Giving Tron a transparent case and putting theatrically designed extra traces on the board to represent the "World of Tron" inside the device was pretty clever.
"The ROM code is actually included in the microprocessor." Oh wow, so these would be some of the very first systems-on-a-chip (SOCs), huh? Interesting!
AFAIK It was actually factory-preprogrammed(the actual chip's silicon-wafer had fixed memory contents by design). The original Intel 8051 microprocessor(the AVR's grandpa) had the same kind of memory built-in, however it also had an external memory bus which allowed to store the program in a seperate EPROM chip or such.
I wonder if anyone has managed to dump the ROMs of these games. This is an under-preserved part of gaming history and while this old hardware is pretty durable it won't last forever.
I had Caveman and Scramble! No blocky pixels with these lol! I always thought the gameplay was actually pretty good for what they were. Better than most lcd game watches. Going to see what emulation options are available…
As soon as I saw the Lupin one I was like "oh I bet it's based on the anime, I wonder if he's aware of it"...and then the answer turned out to be so much more interesting than I could have possibly imagined.
I had Scramble when I was a kid and I loved it. After the batteries died on in I tried a neat trick where you can supply voltage to the battery terminals directly and skip the batteries altogether. I was 7 (or maybe 8?) when I learned that volts are NOT volts. 110V from the wall straight to it's little 6V circuits. That was the exact moment I learned to fear/respect electricity. Never told my parents.
Tomy was infamous for its reliance on interchangeable parts with its physical toys and electromechanical games like hit and missile, atomic arcade pinball and digital derby. Given the mold costs, there is a lot of clever cost-cutting in these games.
@@eekee6034 Most people think of the bad aspects of cost-cutting, where shortcuts make the thing inferior. But when it's done right, it makes it better and cheaper. Tomy mostly did it right.
As someone who has spent his life in the plastic molding business it is insane how much some of the mold costs just to make a plastic cap, a company could easily go out of business if something happened to one of its higher dollar molds and were lost/stolen with the cavities in them in transport.
I'm amazed at the vibrant colours and how the designers cleverly made the display segments work so well for the graphics - VFDs were such an under-rated display tech, at a time when LCD and LED were so bland by comparison. My first CD changer and home cinema amp in the mid-90s both had VFD displays, with an option to turn it off that was intended to improve sound quality (presumably VFDs are electrically noisy?) but I loved the bright turquoise/blue they put out.
I've always loved these VFD games. My friend Paul had a Scramble he got for his birthday. I remember how jealous I was of it! I currently have "Frisky Tom" and "Puck Man" which are both games I played in the 80's. Great stuff.
My parents bought Scramble for me for Christmas of 1982. My friend somehow got it in his head that my parents would buy him a Scramble game too. He was very upset when they didn't buy it for him. He should've known they wouldn't buy it for him.
One other fun thing is that there was an unlicensed quasi-crossover with Sherlock Holmes in the form of a character called Herlock Sholmès, who also kind of crops up in the Ace Attorney games!
The Lupin novels had Sherlock Holmes in French but the author was sued so the English version have Herlock Sholmes or Homeock Shears, depending on the translation.
The funny thing is Doyle's brother in law created a character who was inspired by Lupin as a counterpoint to Sherlock Holmes. :) He had nothing like the same name, he was Raffles the amateur cracksman.
2:36 So it's a System-on-a-Chip like today's ARM chips. Guess that's how you get 32 I/O lines on a 42-pin chip. It's also RISCy, with almost all instructions taking a single word and single clock cycle. It must have a 12-bit address space. 3:02 It's not exactly "bytes" since the data sheet says the ROM is 10-bit words. 6:20 They should make smartphones with transparent cases. 7:16 It would probably tax the 160 nybbles of RAM to remember a light-cycle-trail matrix. I suppose with a bitmap they could store a 25×25 matrix. 14:07 Do they actually mean 2048 bytes of ROM? 16:28 I guess they figured kids wouldn't know what a pterodactyl is.
I've also found the handling of the light cycle trails odd. Never did any thorough testing, but how long or far off-screen a segment is doesn't seem to 100% correlate with whether it's still there when the player turns back toward it.
I had Tron as a kid, thanks for bringing back old memories. Kids these days will never know how much imagination was necessary for handheld gaming back in the days.
"1 Please always use Tomy dedicated AC adapters. Definitely do not use grounded adapters, please. 2 Change the batteries when the image is dim, or you can't move normally, otherwise if one section has gone out please replace all the batteries. 3 Please do not place on locations likely to have a static electricity discharge (On top of the TV ・Microwave, etc.) 4 Please take special care not to insert juice, candy, or the like into the internals of the body of the unit. 5 If the screen becomes dirty, wipe with a dry cloth. (Please do not use paint thinner or nail polish remover)
I wasn't aware that 4 bit processors were used for things like this after 8 bit ones were available. But it makes sense that 4 bit chips would be repurposed for handhelds when 8 bit chips were still relatively new and expensive.
The 8-bit processors of the time couldn't drive high-voltage VFD's and tended to require external support chips (memory, ROM, timers, transistors for the VFD drive and so on). So it wasn't just the processor, the support circuits could easily cost as much as the cpu itself. In comparison the 4-bit calculator chip used had all that integrated to make the cheapest possible VFD based calculators, they were close to being the first modern "SOC" (complete system) in comparison and was cheap because calculators used a LOT of these and was extremely price sensitive. AFAIK most pocket calculators still use 4-bit CPUs to this day (obviously driving LCDs instead). Best guess, using 8-bit processor would have made them totally non-viable (as in "massively increase production cost"). As mentioned these were priced similar to higher end cartridge games which pretty much only has a few dirt cheap ROMs in them. Basically these only exist BECAUSE of those 4-bit calculator chips was already there and someone figured out a secondary market for them.
Lupin was released in germany too... drove my mother nearly to madness with the sound of it *laughs* and i think i still could play it nearly blind ...
I had Caveman! Super fun for the time. Also, around the same time had a racing game shaped like space-age binoculars, and it was 3D! I think that was a Tomy.
16:40 - Is that a knockoff of the Pink Panther theme? Could be...was common for video games of the 80's and 90's. Also, cute collection. In an age when Tiger-style handhelds were black and white, it's refreshing to see.
I honestly expected these to be terrible but they seriously did everything they could with what they had I mean four freaking games with that wacky LCD thing? That's genius I guess it makes sense that it would be a vfd.
I use to develop assembly code for National Semiconductor's COPS 4-bit microprocessors in the early 80's. We used them in TV cable converter boxes. I was sent to a training seminar once and everyone else there was pretty evenly split between toy companies (mostly from Mattel) and car manufacturers.
Very cool! I've never heard from anyone who worked with them. I'd love to hear about the tools and process you used; did you have special development boards? I assume you did the programming on a fairly powerful desktop computer (or maybe a mini?) and then did you have to burn ROMs to test the code, or was there some serial link? What did you use for your display while testing, before the production VFDs (or LCDs or whatever) were made? That kind of thing. Sorry for the nerdy questions, I'm just very curious :)
@@8_BitProgram development was much lower tech than you might imagine. We were using standard seven-segment led displays, so no cool VFD screens. You prototyped with a ROM-less version of your target micro-controller. The development system, supplied by National, used a single 8-inch floppy to store all your source and assembled files. It was connected to a terminal, printer, and PROM programmer. You used an O-scope for all your circuit/code debugging. We were generally only dealing with 1k of memory. But, it was amazing how much you could shoehorn into it.
The Caveman theme at 16:40 sounds suspiciously like Henry Mancini's iconic Pink Panther theme. (Seems to me the "gentleman thief" theme of Lupin would have been more in keeping with that music, since the first Pink Panther film had a character like that.)
It took me a while but I briefly went through HMCS44A data sheet. 2176 words is a total ROM size. First 2048 words can contain both code and pattern, latter only patterns. P instruction takes 2 cycles and loads constant to A and B regs or output 8 bits through R30-R43 pins. Program Counter loops within a page and goes in wierd polynomial sequence. Instruction clock is 100 kHz.
"Translucent shell..." It actually _transparent_ and shaded. When something is translucent that means that it lets light through but is textured/scrambled so you can't see the detail on the other side.
Scramble has a visual grid is 4x8 = 32 words. Each word is able to represent 4 bits, so it is what we are seeing at least in Scramble, the line at the bottom, the square at the top, the bullet, the wings and the rocket (I think they allowed some combinations of them instead of one-byte one symbol). The player has 4 positions = 1 word but it is always at the left. Each missile should have a position x,y (X uses 2 words and Y uses a word), or using an index (2 words). Each enemy uses 2 words or 3 words (I think it could hold up to 4-5 enemies, 5 x 3 = 15). 32 + 1 + 3 + 15 = 51 words out of 160, so there is room for other things such as the boss, the level, the lives, the score, the program, music and level are in the ROM, so there is enough RAM for more stuff, Lupin uses a 5x9 grid so it is a waste of more resources. So, what I am talking about, the CPU is slow but it is enough for even more. The RAM was the main constraint. The Atari 2600 has 128 bytes of ram but it was 8 bytes, so it was almost the same as this 4-bit chips.
I never expected those VDFs to be so detailed. The Tron one shows such a great usage of the technology with the re-using and the different colors, I've never seen this before.
CPU has 8x12 GPIO lines which can drive matrix. Also 4 lines are bit accessed and I guess they are for keyboard scan mostly. Rest of the screen must come from Patterns that Robin mentioned when walking through PDFs. But I agree that authors were very creative on colors and clever segment reuse.
I had Caveman, Fire-away, Q-Bert, Pacman and Frogger...I played them all until they broke, fixed them and kept playing....I didnt even like that Caveman game lol
NOT THE LCDS!!! NOOOOOOOOO (great video though :D) EDIT: Wow, the Tron game was super innovative. I was expecting Game & Watch style stuff. Also, great camerawork!
Isn't amazing what could be done and still be entertaining given the limitations at the time. No high power processors and cpus and loads of memory to throw at the problem.
Only since his second channel, where Adrian starts with his hands, too. BTW, I think that Llopis is a rather good Adrian, whereas Aaron is just a greasy salesman who tries to become one.
Fantastic memories. For my birthday I got the frogger game, that I played to death My cousin had the double players pac man game and I really was jealous at it. 20 years later I asked him if he could give me and he did. On a flea market I found caveman (boxed). And I also have the DK game. Thanks for bringing back memories of a fantastic and unique era, with extremely creative people behind these vfd's (clever segments reuse)
Had never seen Caveman before, looks awesome. Never seen Lupin gameplay before, looks great too, Lupin is possibly the best one of this type of game overall! Would love for that to come to RA emulation. These games were actually really good. Astro Wars really holds up today i think. Thanks for the video 🎉
Really cool video here! I remember a childhood friend of mine lending me his TRON game for a day or two. I was lucky to have a power supply at home that was compatible with it so I didn't have to use batteries with it. I also bought my very first LCD game called SPACE CRUSHER by Radio Shack with was basically the same as Scramble. I still have that little game and it's in near mint condition. Such great memories of such a simple but very rich childhood due to toys that really inspired you to use your imagination or that captured your attention in a whole new way despite being very simplistic by today's standards. Again, great video here! Nostalgic and fun _(and slightly bittersweet)_ blast from the past...
That caveman bears a slight resemblance to Lisa Simpson. Just add a pearl necklace and a saxophone. My brother had the Skramble game, but I remember it being in a taller case like one of those miniature upright arcade games, with a taller screen as if it had a few more vertical segments. My only handheld games were a couple of LDC games from Tiger Electronics, and a mechanical alien ship shooter in a miniature arcade game case that had a tiny record player for the sound effects. I've found a similar game called Cosmic Clash, so I think that may have been it.
Amazing, I have a hard time understanding how a minute, fragile chip (even for those years) could be robust enough to even withstand, let alone produce, 50V across it, even if the current were to be very low.
Wow, we had the Caveman game as a kid (and probably drove our parents nuts with the music it plays). I didn't realize that there were other similar games, but I guess it shouldn't surprise me. Thanks for the vid!
I wouldn't put much faith in the gender of the dinosaur from the instructions. They did the same thing with Samus Aran in Metroid when it came to the US. It was translated wrong and "he" was actually supposed to be "she". I'm betting this might be the same way. OR maybe the dinosaur is related to Birdo from Super Mario 2 :D
Omg, i'm once have that Scramble when i was i kid. When i see your video i suddenly recall that opening melody. So wonder it still stuck on my head this long. Can't remember what happen to it.
In the Tron game, those names are all motorcycles on the fake pcb.. Probably to reference the lightcycle. CB is Honda, XS and YZ are Yamaha, not sure who TS is though..
Its amazing how much better these games are than the crappy "Tiger" LCD games that were being made as much as 20 years later than these! These were simple, but actually fun. Tiger games were just pretty decals printed on worthless plastic.
Lupin was unlikely to be released in the US since the original novels Lupin the 3rd were an unofficial sequel to were not in the pubic domain in the US yet. In the 80s when Lupin the 3rD media was released here his name was changed to Thief or Wolf, if the game was released over here it was most likely rebranded to one of those names or a US cartoon. Very interesting video, thanks for making it.
The dinosaur might have been a "she" and they just didn't translate it that way. Japanese often use non gender-specific pronouns and it would have been up to the translator to "guess" what was meant. I would be very surprised if it was intended to be a "he."
Pretty darn awesome what they could do with those VFD displays, especially in Scramble. The same could have been done in Game & Watch, but they never had anything like scrolling.
Welp guess I'm getting a crunchyroll sub now... 😄 I have a bunch of dvds of the 2nd season but am missing a couple to round it off and idk if I've seen much from any of the other seasons
The Lupin game seems to me to have been originally manufactured with the intent of being a license of Lupin the 3rd, as the "marquee" prominently features a Walther P-38, which is Lupin the 3rd's weapon of choice. The character also seems to have a "tie" (well, that's what the black line in the center of his body implies to me) which is an iconic part of the character's outfit. Funny that the box has no reference to the manga series, I wonder if the license fell through once they had already started on production and they had to pivot. Anyway, the whole controversy surrounding the original Lupin's copyright always seemed kind of hypocritical to me, since Leblanc didn't think to ask permission to feature Sherlock Holmes in his Lupin stories--only changing the character's name to "Herlock Sholmes" once Conan Doyle's lawyers got involved. Ah well, c'est la vie.
Wow. "Herlock Sholmes." That's the kind of lazy, goofy parody name I associate with kids' cartoons, not French authors from old-timey times. It's also amusing to learn that people were getting in trouble for copyright violations even back then.
@@stevethepocket Fun fact, most American versions of Charles Dickens stories were pirated, something he bitterly disputed in several long, drawn-out, and financially draining lawsuits. When there’s a whole ocean between you and you don’t have, you know, email, there wasn’t a lot stopping people from just...taking his words and printing their own versions
Thank you for making this great video. As a kid in the 80s I went down the other Wishbook path to the Atari VCS, but I've always been fascinated by these VFD games. The Tomy ones, especially. It's really ingenious how they worked around the limitations of the technology (and the price point.)
The Caveman game looks pretty awesome, especially for it's time. With multiple, changing, levels these games were far more advanced than play 'n watch style handhelds.
I first saw that Tron game at my cousin's house when I was about three or four. The translucent plastic, the glowing VFD display, and the high-pitched piezo beeper sound made it seem ultra-futuristic and almost magical in a way. I never did get past the first disk level but the sights and sounds were firmly etched in my memory ever since. Thanks for sharing your collection of these handheld games.
I had Caveman! Mine had a green surround on the screen rather than your blue and, despite having the "TOMY" emblem on the case it was distributed by Grandstand here in the UK (the Grandstand logo was printed on the screen surround). I put a lot of hours into that game back in the day. Thanks for memories!
I have the Tomy branded Caveman, and it's interesting, because the instructions on the battery door and a sticker by the DC power jack is all in Japanese. The artwork around the bezel is slightly different. It says "Jr Caveman vs Dinosaur above "Caveman." has graphics for main characters. Also says "Tomy Micro Computer Game Dynamic Multiscreen LSI-CPU FIP Index Panel." The "teradactyl" is actually labeled "Dragon." Gameplay is a bit different from amateur to pro. Seems unlimited axe supply in beginner mode without having to travel back. Couldn't tell on your unit, but if the caveman gets hit trying to take an egg he "rolls backwards." DC jack is 6V negative tip. My Goodwill sticker still says $2.99.
I realize now that I forgot to demonstrate PRO mode, and yeah, you need to pick up new axes at the left side of the screen after every shot, while in AMA you have unlimited axes with you. Your description of the bezel makes it sound like you somehow ended up with a Japanese release, like my Lupin game. Interesting what will find its way to Goodwill!
Oh man, I love these old VFD games! They were so creative with how they incorporated multiple game modes, using a single, non-overlapping grid. I've been developing a Tiger Electronics styled game for fun, but I do want to try making a simpler VFD styled game, eventually.
It’s interesting that the word “lupine” means: of, or relating to, wolves. In fiction, specifically, werewolves. While I don’t think the original characters had anything to do with werewolves; with anime, you just never know. The game shows a bullet being fired, and legend says you need a silver bullet to kill a werewolf, So I wonder if the game’s creator was trying to poke fun at werewolves? In this case, if you set fun = $C030, and you POKE fun, in AppleSoft BASIC, the speaker will click on an Apple ][-series computer! FOR even more fun, POKE in a loop for a buzzing sound! 😊
Not sure if it was on purpose but the designations in your Tron box: CB, YZ, TS, and XS are all motorcycle model numbers from around the early 80s ish. TS was a Suzuki CB Honda, YZ Yamaha not sure about XS but pretty sure it was something.
Very cool, I loved the added detail about the microprocessors (nerdy, but intriguing to see the stuff about binary words and BCD support). The only one of these VFD games I had was Galaxy Twinvader from CGL/Grandstand. It was a Galaga style game but the aliens had two parts to shoot, a bit like the aliens that split apart in Moon Cresta. Sadly the joystick broke and I no longer have it.
I have probably 20 or 30 VFD games. I always thought they were pretty neat. Some are surprisingly good. I have a different version of Scramble in an entirely different form factor which also has a speed-up knob. Scramble is one of the better games. I have a game called astro fighter or something, by Radio Shack, a space fighter game that is pretty good for a VFD game. I think the biggest thing holding them back was really the lack of computing power. It would be interesting to build a kind of simulator that allows you to define VFD segments and a better processor and more RAM just to see what could be done. But they got too ambitious with most of these games or with games which just are not suitable for the VFD display. Donkey Kong and Pac Man are great examples of games not suitable for VFD technology.
This video really show cases your video game playing skills, no doubt honed over decades of play. How many time do you think you've pressed the fire button in your life? I suspect that count wouldn't fit in a Uint32 :-)
I've still got one of mine from when I was a kid in the UK. It's the grey Alien Attack one (same game as scramble) I also had caveman later on, but it was in a red case.
My parents bought the Tomy Scramble for me for Christmas of 1982. It was awesome. It actually has 5 levels. That's pretty good for a VFD game. Tomy also made a handheld version of Pac-Man but it sucked. Many people hated the Atari 2600 Pac-Man but it was better than Tomy's Pac-Man.
The game was renamed in the UK as there was already a VFD game called Scramble with the same form factor on the market, by Granstand, no idea if they got a license for it. I got it for Christmas in 1982 as I loved Scramble in the Arcade, wish I got your version much closer to the arcade game.
And the memories come flooding back, mainly of the Scramble one, sneaking goes under my bed covers in the night, hahaha. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the screens of these presented so well, before, btw.
4:12 - minor correction - the cheaper Atari games weren't because they weren't "name brand" like Space Invaders; $30 was pretty standard for a new game; the first few cheaper games in that 1981 catalog were all older games. Baseball was a launch title (1977) and Football was from 1978. Race was so expensive because it included racing paddle controllers.
Giving Tron a transparent case and putting theatrically designed extra traces on the board to represent the "World of Tron" inside the device was pretty clever.
"The ROM code is actually included in the microprocessor." Oh wow, so these would be some of the very first systems-on-a-chip (SOCs), huh? Interesting!
This was fairly common, then some smart arse decided it needed a new fangled name so SOC came to be.
@@paulstubbs7678: Why do you believe the term "system on a chip" came from what you call a "smart arse"?
AFAIK It was actually factory-preprogrammed(the actual chip's silicon-wafer had fixed memory contents by design). The original Intel 8051 microprocessor(the AVR's grandpa) had the same kind of memory built-in, however it also had an external memory bus which allowed to store the program in a seperate EPROM chip or such.
@@MrKata55: So we're still talking about an SOC.
Technically that probably would have been calculators, of which these were an offshoot.
I wonder if anyone has managed to dump the ROMs of these games. This is an under-preserved part of gaming history and while this old hardware is pretty durable it won't last forever.
I just did some searching around, it looks like Kevtris has dumped all them except Lupin.
They're in here:
blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/Handhelds/VFD%20Games/
@@Cherijo78 Thank you!
I had Caveman and Scramble! No blocky pixels with these lol! I always thought the gameplay was actually pretty good for what they were. Better than most lcd game watches.
Going to see what emulation options are available…
I was playing Tron on my Steam Deck. @@DJFace147
I had that Tron game, it's clever how they put different modes into it.
That game looks fun! Many of those games were kinda lame. But they did look cool for back then!
As soon as I saw the Lupin one I was like "oh I bet it's based on the anime, I wonder if he's aware of it"...and then the answer turned out to be so much more interesting than I could have possibly imagined.
I had Scramble when I was a kid and I loved it. After the batteries died on in I tried a neat trick where you can supply voltage to the battery terminals directly and skip the batteries altogether. I was 7 (or maybe 8?) when I learned that volts are NOT volts. 110V from the wall straight to it's little 6V circuits. That was the exact moment I learned to fear/respect electricity. Never told my parents.
Those games aren't cheap. Been looking for affordable versions for a long time.
Not only that but the technology just wasn’t there yet.
I have Caveman, the funnest one.
Lupin III : The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), was the first film by Miyazaki better known for Studio Ghibli
Secret of Momo was 1st
I doubt modern viewers will understand just how special and magical these games felt.
Bought the Tron one at a Flea Market in the 90s for $5 or so.
Tomy was infamous for its reliance on interchangeable parts with its physical toys and electromechanical games like hit and missile, atomic arcade pinball and digital derby. Given the mold costs, there is a lot of clever cost-cutting in these games.
I always loved the interchangable parts. Modularity seemed like a cool trick to me when I was a kid, :) plus I liked cost-saving where it didn't hurt.
@@eekee6034 Most people think of the bad aspects of cost-cutting, where shortcuts make the thing inferior. But when it's done right, it makes it better and cheaper. Tomy mostly did it right.
As someone who has spent his life in the plastic molding business it is insane how much some of the mold costs just to make a plastic cap, a company could easily go out of business if something happened to one of its higher dollar molds and were lost/stolen with the cavities in them in transport.
I'm amazed at the vibrant colours and how the designers cleverly made the display segments work so well for the graphics - VFDs were such an under-rated display tech, at a time when LCD and LED were so bland by comparison.
My first CD changer and home cinema amp in the mid-90s both had VFD displays, with an option to turn it off that was intended to improve sound quality (presumably VFDs are electrically noisy?) but I loved the bright turquoise/blue they put out.
I've always loved these VFD games. My friend Paul had a Scramble he got for his birthday. I remember how jealous I was of it!
I currently have "Frisky Tom" and "Puck Man" which are both games I played in the 80's. Great stuff.
My parents bought Scramble for me for Christmas of 1982. My friend somehow got it in his head that my parents would buy him a Scramble game too. He was very upset when they didn't buy it for him. He should've known they wouldn't buy it for him.
I had a friend who had the Tron version in the 80's ... He was very popular 😄 and we all wanted it
One other fun thing is that there was an unlicensed quasi-crossover with Sherlock Holmes in the form of a character called Herlock Sholmès, who also kind of crops up in the Ace Attorney games!
The Lupin novels had Sherlock Holmes in French but the author was sued so the English version have Herlock Sholmes or Homeock Shears, depending on the translation.
The funny thing is Doyle's brother in law created a character who was inspired by Lupin as a counterpoint to Sherlock Holmes. :) He had nothing like the same name, he was Raffles the amateur cracksman.
Those games are truly amazing pieces of tech.
I grew up with tiger black and white garbage...
Thank you for your demonstration.
Oh man I had caveman and scramble. Still at my mum and dad's and still working.
Caveman I played a ton. Has surprisingly enjoyable gameplay.
I had the Tron game years back. I got so good at it, I flipped the score. Good memories. Thank you for sharing!
Now I get why cavemen died so soon: egg-only diet, basically meaning cholesterol killed them.
That's a myth. Eggs are protein-rich, not cholestrol-rich.
2:36 So it's a System-on-a-Chip like today's ARM chips. Guess that's how you get 32 I/O lines on a 42-pin chip. It's also RISCy, with almost all instructions taking a single word and single clock cycle. It must have a 12-bit address space.
3:02 It's not exactly "bytes" since the data sheet says the ROM is 10-bit words.
6:20 They should make smartphones with transparent cases.
7:16 It would probably tax the 160 nybbles of RAM to remember a light-cycle-trail matrix. I suppose with a bitmap they could store a 25×25 matrix.
14:07 Do they actually mean 2048 bytes of ROM?
16:28 I guess they figured kids wouldn't know what a pterodactyl is.
More of a microcontroller, I'd say. SoCs tend to lack onboard memory, whereas microcontrollers contain their own ROM and RAM.
I've also found the handling of the light cycle trails odd. Never did any thorough testing, but how long or far off-screen a segment is doesn't seem to 100% correlate with whether it's still there when the player turns back toward it.
I had Tron as a kid, thanks for bringing back old memories. Kids these days will never know how much imagination was necessary for handheld gaming back in the days.
@30:41
1 ACアダプターは、必ずトミー専用アダプターをご使用ください。地のアダプターは、絶対に使用しないでください。
2 乾電池の交換は、画面が暗くなったり、正常な動作をしなくなったとき又、画面が一部消えるようになったときに、全部の乾電池を交換してください。
3 静電気の発生するような場所（テレビ・電子レンジ等の上）には、置かないでください。
4 本体内部にジュースなどの飲物や、お菓子類の粉などが入ると故障の原因になりますので充分にご注意ください。
5 表面板の汚れは、乾いた布でふいてください。（シンナーや除光液は使わないでください）
© TOMY
"1 Please always use Tomy dedicated AC adapters. Definitely do not use grounded adapters, please.
2 Change the batteries when the image is dim, or you can't move normally, otherwise if one section has gone out please replace all the batteries.
3 Please do not place on locations likely to have a static electricity discharge (On top of the TV ・Microwave, etc.)
4 Please take special care not to insert juice, candy, or the like into the internals of the body of the unit.
5 If the screen becomes dirty, wipe with a dry cloth. (Please do not use paint thinner or nail polish remover)
I wasn't aware that 4 bit processors were used for things like this after 8 bit ones were available. But it makes sense that 4 bit chips would be repurposed for handhelds when 8 bit chips were still relatively new and expensive.
The 8-bit processors of the time couldn't drive high-voltage VFD's and tended to require external support chips (memory, ROM, timers, transistors for the VFD drive and so on). So it wasn't just the processor, the support circuits could easily cost as much as the cpu itself.
In comparison the 4-bit calculator chip used had all that integrated to make the cheapest possible VFD based calculators, they were close to being the first modern "SOC" (complete system) in comparison and was cheap because calculators used a LOT of these and was extremely price sensitive.
AFAIK most pocket calculators still use 4-bit CPUs to this day (obviously driving LCDs instead).
Best guess, using 8-bit processor would have made them totally non-viable (as in "massively increase production cost"). As mentioned these were priced similar to higher end cartridge games which pretty much only has a few dirt cheap ROMs in them. Basically these only exist BECAUSE of those 4-bit calculator chips was already there and someone figured out a secondary market for them.
@@Torbjorn.Lindgren Great explanation!
Lupin was released in germany too... drove my mother nearly to madness with the sound of it *laughs* and i think i still could play it nearly blind ...
I remember these as a kid funny how the games went from these, great graphics and highly playable to tiger crap. Tron looks amazing!!
I had Caveman! Super fun for the time. Also, around the same time had a racing game shaped like space-age binoculars, and it was 3D! I think that was a Tomy.
Yes, they did a series of 3D games with the binocular form factor. Trying to capture that gameplay on video would be really difficult I bet!
You're pretty good at these games! Those VFDs sure are nicer looking than the tiger LCDs, and the games have a lot more effort put into them also.
16:40 - Is that a knockoff of the Pink Panther theme? Could be...was common for video games of the 80's and 90's.
Also, cute collection. In an age when Tiger-style handhelds were black and white, it's refreshing to see.
I'm impressed by how good these look for the (original) price. The art for the caveman game is really cute too.
$20 in 1981 is the same as $60-$65 today.
Last time I was this early, it was 1982 and I'd had my first glimpse as a 5 year old of a C64 at a family friends house.
Harrr haaaarrrrr! :-D
I honestly expected these to be terrible but they seriously did everything they could with what they had I mean four freaking games with that wacky LCD thing? That's genius
I guess it makes sense that it would be a vfd.
I use to develop assembly code for National Semiconductor's COPS 4-bit microprocessors in the early 80's. We used them in TV cable converter boxes. I was sent to a training seminar once and everyone else there was pretty evenly split between toy companies (mostly from Mattel) and car manufacturers.
Very cool! I've never heard from anyone who worked with them. I'd love to hear about the tools and process you used; did you have special development boards? I assume you did the programming on a fairly powerful desktop computer (or maybe a mini?) and then did you have to burn ROMs to test the code, or was there some serial link? What did you use for your display while testing, before the production VFDs (or LCDs or whatever) were made? That kind of thing. Sorry for the nerdy questions, I'm just very curious :)
@@8_BitProgram development was much lower tech than you might imagine. We were using standard seven-segment led displays, so no cool VFD screens. You prototyped with a ROM-less version of your target micro-controller. The development system, supplied by National, used a single 8-inch floppy to store all your source and assembled files. It was connected to a terminal, printer, and PROM programmer. You used an O-scope for all your circuit/code debugging. We were generally only dealing with 1k of memory. But, it was amazing how much you could shoehorn into it.
Awesome, thanks for the info. I sometimes think that sort of thing would have been my dream job had I been born 10 years earlier!
@6:24 They are real life motorbike model numbers probably meant as an ode to the lightcycles in the movie Tron
The Caveman theme at 16:40 sounds suspiciously like Henry Mancini's iconic Pink Panther theme. (Seems to me the "gentleman thief" theme of Lupin would have been more in keeping with that music, since the first Pink Panther film had a character like that.)
It took me a while but I briefly went through HMCS44A data sheet. 2176 words is a total ROM size. First 2048 words can contain both code and pattern, latter only patterns. P instruction takes 2 cycles and loads constant to A and B regs or output 8 bits through R30-R43 pins. Program Counter loops within a page and goes in wierd polynomial sequence. Instruction clock is 100 kHz.
these are like....an order of magnitude better than those crappy tiger electronics handhelds.
"Translucent shell..." It actually _transparent_ and shaded. When something is translucent that means that it lets light through but is textured/scrambled so you can't see the detail on the other side.
When i was child i have Lupin. Tank you. i went back to my childhood.
I love the extra details they did on the Tron console
Scramble has a visual grid is 4x8 = 32 words. Each word is able to represent 4 bits, so it is what we are seeing at least in Scramble, the line at the bottom, the square at the top, the bullet, the wings and the rocket (I think they allowed some combinations of them instead of one-byte one symbol).
The player has 4 positions = 1 word but it is always at the left.
Each missile should have a position x,y (X uses 2 words and Y uses a word), or using an index (2 words).
Each enemy uses 2 words or 3 words (I think it could hold up to 4-5 enemies, 5 x 3 = 15).
32 + 1 + 3 + 15 = 51 words out of 160, so there is room for other things such as the boss, the level, the lives, the score, the program, music and level are in the ROM, so there is enough RAM for more stuff, Lupin uses a 5x9 grid so it is a waste of more resources.
So, what I am talking about, the CPU is slow but it is enough for even more. The RAM was the main constraint. The Atari 2600 has 128 bytes of ram but it was 8 bytes, so it was almost the same as this 4-bit chips.
I never expected those VDFs to be so detailed. The Tron one shows such a great usage of the technology with the re-using and the different colors, I've never seen this before.
CPU has 8x12 GPIO lines which can drive matrix. Also 4 lines are bit accessed and I guess they are for keyboard scan mostly. Rest of the screen must come from Patterns that Robin mentioned when walking through PDFs. But I agree that authors were very creative on colors and clever segment reuse.
I had Caveman, Fire-away, Q-Bert, Pacman and Frogger...I played them all until they broke, fixed them and kept playing....I didnt even like that Caveman game lol
NOT THE LCDS!!! NOOOOOOOOO (great video though :D)
EDIT: Wow, the Tron game was super innovative. I was expecting Game & Watch style stuff. Also, great camerawork!
Isn't amazing what could be done and still be entertaining given the limitations at the time.
No high power processors and cpus and loads of memory to throw at the problem.
This was very interesting and complete. Thank you
Thanks! Oh, I see you have some calculator watch videos, I have to... watch!
”LSI CPU” :) LSI sometimes mean Large Scale Integration, which I guess is technically correct but sounds a bit ”optimistic” for 4-bit processors.
I always think Robin is Adrian !
And I always think Adrian is Robin!
Only since his second channel, where Adrian starts with his hands, too.
BTW, I think that Llopis is a rather good Adrian, whereas Aaron is just a greasy salesman who tries to become one.
Fantastic memories.
For my birthday I got the frogger game, that I played to death
My cousin had the double players pac man game and I really was jealous at it.
20 years later I asked him if he could give me and he did.
On a flea market I found caveman (boxed).
And I also have the DK game.
Thanks for bringing back memories of a fantastic and unique era, with extremely creative people behind these vfd's (clever segments reuse)
Had never seen Caveman before, looks awesome. Never seen Lupin gameplay before, looks great too, Lupin is possibly the best one of this type of game overall! Would love for that to come to RA emulation. These games were actually really good. Astro Wars really holds up today i think.
Thanks for the video 🎉
Really cool video here! I remember a childhood friend of mine lending me his TRON game for a day or two. I was lucky to have a power supply at home that was compatible with it so I didn't have to use batteries with it.
I also bought my very first LCD game called SPACE CRUSHER by Radio Shack with was basically the same as Scramble. I still have that little game and it's in near mint condition. Such great memories of such a simple but very rich childhood due to toys that really inspired you to use your imagination or that captured your attention in a whole new way despite being very simplistic by today's standards.
Again, great video here! Nostalgic and fun _(and slightly bittersweet)_ blast from the past...
That caveman bears a slight resemblance to Lisa Simpson. Just add a pearl necklace and a saxophone. My brother had the Skramble game, but I remember it being in a taller case like one of those miniature upright arcade games, with a taller screen as if it had a few more vertical segments. My only handheld games were a couple of LDC games from Tiger Electronics, and a mechanical alien ship shooter in a miniature arcade game case that had a tiny record player for the sound effects. I've found a similar game called Cosmic Clash, so I think that may have been it.
Amazing, I have a hard time understanding how a minute, fragile chip (even for those years) could be robust enough to even withstand, let alone produce, 50V across it, even if the current were to be very low.
Wow, we had the Caveman game as a kid (and probably drove our parents nuts with the music it plays). I didn't realize that there were other similar games, but I guess it shouldn't surprise me. Thanks for the vid!
I wouldn't put much faith in the gender of the dinosaur from the instructions. They did the same thing with Samus Aran in Metroid when it came to the US. It was translated wrong and "he" was actually supposed to be "she". I'm betting this might be the same way. OR maybe the dinosaur is related to Birdo from Super Mario 2 :D
Great video, very informative! As a side note, I didn't know that Lisa Simpson was a prehistoric egg hunter, LOL
Omg, i'm once have that Scramble when i was i kid. When i see your video i suddenly recall that opening melody. So wonder it still stuck on my head this long. Can't remember what happen to it.
In the Tron game, those names are all motorcycles on the fake pcb.. Probably to reference the lightcycle. CB is Honda, XS and YZ are Yamaha, not sure who TS is though..
Nice catch!
I'd say TS references to Suzuki TS 400 - same time period.
Say Tomytronic Tron 10 times fast
Its amazing how much better these games are than the crappy "Tiger" LCD games that were being made as much as 20 years later than these! These were simple, but actually fun. Tiger games were just pretty decals printed on worthless plastic.
Dan from Game Grumps has talked about an old primitive game called Caveman that was a solo unit. This is probably it
Lupin was unlikely to be released in the US since the original novels Lupin the 3rd were an unofficial sequel to were not in the pubic domain in the US yet.
In the 80s when Lupin the 3rD media was released here his name was changed to Thief or Wolf, if the game was released over here it was most likely rebranded to one of those names or a US cartoon.
Very interesting video, thanks for making it.
The dinosaur might have been a "she" and they just didn't translate it that way. Japanese often use non gender-specific pronouns and it would have been up to the translator to "guess" what was meant. I would be very surprised if it was intended to be a "he."
Pretty darn awesome what they could do with those VFD displays, especially in Scramble. The same could have been done in Game & Watch, but they never had anything like scrolling.
Super Mario Bros Game&Watch June 25, 1986 had scrolling.
Lupin III is awesome. I love the TV series and movies.
Lupin the 3rd is still up on Crunchyroll, parts 1 - 5 (~24 videos per part except part 2 which has 234 episodes)
Cheers,
Welp guess I'm getting a crunchyroll sub now... 😄 I have a bunch of dvds of the 2nd season but am missing a couple to round it off and idk if I've seen much from any of the other seasons
The Lupin game seems to me to have been originally manufactured with the intent of being a license of Lupin the 3rd, as the "marquee" prominently features a Walther P-38, which is Lupin the 3rd's weapon of choice. The character also seems to have a "tie" (well, that's what the black line in the center of his body implies to me) which is an iconic part of the character's outfit. Funny that the box has no reference to the manga series, I wonder if the license fell through once they had already started on production and they had to pivot.
Anyway, the whole controversy surrounding the original Lupin's copyright always seemed kind of hypocritical to me, since Leblanc didn't think to ask permission to feature Sherlock Holmes in his Lupin stories--only changing the character's name to "Herlock Sholmes" once Conan Doyle's lawyers got involved. Ah well, c'est la vie.
Wow. "Herlock Sholmes." That's the kind of lazy, goofy parody name I associate with kids' cartoons, not French authors from old-timey times. It's also amusing to learn that people were getting in trouble for copyright violations even back then.
@@stevethepocket Fun fact, most American versions of Charles Dickens stories were pirated, something he bitterly disputed in several long, drawn-out, and financially draining lawsuits. When there’s a whole ocean between you and you don’t have, you know, email, there wasn’t a lot stopping people from just...taking his words and printing their own versions
Thank you for making this great video. As a kid in the 80s I went down the other Wishbook path to the Atari VCS, but I've always been fascinated by these VFD games. The Tomy ones, especially. It's really ingenious how they worked around the limitations of the technology (and the price point.)
The Caveman game looks pretty awesome, especially for it's time. With multiple, changing, levels these games were far more advanced than play 'n watch style handhelds.
Helou, sou do Brasil e tenho um tron original modelo Black 1981 funcionando e tenho interesse em vender...
great content...thank you :)
closing song is awesome ^^
These 1982 games are far superior to the handheld Tiger games made in the late 90s!
Nice little machines from the past... Can they run Crysis?
The fake PCB in the Tron game would have fooled me.
"Well no wonder it doesn't work; they've forgotten to solder the components on!"
I first saw that Tron game at my cousin's house when I was about three or four. The translucent plastic, the glowing VFD display, and the high-pitched piezo beeper sound made it seem ultra-futuristic and almost magical in a way. I never did get past the first disk level but the sights and sounds were firmly etched in my memory ever since. Thanks for sharing your collection of these handheld games.
I had Caveman! Mine had a green surround on the screen rather than your blue and, despite having the "TOMY" emblem on the case it was distributed by Grandstand here in the UK (the Grandstand logo was printed on the screen surround). I put a lot of hours into that game back in the day. Thanks for memories!
I have the Tomy branded Caveman, and it's interesting, because the instructions on the battery door and a sticker by the DC power jack is all in Japanese. The artwork around the bezel is slightly different. It says "Jr Caveman vs Dinosaur above "Caveman." has graphics for main characters. Also says "Tomy Micro Computer Game Dynamic Multiscreen LSI-CPU FIP Index Panel." The "teradactyl" is actually labeled "Dragon." Gameplay is a bit different from amateur to pro. Seems unlimited axe supply in beginner mode without having to travel back. Couldn't tell on your unit, but if the caveman gets hit trying to take an egg he "rolls backwards." DC jack is 6V negative tip. My Goodwill sticker still says $2.99.
I realize now that I forgot to demonstrate PRO mode, and yeah, you need to pick up new axes at the left side of the screen after every shot, while in AMA you have unlimited axes with you. Your description of the bezel makes it sound like you somehow ended up with a Japanese release, like my Lupin game. Interesting what will find its way to Goodwill!
Caveman, the "beat the mother dinosaur over her head with the axe so you can steal her babies game".
this is open source?
they show the circuits damn!
Oh man, I love these old VFD games!
They were so creative with how they incorporated multiple game modes, using a single, non-overlapping grid.
I've been developing a Tiger Electronics styled game for fun, but I do want to try making a simpler VFD styled game, eventually.
@30:38 トミーLSIゲーム パックマンゲーム専用アダプター以外は絶対ご使用にならいないでください。
"Definitely do not use dedicated adapters other than (those produced for) Tomy LSI games or PacMan games."
Love the look of these games!
you forgot vfds look awesome on the reason list
Playing like an OG schoolyard champion there!
It’s interesting that the word “lupine” means: of, or relating to, wolves. In fiction, specifically, werewolves. While I don’t think the original characters had anything to do with werewolves; with anime, you just never know. The game shows a bullet being fired, and legend says you need a silver bullet to kill a werewolf, So I wonder if the game’s creator was trying to poke fun at werewolves? In this case, if you set fun = $C030, and you POKE fun, in AppleSoft BASIC, the speaker will click on an Apple ][-series computer! FOR even more fun, POKE in a loop for a buzzing sound! 😊
As in "a lupine-wavelength haemovariform"? :p
Not sure if it was on purpose but the designations in your Tron box: CB, YZ, TS, and XS are all motorcycle model numbers from around the early 80s ish. TS was a Suzuki CB Honda, YZ Yamaha not sure about XS but pretty sure it was something.
XS is also Yamaha. I owned an XS650 parallel twin from this era.
The real bike was of course YZ 400, but somebody was "no, that will not do in this game, it must be FOUR THOUSAND".
Very cool, I loved the added detail about the microprocessors (nerdy, but intriguing to see the stuff about binary words and BCD support).
The only one of these VFD games I had was Galaxy Twinvader from CGL/Grandstand. It was a Galaga style game but the aliens had two parts to shoot, a bit like the aliens that split apart in Moon Cresta. Sadly the joystick broke and I no longer have it.
Tomy made some cool stuff in the 80s... I had the caveman game.
I have probably 20 or 30 VFD games. I always thought they were pretty neat. Some are surprisingly good. I have a different version of Scramble in an entirely different form factor which also has a speed-up knob. Scramble is one of the better games. I have a game called astro fighter or something, by Radio Shack, a space fighter game that is pretty good for a VFD game.
I think the biggest thing holding them back was really the lack of computing power. It would be interesting to build a kind of simulator that allows you to define VFD segments and a better processor and more RAM just to see what could be done.
But they got too ambitious with most of these games or with games which just are not suitable for the VFD display. Donkey Kong and Pac Man are great examples of games not suitable for VFD technology.
For a moment I heard "hi it's Jan Beta"
This video really show cases your video game playing skills, no doubt honed over decades of play. How many time do you think you've pressed the fire button in your life? I suspect that count wouldn't fit in a Uint32 :-)
I owned CaveMan, I wish that I had Scramble.
I've still got one of mine from when I was a kid in the UK. It's the grey Alien Attack one (same game as scramble) I also had caveman later on, but it was in a red case.
If somebody had one of these in the 80's when were kids in Grade School they were the freaking KINGS on the playground at recess. Fun times. 😊
My parents bought the Tomy Scramble for me for Christmas of 1982. It was awesome. It actually has 5 levels. That's pretty good for a VFD game. Tomy also made a handheld version of Pac-Man but it sucked. Many people hated the Atari 2600 Pac-Man but it was better than Tomy's Pac-Man.
Thanks Robin, we love your Video's for our beloved C64 but this brought back some great memories
Living in Scotland, we had Astro blaster
The game was renamed in the UK as there was already a VFD game called Scramble with the same form factor on the market, by Granstand, no idea if they got a license for it. I got it for Christmas in 1982 as I loved Scramble in the Arcade, wish I got your version much closer to the arcade game.
🙌
Have all sans Lupin, now I’m on the hunt….
Same for me! Still kicking myself for passing one up I saw for $50 a couple of years ago.
Tomy produced some truly amazing toys. I had an electro mechanical helicopter game that was more fun than it should have been for an 80's kid.
Man, these actually look pretty cool!
And the memories come flooding back, mainly of the Scramble one, sneaking goes under my bed covers in the night, hahaha. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the screens of these presented so well, before, btw.
4:12 - minor correction - the cheaper Atari games weren't because they weren't "name brand" like Space Invaders; $30 was pretty standard for a new game; the first few cheaper games in that 1981 catalog were all older games. Baseball was a launch title (1977) and Football was from 1978. Race was so expensive because it included racing paddle controllers.