On the right, the map of the sound board details how the Motorola 6809 (U4 running at 2Mhz) is fed instructions from a single EPROM (U3) to orchestrate the music and sound effects. In the same fashion, the graphic assets are four-way interleaved to form a 32-bit address, 32-bit data storage system storing 8MiB.Įvent though this article is mostly about the graphic pipeline, I cannot resist describing briefly the audio system. For the 34010, which needs a 16-bit data bus, two EPROMS (J12 and G12) are two-way interleaved into 1 MiB. These 512 KiB EPROMS have 32-bit address pins and 8-bit data pins. Notice the cool trick of using the same EPROM component (in blue) to build different storage system (and save money). I was unable to dig anything about the bus protocol so if you have any knowledge of the matter, please email me. The super-blitter ASIC is capable of many graphic operations prowess which are detailed later.Īll chips (System RAM, GFX EPROMs, Palette SDRAM, Code, Video Banks) are mapped into the same 32-bit memory address space and are connected to the same bus. According to the kit diagrams, it has an impressive (at the time) 32-bit data bus and a 32-bit address bus, making it the biggest chip of the board. The graphic powerhouse is in fact the U13 chip called "DMA2". Surprisingly, it only takes care of the game logic and does not draw anything. This chip was used in several hardware-accelerating card in the early 90s and I expected it to do a lot of GFX work. The 34010 is a 32-bit chip with a 16-bit bus which features cool graphic instructions such as PIXT and PIXBLT. To help reference components, a board has coordinates with origin in the lower-right (UA0) increasing to the upper-left (UJ26).Īt the heart of the main board, we find a Texas Instrument TMS34010 (UB21) running at 50Mhz with 1MiB of code in EPROMs and 512 KiB DRAM. The informations from the kit allowed to draw a map of the boards and identify the function of each parts. Among other things, we can find here an extended description of the boards wiring including EPROM and chip connections. The level of details in this document is astonishing. In my quest for data, I stumbled upon the NBA Jam Kit. And in the case of NBA Jam, it is beautifully documented. But the amazing thing about stuff from the 90s is that it is occasionally documented. To make sense of everything using only serial numbers would have been a daunting task. Together the two boards account for more than two hundreds chips, resistances, and EPROMs. Notice the huge passive heat sink on its upper left corner. The sound board is connected to the power supply and to the graphic board, mounted beside it. Dedicated to audio, it is not only capable to play music via FM synthesis but also digitized sound playback. The other board is less complex in comparison but manage to perform a lot anyway. NBA JAM TE Edition CPU board (about 40cm by 40cm or 15 inches). The largest one is where game logic and graphics happen. So good that it was given a name, T-Unit, and reused for other games.Ī T-Unit is made of two boards. The hardware Midway developed for Mortal Kombat turned out to be really good. Even though Mortal Kombat framebuffer is 400 × 254, it is stretched on a 4:3 CRT to 400 × 300. Trivia: Like the VGA Mode 0x13 on PC, these games have non square-pixels. Featuring a lot of blood on screen and insanely gore "fatalities", the game became an instant worldwide hit gathering close to 1 billion dollar within one year. The visual style was a departure from the usual pixel-art and the game design was, to put it mildly, "controversial". Within a year of hard work, Midway released Mortal Kombat in 1992. When negotiation collapsed, Midway "pivoted" to build a combat game in the spirit of Capcom's 1991 mega-hit named "Street Fighter II: The World Warrior".Īn initial team of four (Ed Boon for programming, John Tobias for art and story, John Vogel for graphics, and Dan Forden for sound design) assembled and got to work. They had used the technology with great success for the popular shooter game "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" but were unable to secure a license for "Universal Soldier" (JCVD financial conditions were deemed unacceptable ). We are talking about a huge technological leap here with 60 frames per second animations and unseen-before 100x100 pixels sprites, each with their own 256 colors palette. Around the same time "Universal Soldier" got released, "Midway Games" had developed a technology allowing to manipulate large digitized photo-realist sprites and preserve the likeness of real actors. The story of NBA Jam does not find its roots in basketball but rather, like all things, in Jean-Claude Van Damme.
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