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The Parts-Bin Approach: Konami’s Contra
- metadat 3y agoThe Konami Decap (linked in TFA) is also worth a read: https://www.patreon.com/posts/49965048 https://www.patreon.com/posts/49965048 I wish Ken Sherriff would do decap teardowns of these chips.. I emailed him the request, but it's a longshot. In the past he has not replied to me (no hard feelings on my end, surely he's very popular and busy).
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoSend him a chip.
- MegaDeKay 3y agoFurrtek is doing great work for arcade game preservation, helping both MAME and the MiSTer project to improve emulation accuracy.
- ipcress_file 3y agoEven as a teenager the anti-Sandinista politics of this game were clear: https://killscreen.com/previously/articles/the-forgotten-politics-behind-contras-name/ https://killscreen.com/previously/articles/the-forgotten-pol... Contra was an early experience that made the propaganda of everyday life visible to me.
- mananaysiempre 3y agoThe (very interesting) article you linked says it’s more of a mockery of anti-Sandinista politics though? (A bit peculiar that it speculates a lot about the original Japanese versions of things but doesn’t actually refer to them.)
- dundarious 3y agoI have to agree, it's a confused article, but has some interesting info.
- ipcress_file 3y agoFair, though the author of the article seems to hedge in both directions: "Or it could have been the product of the opposite: absolutely no self-awareness about how current events can be sneakily channeled or commented on through seemingly brainless media."
- matheusmoreira 3y agoSo many companies had their own custom chips back then. Nowadays even game consoles use parts that are off the shelf PC components. Was it cheaper to make custom hardware in that era?
- bantunes 3y agoI'd say not only cheaper, but the industry hadn't yet standardized regarding graphics technology so a lot of companies were trying different things (and not selling them to competitors at all).
- jonny_eh 3y agoNot only cheaper, but local. Many chips were still made in Japan or US, depending on where you needed them. To be fair, making modern chips is a lot more challenging, so it makes sense that it has become consolidated somewhat.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoModern chips sure, but what about chips from a few generations ago? Do the factories they made 20 years ago for what was then cutting-edge tech still exist and produce things using that era of chip making tech, or have they been modernized?
- rwmj 3y agoVery much so. For example the UK's only FAB in Newport was formerly used to make Inmos Transputers. It can currently do 180nm chips which is late 90s technology. There are very many in Japan if you look at Wikipedia's list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
- rwmj 3y agoDon't know why I wrote "FAB" there. Maybe channelling Thunderbirds ...
- psunavy03 3y agoUp, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start. It was the only way to win . . .
- corysama 3y agoThere was a time in my life where I was an only child, living in the boondocks with Contra as my only game. It was Contra or go walk in the woods again. You know when you beat Contra, it restarts you at the beginning with your remaining lives. After beating the game 3 times in a loop without the Konami code, I decided I was done with it and turned it off.
- skhr0680 3y agoI guess you were done with games too, except maybe "Battletoads"
- userbinator 3y agoWhy it (and what I presume is its DAC) have had their surfaces scratched off is beyond me; The author seems to have arrived at the answer later in the article: I assume these opaque parts codes were meant at least in part to make things a little harder for bootleggers. Sure, you can’t stop them, but you can slow them down. Custom parts are difficult enough to RE, but a common trick was (and to some extent still is) to grind off the markings on common parts. Remember that this is in the 80s, where large databases of ICs, sortable by pinout, were basically nonexistent. Ironically, with the degradation of search engines today, IC part numbers and markings have gotten far more difficult to find too, since there are now so many more companies making parts but search engines are barely indexing them. One wonders if that's a deliberate move from anti-right-to-repair advocates.
- RF_Savage 3y agoOr the n+1 "broker" sites that will sell you every chip under the sun, but don't have datasheets or any info for them.
- TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago> the-best-take-on-iran-contra.html Now that's SEO!