![]() ![]() Only around 800-1,000 of the 3,000 estimated units manufactured and shipped to the USA from Japan sold, living Nintendo in a rather tough spot financially.Īs Nintendo scrambled to resolve this misstep that was turning into a financial crisis (Nintendo was a small company in the early 1980's without the deep pockets that the company has today), a plan was created to help retool the unsold Radar Scope games made with a blaze red laminated wood into something the public wanted. ![]() Overall Radar Scope simply didn’t click with most gamers outside of Japan. Radar Scope’s clunky gameplay and annoying sound effects didn’t help the situation. ![]() Space Invaders style wanna be and copycat games had saturated the marketplace by the time Radar Scope premiered. This was not so much due to a lack of popularity in Nintendo's native Japan (where the game did fairly well in the marketplace), but Nintendo's bet that the game would do well in North America. Despite the attempt at an early 3-D like playfield the game was a huge commercial failure for Nintendo. Radar Scope is a space shooter very similar to many other such games that would be released in the aftermath of the popularity of Taito’s Space Invaders. Legendary Nintendo game developer Shigeru Miyamoto would be part of the team that would introduce the world to a game Nintendo hoped would be a huge success, that game would be Radar Scope. The museum is not using a typical modern display in this Donkey Kong, but that's what the Nanolumens tech is for, creating an LED-based Nixel video wall inside the cabinet.In the late 1970’s Nintendo was struggling to get a piece of the red-hot arcade video game market in the United States and globally. There are more differences, but both are commonly used to get arcade signals ready for a modern display. One wiki suggests that while the Framemeister's processing can add 20 ms of lag, it can actually counteract the inherent lag some displays will generate when handling 240p signals. The museum's pick, the Framemeister XRGB-Mini, works differently, taking snapshots of video frames and sending them out. Multiply 240p by five, and you're at 1080p. The OSSC takes a signal and multiplies it, without buffering or processing. Before we heard from the Strong Museum, Lawson's guess was an OSSC, an Open Source Scan Converter. You need an upscaler, preferably one with little lag. Modern LCD screens can't handle it those that might attempt to upscale it would add lag and not look great, especially at 370 percent size. Micomsoft/AmazonAt that point, you'd have, according to Lawson, a 15 kHz video signal-"what we'd think of as 240p"-coming from the Donkey Kong PCB, meant for a CRT screen. He grabbed one from his collection to illustrate. Adapters exist for many pre-JAMMA board styles, including Nintendo's Kong-related boards. JAMMA normalized the outputs and inputs of arcade games, such that swapping printed circuit boards (PCBs) in and out of cabinets required far less solder and schematics. He explained that JAMMA, a wiring standard for arcade games named for the Japanese Amusement Machine and Marketing Association, wasn't introduced until 1985. I ran this by Ars' Aurich Lawson, noted arcade enthusiast (and person I can reach on Slack). Shane Rhinewald, senior director of public relations at the Strong Museum, said that a schematic for the system outlined it as such:ĭonkey Kong TKG-4 Original Motherboard -> Nintendo to JAMMA Adapter -> Home Arcade System Supergun -> Micomsoft Framemeister XRGB-Mini Upscaler -> Nanolumens Processing Box -> Nanolumens Nixel Display We asked the Strong Museum about the specifics of the tech stack only hinted at in the wider press. The game will run on "a motherboard from an original Donkey Kong cabinet," according to the Strong Museum. You can then be overcome with the vastness of the vertical construction worksite in which Donkey Kong holds court, whilst also holding Pauline. The cabinet will be constructed from "an aluminum frame with MDF fiberboard." As is suggested by Strong's rendering, you won't be playing the game on a step stool or ladder, but using a human-scale, hip-height control panel from ground level.
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