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Did they ever use early x86 chips in arcade machines?


Keatah

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Sure, Hydro Thunder used some iteration of the Intel-compatible Quicksilver platform. Several others did too, I'm sure.

 

The two most well known uses of a Quicksilver II system is in Midways Hydro Thunder and Offroad Thunder arcade consoles. As used in those two applications Quicksilver II was configured with a Celeron 333, 64 MB of ram, an Obsidian2 90-2440 (which is a Voodoo II with 10 MB of ram, a network card and either a custom version of Win95 or an imbedded version of Windows 2000.

 

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8080 was a forerunner of the x86 series and used in some earlier machines - Z80 was upward compatible with 8080 code and developed by some of the same team so in a way is a forked development but essentially the 8086 and later CPUs bear little relation to it.

 

I can't think of anything off hand that used x86. The thing is that the x86 CPUs of "current generation" were usually very expensive in comparison to the competition. Think hundreds of dollars vs tens for the like of Z80 and 6502.

 

It was just cheaper to use multiples of the other or custom ICs as assistants than to use an x86.

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I found this blog entry, which draws a thin line for 8086 to 80386 meaning there must've been a few such games:

http://jasoneckert.triosdevblog01.ca/blog/Entries/2012/9/2_Arcade_game_CPU_timeline.html

 

At the end of the 1980's, the 68000 seems to have been plentiful in arcade games. I don't know if the 8086/8088 still were much more expensive, or perhaps Intel and the second sourcing manufacturers at that day mainly delivered chips to computer manufacturers. When it comes to arcade games, I suppose one doesn't need a more powerful CPU than there exists graphics hardware etc to feed.

 

After researching the International Arcade Museum, System-16, Wikipedia and a few more, I reached the MAME DB which of course only lists games that MAME will emulate, but I suppose that list contains most of the earlier games.

 

http://www.mamedb.com/search.php

 

I counted the entries for 8086, 8088, 80186 and 80188 and reached to a total number of some 50-60 unique games plus variants and clones. For 386 and 486, I estimate some 40 games of which the majority origin from Russia or China.

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Yes, it seems common to match the 68000 to a 80286, or even an i386SX in some cases although I think the latter has more advanced math functions even without a FPU. When it comes to games, I suppose something calculating a 3D world to be plotted by the graphics system (before there were GPU's that would do the calculations themselves) may be the most demanding. I didn't check the various Russian games, but for what it is worth, those may be clone PC's with a more or less regular motherboard featuring a 386 or 486 CPU and some graphics subsystem. In that case, it is kind of a philosophic question what an arcade game is, if you put a PC inside a cabinet and attach controllers to it, from the outside it will look like any other arcade game but on the inside it runs on the same hardware that any business owner or home user who could afford a PC already got.

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