The Pinball Expo will be expanding its show floor to 100,000 sq. ft. and celebrating its 40th year as the longest running pinball show. The event, which takes place Oct. 17-19th, will be combining forces with Video Game Summit, which has been running since 2003. Video Game Summit first became involved with Pinball Expo in 2019, with the introduction of the Retro Video Game Section that year.

Press Release

In 2019, the Pinball Expo reserved a room to bring retro video gaming to the pinball expo. It was our first introduction to this genre. It was a big hit, so the last few years we decided to expand on this idea and create a whole section of the expo with retro gaming. It was a great turnout and a fun event. Now, in 2024, The Video Game Summit will be partnered with the Pinball Expo to bring the largest retro gaming area ever for this event. From Atari to PlayStation, ColecoVision to PS5, the combination of pinball, arcade machines and retro gaming will complete the ultimate video game conference in the Chicagoland area. Vendors will be there to sell games, systems, and other accessories. Special guests will be there as well to sign autographs and take pictures. Come live in the past in this amazing area of the pinball expo. More information on the events, guests and vendors click here 

Rob Berk, Todd Friedman, and Dan Iacovelli agreed to join forces this year to make a great combo show, with Pinball Expo running the Pinball and Arcade Section and Video Game Summit running the Retro Video Game Section. As both shows are celebrating a big anniversary it seems fitting to celebrate together.

COSPLAY SIGNUP

Come meet your favorite retro gaming artists, authors, and designers on Sat. Oct. 19, 2024 from 1:00 – 2:30 pm in the Nirvana C Seminar Room.

Attention pinball fans! To celebrate Pinball Expo’s historic 40th show we are proud to present “The Adventures of Flippy” – a commemorative comic book all about our favorite Pinball Expo mascot! But that’s not all! We are opening up this issue to include fan submissions and stories, which means YOU can have your story and drawings included in this special issue! If your content is selected you will also receive FREE ADMISSION TO PINBALL EXPO 2024!

Video Game Summit 2024 is being held at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center, 1551 N. Thoreau Drive, Schaumburg, IL 60173 October 17th to October 19th, 2024. For more information visit the official website for Video Game Summit and if interested in being a vendor, please contact me at tfried0237@gmail.com.

http://videogamesummit.net/

https://pinballexpo.com/retro-gaming-console/

Todd Friedman YouTube

 

 

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From Bugs to Breaking into Development: Going Above and Beyond I’ve always had a habit of doing more than I was supposed to. One of my first duties was to report bugs so they could get fixed. At Tengen/ Atari we received an early version of Rampart for the Sega Genesis which played nothing like the arcade version. My job duty was fulfilled after stating that the maps were…

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This tradition of innovation from Gottlieb continued over the years, as highlighted by the 1981 pinball machine called Caveman. Part of the machine was a standard pinball cabinet, decorated with a dinosaurs and cavemen. Now, I will resist the urge to point out how historically inaccurate it is to lump dinos and cavemen together. I certainly won’t mention the fact that the very last of the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago and the earliest humans didn’t exist until 6 million years ago. Those facts are completely beside the point and I won’t waste any time screaming into the void about them.

Since I didn’t waste any time discussing it’s horrific scientific and historical inaccuracies, I can explain why I’m writing about a pinball machine when I typically focus on video games. Caveman was a hybrid machine. In addition to all the standard pinball accouterments (pop targets, vari targets, etc.) it had a built in screen and a joystick. Hit the ball in the right spot, and play switched from pinball to video game. You controlled a caveman in a variation on the classic maze game. Your mission was to hunt pterodactyls, brontosauruses and triceratopses. T-rexes were trying to eat you as you made your way through the maze. To return to classic pinball, you exited the maze. You also returned if one of the t-rexes caught and devoured you. However, in that case you also lost a ball.

Released in 1981, Gottlieb advertised the machine as the “World’s First Pinball Video Game,” a concept which presumably was an attempt to stem the flow of players switching from pinball to video games. It was an entertaining and novel idea, even if it didn’t save the pinball industry as a whole.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPm0pmmBp0Y

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Have you ever wondered why the numbers in the names of today’s consoles have more to do with the generation of the hardware family than they do processing power?  Let’s cut to the chase on this one – technology has surpassed the point where a single number can encapsulate a system’s performance.  But perhaps more importantly, the way video games are marketed has changed.  In short, video gaming has become more popular over time.  What was once a rather niche’ activity is now a staple of pop-culture.  Nevertheless, we refer to console generations past by their bits.  Why do we do this and when did it change?  Let’s find out.

To start at the very beginning, we need to define a bit.  The bit is a basic unit (the smallest unit, in fact) of information used in computing and digital communications. A binary digit can have only one of two values; 0 or 1.  So 1-bit can have 2 states (again, 0 or 1).  2-bit would have 4 possible states.  4-bit would have 16 possibilities and 8-bit boasts 256 of them.

By the time the early 1980s rolled around, 8-bit architecture had become the standard in commercial processors.  When Nintendo was developing their Famicom and then Sega their Mark III (NES and Master System respectively), 8-bit architecture was the natural fit.  What this meant was their CPUs use an 8-bit data bus and can therefore access 8 bits of data in a single machine instruction.  Remember that there are 256 possible values for 8 bits; 256 places to store information if you will.

Now what’s interesting is that while we call the third generation of home consoles (as of July 15, 1983, with the Japanese release of both the Famicom and Sega SG-1000) the 8-bit era now, at the time there was very little marketing or even mention of the term “8-bit” as it was happening.

It seemed like bits really became a factor the following generation; when 8 became 16-bit.  NEC went as far as to name their Japanese PC Engine the Turbo Grafx-16 for North America, ensuring part of the very name reminded consumers of its processing prowess.  The Sega Mega Drive/ Genesis boldly displayed the word “16-Bit” across the top of its hardware.  Suddenly the bit had become a term used to identify not just the machine’s processing capability, but also a sort of bookend for which generation the hardware itself belonged.

Consumers, largely unaware of how processing even works, knew one simple thing: The bigger the bit number, the more powerful the console.

Now the leap to 16-bit was a surprising one.  Rather than that 256 possible values that our NES could process simultaneously, that number rocketed to 65,535.  Nintendo didn’t bother flaunting processor specs on their SNES, instead letting their strong library of game titles represent their stake in the 16-bit console wars (of which they would eventually take the lead).

It was the following generation that set much of the precedent that we still follow today.  When home consoles began coming equipped with 32-bit processors, it meant that the CPU was capable of deciphering a staggering 4.3-million (4,294,967,295) bits of data in a single instruction.  When it comes to this much information being processed simultaneously, suddenly other factors began to bottleneck the data flow.  For example 32-bit processors could actually only access roughly 4 gigabytes worth of information at a time (as restricted by the system’s RAM).

To get around some of these snags, RISC processors were implemented (reduced instruction set).  RISC processors actually break up actions that consume memory resources before performing their calculations.  Take Sony’s original Playstation, for example.  It’s RAM came in well below 4-gigabytes; instead working with 2 mebibytes of main RAM and 1 MB SGRAM for frame-buffer.  In short, even the most taxing hardware functions weren’t anywhere close to the limitations of the processor’s capabilities.

Another thing that happened around this era that started to put the proverbial nail in the bit coffin was the allocation of various processors to perform specific tasks within the hardware.  The Sega Saturn is a famous example of how calling the system “32-bit” was a very blanket description of what was actually taking place under the hood.  The system achieved its output across a total of eight processors!  Even its main central processing unit was in fact two Hitachi SH-2 (32-bit RISC) microprocessors clocked at 28.6 MHz and capable of 56 MIPS and two video display processors, the VDP1 (to handle sprites, textures and polygons) and the VDP2 (which handled backgrounds).

Nintendo sat back and watched what was then deemed the 32-bit generation of consoles, aware that its decision to rely upon the highly restrictive cartridge medium while Sega and Sony were touting the vastly more spacious CD-ROM format would demand more horsepower somewhere along the way to compete.  Their solution?  To spec an NEC VR4300i.  While technically a 64-bit RISC processor for which the system was named, the N64, like most video game hardware, faced data restrictions elsewhere throughout the architecture that ensured merely a minuscule fraction of the processor’s ability to interpret 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 combinations of data as a single instruction was ever used.

Believe it or not, home computing even to this very day is still based on 64-bit architecture.  The reason for this is that it would take about 16 exabytes of RAM (and do keep in mind one exabyte is 1-billion gigs) to reach the limitations of a 64-bit processor’s abilities.  Think about that for a moment.

But back to consoles, there has really never been a reason to advance beyond 64-bit processing; it’s simply a matter of boosting up the limitations of the hardware around the CPU to achieve the desired results in system output.

About the last time I recall bits being used in console marketing was around the year 2000 when Sony was discussing its Emotion Engine fueling the Playstation 2 as a 128-bit platform.  This wasn’t just marketing hyperbole, but nor was it truly a 128-bit processor in action either.  What’s actually there is a two-way Sony/Toshiba RISC processor operating on 128-bit wide groups of either 32-bit, 16-bit, or 8-bit integers in single instruction fashion.  So contrary to popular misconception, the Emotion Engine is not a 128-bit processor as it does not process a single 128-bit value, but rather a group of four 32-bit values that are stored in one 128-bit wide register.

So in conclusion, as nice as it is to imagine a processor bit count that continued to double as quickly as it did in the 1980s and 90s, the truth of the matter is 64-bit is about where the train has stopped.  Engineers are continually developing new ways to tap into that type of processing potential; faster buses, increased clockspeeds, larger and faster system RAM, multi-core processors to divide workloads, more efficient co-processors and control modules to allocate tasks etc.  Or another way of saying it: We don’t expect video game console manufacturers to return to CPU bit-counts in marketing any time soon.

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