Arcade Talk 1 - Galaxian Hardware

NOTICE: ALL CONTENT IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES. ALL CREDIT TO THEIR ORIGINAL CREATORS. 

 Ah, Galaxian. The game that popularized RGB graphics, the game that helped Namco set their stones on the arcade scene, the game that had its hardware reused 50 trillion times over-wait, what?

Why yes, dear reader, Galaxian hardware has been used time and time again by all sorts of folks. But before that..

Hellllllllllllllllllllllllllllooooooo and welcome to Arcade Talk, a new series where I ramble on about arcade games. Why? 'Tis a topic that will forever amuse me, that's why. On Arcade Talk, you will find things like obscure arcade games no one has ever heard of, bootleg garbage that is interesting or intolerable, and other arcade oddities that make me smile.

Today's topic is Galaxian hardware.

That is Galaxian, released by Namco in 1979. A fairly simple space shooter in all accounts, however the game is rather impressive technology-wise. It was one of, if not the first game to use RGB graphics instead of cellophane for color (the latter being a tactic used by games like Space Invaders), and it was the first to feature the enemies coming down to attack-a rather basic thing now, but in 1979 this was a huge deal.

Of course, the game was successful, especially in the States, where it was ported to who knows how many systems. And with great success comes great.. people using the game's hardware for various uses. 

And that's what I'll be looking at today!

Now there are lots of official uses of this thing besides ol' Galaxian. Most of Konami's earliest output was based on Galaxian hardware, like Amidar, Scramble, and Frogger.

Amidar - 1982

Frogger - 1982

Scramble - also a 1982 release

All these are examples of official uses of Galaxian hardware. Heck, Konami even modified it slightly, making use of the AY PSG chip instead of Galaxian's discrete sound logic. (However, Scramble does use sampled sounds, or maybe some other chip, I'm not sure)

But that's not why I'm rambling on about hardware from 1979. The reason, is that there was at one point some weird underground collection of unauthorized bootleg conversions of other games that were really popular around '82, to run on Galaxian's hardware. This is a choice that'll always interest me. I cannot see anyone playing these thinking these were the real games, but I'm 110% positive these bootleggy hacked-up nonsense excuses of conversions were sources of nostalgia for.. someone, anyone.

Sometimes, like with the above-pictured KONG, these were somewhat uniquely coded to run on this hardware. It isn't obvious, cause this is a picture, but looking up gameplay of this one will show that this is somewhat uniquely coded, and it's an alright Donkey Kong clone.

Then you have stuff like this..

This kinda thing is scarily common, and especially so with Pac-Man. There's this one, which is Set 2 in MAME, Set 1, Ghost Muncher, The Ghost Muncher Part 3, Crazy Mazey, are there any others I need to know about??! I get it, Pac-Man is a really popular game, but good googly moogly! There could probably be a whole other Arcade Talk about the amount of Pac-Bootlegs, if I cared about the game as much as I did 7 years ago.

So, in short, Galaxian hardware was commonly used to convert later games to hardware which by the time these things were released, was starting to get outdated, and actual companies looking to use the hardware for their own, actually original games, had to update certain aspects of it to keep the hardware somewhat going, until '84 at least.

So that's Arcade Talk 1, folks! Whaddya think of it, ya like it, ya don't? Lemme know and I'll probably forget about this thing's very existence 4 weeks later. Buh bye.