All that discussion of screen layouts and no actual pictures to show the effect?

Video of in-cabinet gameplay: https://youtu.be/NOAliCg0WcM

More gameplay, screen-capped: https://youtu.be/arXkcI-FgS4

The music on this video game is my favorite of all time in any game, I'm actually somewhat obsessed with this particular ditty from a later level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIhRPpWDa88

Very reminiscent of one of my favorite EDM artists, Boy-8-Bit, but predating him by decades.

Also, anyone living near Illinois should treat themselves to Galloping Ghost arcade, where you can play Darius on an original cabinet.

I loved this quote about the music: I had wanted to sample the sound of an industrial piston in a factory, but was unable to get it, so instead I just sampled it off a YMO song. (laughs) That happened numerous times, actually.

I'm assuming YMO is referring to the Japanese electronica outfit Yellow Magic Orchestra.

A recent Twitter thread about this game, which goes into a little more detail on a couple points: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1054907948852342784

Something that stuck out to me as cool:

> It used a dual-processor system using 8mhz 68000s, and for graphics it used a custom Taito tile-mapping chip, the PC080SN. They just used three of them, in fact, one for each screen. These were all mapped into the same memory space, so the three-screen display “just worked”.

First of all, it’s curious that it was cost-effective at all to invest in all this custom hardware for one game. But thanks to this hardware mapping, on the programming side, they could mostly treat the three CRTs as a single large display.

1) Hardware magic was often how you could distinguish yourself.

2) General purpose CPUs were very weak.

3) An arcade machine could easily cost 5-figure amounts of money. Suddenly, custom hardware is possible.

4) The PC080SN was custom, but not just for one game. E.g. Rainbow Island used it as well. (I think Bubble Bobble did, too, but memory is weak)

There are countless games with large investments in mechanical design and/or hardware. Think about all of those Sega motion games.

Fascinating that the inclusion of a headphone port was considered a key feature and drew people to the platform, rather than repelled them...