicated to rendering it. Sometimes people DO do vector graphics, but really, it's 3d polygons where the fill color is transparent. It looks the same.
Hardware can handle a lot of stuff you had to be really brilliant to get around or figure out, in the bad old days.
I still remember pumping £5 into a sit down Outrun in a Minehead arcade in 1987. That music! I’ve still got the cassette of the music that came with the Atari ST version
I knew Nintendo were an old company but didn't realise Sega went so far back so this is a great informative vid.
I LOVED that you started in the 60s!
Oh my god, such fantastic work at the start. I love when people acknowledge the real early arcade games and don't just suggest pong and computer space appeared out of nowhere.
Dude, you keep making full documentaries on such niche video game topics and it's just... amazing.
I fucking love long Kims history videos.
A meticulously well researched video and arguably one of your very best. As a kid, these arcade boards were enigmatic, arcane things that inspired awe and fired the imagination. Having them laid bare and demystified like this has been hugely educational and, of course fun.
Outrun is definitely dreamy for sure. Love the Flicky banner in SMGP, such a cool touch that Sega, even then, were playing fan service.
Honestly between Kim and Sega lord X videps I am being absolutely spoiled today.
This is a fascinating video - I didn't realise Sega arcade games went all the way back to the 1960s.
Space Harrier's "Get Ready" is legendary, that, and "Operation Wolf" barking out takes me back (As well as the horse racing ear worm betting thing where it plays a jingle and then goes 'Place your bets now please'! I was shit hot with Space Harrier as a kid, lol, 42 now, replayed it on Sega Classics on the PS4 and yeah... I'm shite! :D hehehe Happy days though, which sadly, have gone, but, certainly not forgotten! :)
I could ace the space harrier hydraulic version at my local arcade as a teen, used to get a crowd of people round the machine watching lol. Im also crap at it now, although I still have every enemy movement pattern memorised. I think the combo of my aging reflexes+lcd and emulation lag mess up my performance nowadays. Its still my favorete arcade game though, at the time there was nothing even remotely as impressive in the arcade.
My brain on hearing the year 1969: Nice... Wait what? Arcade games?
As always, thanks for your hard work on these videos.
I loved the Star Trek game in the arcade. It came housed in a huge captains chair with thrust and fire controls. Looked amazing, and really felt like you were in charge of the enterprise.
You just sent me back through time on a nostalgia rush of a trip with this video. My god so many games that were such a huge deal to me growing up. Seeing each new one in the arcades was so exciting. Those enormous moving cabinets and even just the huge sitdown ones with great feeling controllers. One memory you really triggered was the holographic game. I remember seeing that for the first time and declaring it was the future of all games to come. It had to be because it was so amazing to see these little people almost alive in front of your eyes. You could look around too and even though the play area was super tiny it was extraordinary. I still hadn't grasped at this point that it was what we now call FMV games. I just thought the graphics had gotten this good. The fact it was never seen again really baffled me. The weird thing was unlike say Dragons Lair that attracted crowds of people who would watch layers deep. This game was always free to play, no one seemed to get how amazing it was. It reminded me of the hologram R2D2 projects of Leia in Star Wars and all my life really I've been waiting for that to become a thing in our world. Even today its prohibitively expensive to do something like that. Shame really.
The VCO boards had what was basically analog sprite zooming no high speed math chips were involved. There was a bank of 8 voltage controlled oscillators that provided the clock pulses that were used for reading images from the object ROMs on the board. Instead of using clock pulses that ran at a fixed buss frequency, the speed could be adjusted by changing the frequency of the VCOs. Sprites were read out of the object rom as lines were drawn on the CRT and by changing the speed at which they were read out from ROM their size on the screen could be controlled. The longer it took to draw the object the more area of the screen it would be drawn across and the larger it would appear.
I get how that works across a scanline to get horizontal scaling, but how is vertical scaling achieved? I feel like you probably already said how but I'm just missing something lol
Only just found this channel and so glad I did! Loving going through your videos. Keep up the good work, excellent content my man 👍🏻👏🏻👏🏻
You're in for a real treat
I miss the superscalers so much im having a go at programming my own based on 3d Deathchase mixed with G-Lock, having lots of fun :)
Awesome! :)
@Darth Wheezius Thanks Darth, its come along quite a way now and I have built an engine that gets the look of the old late 80s games quite nicely. Looking to put it out on steam at a low price, making sure all content is 100% oringinal too :) (or at least licenced where it needs to be!)
I absolutely love these Sega arcade videos. Brings back loads of memories. They’re very informative too. Love your whole style of presentation. Seriously 10/10. You’ve made an old man very happy!! 😜
Keep em coming!!
When they run in a 3D perspective, those vector games achieve astonishing results for the time.
Excellent of you to cover Sega's EM games. I used to snuck into the local bird zoo which had an arcade that was mostly EM games. These games are even more nostalgic to me than computer games, but they get little recognition. Although simple games, they are technical marvels, and it's impressive to see and hear them in action (which unfortunately is a rare occurrence, nowadays).
I grew up in Newquay, Cornwall a town full of arcades. Loved Space Harrier and Outrun and remember being so excited when these titles were released on the ZX Spectrum. Many hours spent on the speccy reliving the arcade experience :)
Black Pool, 1994 one of the large arcades near the beach front there was an R360. I think it was a pound ago. I did spend a good few pounds playing.
@Jamie McLaughlin hmm, either way it was less than the virtual reality machine they had. Which was the 4 player WW2 flight simulater/shooter.
If I remember rightly there were two of these large arcades near each other.
You can play a lot of bastardised versions of the early machines in the museum of Soviet arcade machines in Moscow.
You do such an amazing job on these videos my friend. It’s just incredible the amount of research and work that you put into everyone of your videos. Thank you do all you do for our community.
Great video again and a great nostalgia trip but the C64 conversion of Thunder Blade deserves some credit, it's a true feat of programming talent by the great Chris Butler.
Another cracking video, Kim... nice one.
As a matter of interest, I note that you like Asteroids games, and also the vector versions of Star Trek and Tac Scan. Well, during the first lockdown of this crazy year I made a fun version of Asteroids and stuffed it full of sound effects from those games above (as well as others - see if you can tell which ones).
The game is Coronaroids, and it's over at coronaroids.com if you fancy a blast.
Again, top video superbly researched..... well done my friend.
Playing an R360 was indeed an experience - a short one! I was lucky enough to stumble across this in Blackpool in 1991. After queuing to play (!) the operator was ensuring that each player only played the `limited time' game were you scored as much as possible in 60 seconds (boo). That was my one and only minute with the machine... but I HAVE played it!
Me too. They had one at Trocadero London. £2/go but it was one hell of an experience.
Remember spending my childhood running around all the arcades in Bognor Regis. Space harrier, G-loc, Thunderblade and Virtua Racing among many others. Always looked forward to my school holidays and heading down from sunny Wales. Ah...rose tinted glasses and all that.
Turbo had a fantastic conversion on Colecovision, with the steering wheel controller, it was one of a kind at that time...
Love these games, they are always so utterly "arcade like" to me. The graphics of Galaxy Force II are a sight to behold.
The look at the electromechanical era was truly a neat watch - didn't really know much about 'em (partially because they're just not seen), and I learned a great deal about 'em.
Monaco GP has a fond spot in my heart - probably because I played it in more recent years, thanks to encountering it a few times when I wasn't expecting it. I kind of wish it'd get another chance - there's a neat Saturn version in one of the Ages packs, but of course that requires one to have a Japanese Saturn :(
I played Periscope in an arcade in Penarth. The middle scope had a faulty torpedo track that sent it over to the side every time.
Have you seen Sega's Space Tactics? That was a beast of a sit in cabinet!
Oddly enough, I player AB Cop about a week ago. Got to the third boss fist go :)
Another Excellent Video! 🏆✨
Should we have expected any less? 😎
Keep up the great work, Kim. 📺🕹️
What a special episode. Just filled with some of my favorite games.
Space Harrier is my first, and still favorite video game experience.
Outrun is my 2nd favorite racer after Outrun 2, but even that changes with my mood.
While I can find Galaxy Force II to be frustrating at times, it's still one of the most, if not the most beautiful game I've ever seen. That game demanded everyone's respect whenever it was spotted at an arcade.
I definitely haven't seen Last Survivor before, the name sound familiar, but this is my first time seeing it. Looks interesting.
Galaxy Force was blanked from my memory until I just watched this. It all came back but my memory of it is never having £1 to just splurge on one go. I may have tried it once but I remember someone was always posted next to the machine and they would show you what to do and make sure you were locked into the seat properly. and I was really shy back then so missed out on one of the arcades greatest games.
Love G-LOC! I played the R360 version in Vegas at the Luxor casino's Sega arcade back in the mid to late 90's. Very fun stuff!
I played R360 in the arcade at the Trocadero back in the 90’s. They also had Starblade Alpha in the “Namco Theatre”. Legend.
This was so dope and informative.
Also, I've been subbed for years now (Kimble days) but i haven't seen your vids in a while, i come back and here you are at 60k subs!!
Good on ya love. I'm glad you're getting the recognition your work deserves.
Anyone else hear Ryu's Hadoken and Sagat saying Tiger?
Thank you! I thought I was going crazy XD
@@diecarro79 Had me wondering if he went to an actual arcade to get footage. 😂
I think the audio is a bit borked
38:07
39:15
Your passion for the games really comes through in this video. Great to hear, Kim!
Wow Kim, thanks so much for all this research!! Congratulations on the nice documentary, I loved it.
Really cool video, and really nice to just do this big run through so many amazing games...a decent number of these are in my top 20 arcade games ever. Tac Scan is my personal favorite vector game ever...from any publisher/producer, with Star Wars, Battlezone, and Tempest not far behind. Galaxy Force 2, Thunder Blade, Rail Chase, and Outrun are my personal favorites from the Super Scaler games. I was really fortunate to have an arcade near me about 17 years ago that had good condition examples of both arcade cab versions of Thunder Blade and a flawless Rail Chase machine (they also had some really cool and often rare arcade machines unrelated such as Pyros, Bonze Adventure, Avenging Spirit, Duramold Sinistar,In the Hunt, Crazy Balloon, and Thunder Jaws).
This is a great video Kim. I have watched a lot of your vids and I like them all ... genuine history here Kim... may it blitz the retro internet!
Great Video! I looked at the late 80's/early 90's SEGA arcade machines in awe. No way could my humble Megadrive compete.
By the time home consoles could ape these games convincingly, they were old hat. Such a shame.
I played Time Traveler in the arcades back in the 90's, had no idea what i was doing either, couldn't help but notice, most of the other guys had their attention elsewhere as well.
bleedin' marvelous as usual. THanks for taking the time & effort Kim. Much love.
fond memories of many of these, esp. Monaco GP and Turbo. Thanks for the excellence, Kim.
brilliant as usual Kim, watching your docus is like a warm hug. just like Simon Schama or David Attenborough (oh yes really), your enthusiasm and knowledge shines.
You are some sort of genius for producing these vids in so much brilliant, interesting detail. Thank you.
The synthwave genre has a sub-genre called "Outrun". That's how big its influence was.
Not even a sub-genre... The entire synthwave genre is called "outrun" music!
But Outruns music was based on various jazz funk type bands e.g. Casiopea.
A common misconception about AfterBurner (and other X Board games, and Y Board too) is that it had HW sprite rotation. Any sprites that needed to be rotated were pre-rotated and in AfterBurner's case that's through 90 degrees in ROM and then the full 360 rotation completed with horizontal and vertical flips of the sprites. The sprite data has to be fairly symmetrical to pull it off with such few angles. Note that the canyon runs and the landing areas have no rotation. The ground and sky separation is with BG tiles and the horizon fade is a long line of sprites with many more rotations than the rest.
Oh it was G-Loc! I played it few times at the local amusement park arcade as a kid. I always wondered what it was called... It certainly was an experience one doesn't forget easy. But I would've had to play it dozens of times to actually get used to it. It's not easy to focus on the gameplay when you're quickly rotating around. It didn't help that one credit cost like 20 times more than the other arcade games, so naturally I only had a chance to play it few times.
you mention hot rod. i couldnt remember. then you showed the cabinet and i remembered right away
Most of these were made way before my time so they're really interesting. Also, vector graphics are so pretty. They look 10x better than most games from that era.
Vector graphics are just a series of math calculations drawing lines between points instead of displaying images. It's much less CPU intensive so they were able to do interesting pseudo 3d effects and particles. It also helps that vector graphics looking the way they do as a necessity ended up giving them a very unique art style that you could only see in arcades!
The best games from the 80s had personality that holds up.
@@paulclinton6414 Fair point.
Sitting in a Star Wars cockpit back in the day was the nuts........those vector graphics looked amazing at the time, and there were speakers right behind your head blasting out sound effects, and a sample of Obi-Wan reminding you to use the force (Luke) !
I remember reading about Survivor in the coin op section of either CU Amiga or The One magazine back in the early 90s. Was waiting for it to appear in MAME for years, as I never saw it anywhere else. Anyway, enjoyable & education video Kim!
I remember playing on a 'time traveler' machine in our local leisure center, so it must have been fairly well distributed. I don't remember it staying there very long though. I remember reading about it in one of the UK multiformat mags at the time too.
Yeah it came and went fast in Blackpool arcades. It was annoyingly expensive as were any of the larger games so I never really got to play it properly. Only watched the attract mode it had over and over and would hang around it waiting for someone to have a go so I could watch but you couldn't really see it from too far back. You had to get your face right down into it. I already wrote a comment about it but I'll echo it here that it really did blow me away. I only got about £2 a week pocket money so had to really plan out how that got spent. 10p machines were the key to getting decent long games so these 50p/£1 a go games really shot themselves in the foot and were often just empty while rows of Mr Do! and dig dug etc were all in pretty much constant use. You had to wait for a go is how I remember it. But I could get straight into super hang on if i had the cash.
i was fascinated by these superscalers games since the first time i saw hang on cabinet.Since then, i was looking to play the same experience in home, but i then i saw how advanced these machines were for the time.Even outrun to run a properly "arcade perfect" port was on sega saturn.
I was literally just thinking the other day how much i missed your lovely accent and dry british humor and here you are talking about some of my favorite games
My local roller rink (RIP Roller World) had a simple joystick-and-screen cabinet for AfterBurner, but man, I must have spent more time and money on that thing than I did anything rollerblading related. The whole thing absolutely blew me away, and this was in goddamn 1996 or so too. Ten years later and home consoles still had yet to deliver anything like it.
Related: trying to play Cruisn USA with skates on is truly hard mode.
awesome video as always. Fond memories of arcade runs to Torquay years ago :)
loved the ambient arcade background sounds
You did a TON of research for this video. Freaking excellent job!!! Super scalar games have always been my favorite and I’m ecstatic that there is a sudden new interest in them.
its got me in the mood to track them down and get them emulated up on my PC. The research was pretty staggering, it just kept coming and I really thought I knew a fair bit. I didn't know shit lol
Alys, a little errata:
The Master System port wasn't the first port of After Burner (one or two). The Video Challenger came before it ;-)
Also the Master System port wasn't the "only" port of the first game. It was ported in 2003 for the Game Boy Advance.
I love to listen to your long form docs on video games / developers while I practice programming in python. I've no idea why lol
anyway, CHEERS! and thanks!
Never stop making videos. Your content is genuinely quality. Don't burn out. =)
Been curious for the origins of killer shark ever since I saw it in jaws.. thanks for that!
Congrats on 60k
Thanks for all the memories
Oh on the subject of holoseum, I do remember playing this in the arcades. It blew me away, and remember seeing it in several locations. Now I am interested in tracking down time traveler
One of the arcades I used to frequent had time traveller. The holographic effect was pretty impressive but the gameplay was unfair and not much fun. As kim said in the video, just a load of quicktime events strung together. Its such a pity Sega didnt use the tech for a more traditional game (imagine something like zaxxon or hang on in full 3d) or even porting Astron belt to it. Very much a wasted opportunity although im guessing the display tech limited what it could do.
The only place I ever saw the full motion GLOC game was in DIsneyland back in the 90's. Back then it cost $5 to play the game and it had its own attendant. Was the game worth 5 buck to play? HELL YES! That thing was fun! Only played it once and that game had a huge line too.
Absolute peak content thank you
What a lovely video... and lovely arcade ambience too!
AB Cop is my all time favourite scaler game. Playing it on the cabinet was pure fun. Power Drift & Galaxy Force come close.
Consistenly great content, Kim. Thank you.
I remember the seedist most run down arcade in Ingoldmells having a Sega electro-mechanical machine (it may have been one of the shooting ones?) waaay after they'd been sacked off by everywhere else, they also had that weird Sonic 2 machine.
Ingoldmells was like that... I seem to recall it being somewhere between Royston Vasey on Sea and something that Ramsey Campbell in his high-Lovecraft era would have written. Sort of a sense of ill concealed horror to the place (although the last time I visited was the week that Elvis died, I doubt it's improved in the intervening years since 1977)
I am loving this series. Thank you for all your hard work.
i used to play power drift a lot, i love the rollercoaster feeling
awww i thought it wass the amiga game galaxy force, that game is sooo good, loved afterburner with the sit in cab,
Kim!!! This is the Most Awesome vid bout Arcade History i have seen from the YT 2006. Big Respect from Ukraine fans! Youre an Arcade Chronicals Monster! How did you get all this Footage and Information? Nobody could do this till this time! All the Same Wiki-Articles and Sega History facts even my grandma knows everywhere on all channels. But you did it!
WOWWWW!
Those old vector games still look so nice that I'm surprised they bothered with raster graphics at all for space shooters in the early 80s.
they used to have HeliShooter at Southend peir I remember playing it as wee child back in the 70's!
Excellent again Kim. Thank you!
Wait a minute, what about Alien 3 from sega, that was an awesome and one of the best shooters since Operation Wolf?
Thanks for such an amazing video. Looks like a ton of work went into this.
I played Gloc in the arcade.
I put 4 quid in, and 30 seconds later i was dead.
4 quid would've gotten me hours of use of OTHER machines in the same arcade... I didnt even get to go upside down!
My chopper changes altitude at least once a day, but it’s been a while since it’s done that and been straight into the action.
Power Drift was an amazing game. I always had the feeling that Outrun ported the game over but not the feeling when playing, Power Drift on the other hand was good to play on home computer and I will throw Chase HQ in also as it ported over pretty good.
Fantastic documentary thank you
First time I played Sega games was on the Colecovision. There were quite a few of them made for it,Space Fury ,Zaxxon and Turbo were all really well done for the system. The Star Trek arcade was really impressive especially the sit down cab. Sega has always made good arcade games that are pretty fun and cool to see. Super Monaco GP was amazing for the time, it's a shame the Mega Drive version didn't look as good as the adds made it seem,even though it played great. Until the Sega Saturn nothing was able to touch Galaxy Force 2. Of course their 3D efforts were just as groundbreaking but I suppose that's another video entirely.
Great knowledge and we'll put together. And brings back great memories when games we're made out of passion not total greed.
Amazing knowledge. I mean I grew up with most of these and lived close enough to a huge arcade scene that I could walk there every night and weekends and I didn't even know about a bunch of these and certainly had no idea about the innards to this kind of detail. That's some super sleuthing to get all that mapped out. Why isn't this getting hundreds of thousands of views? Grrr
Awesome Kim! Enjoyed that, some of those early sega cabs look great
And here I thought I was going crazy because I was hearing Street Fighter along with the video. Looks like I'm still sane, whew haha.
I really would have loved to see more titles making use of the hologram cabinets. Never got to play Holoseum, but I certainly remember a local arcade having TimeTraveler. Would have been cool to have seen more swapable boards manufactured by Sega for them, like a take on Space Harrier or a traditional arcade platformer.
This electromechanical shit is fucking awesome and I wish more of it was still around. Big-screen LED Pac-Man seems to be the closest you're getting in arcades.
I was blown away by Outrun, Afterburner and especially Thunderblade when they came out. Still love Outrun and Thunderblade, but I find Afterburner a bit repetitive.
I remember playing most of those electromechanicals. God I feel old.