1988 Retro Game Tycoon - Chapter 41



Only Noblemtl

Episode 41 – Iron Age

I approached the console, which was presumed to have been made by Lee Ki-cheol, and examined it.

“Did you make this yourself too?”

There were various chips mounted on a universal circuit board with countless IC pin holes commonly used in prototype production, and wires were tangled in a complex manner.

“But don’t you see a Ricoh chip here? The Famicom uses a Ricoh chip as its CPU, right? They intentionally used an uncommon chip as the CPU to prevent copying.”

“That’s right. It’s really pointless. It’s a bit annoying, but can you stop it? It’s annoying me too. And that chip is based on a Mos 6502 anyway? Here it is.”

Lee Ki-cheol pointed with his finger at the chip in the center. A long IC chip with 40 legs, 20 on each side, was visible.

“The two have similar designs, so with just a little bit of tweaking, you can play Famicom games. But the Famicom seems to have added a sound module to the MOS chip. The 6502 didn’t have that, so I solved it by adding another chip. That’s probably why the sound is a bit bad.”

“Oh, somehow. It definitely felt familiar, but it felt a little different. So that’s what it was. So the command set is the same?”

“Oh? You know a little bit? Are you a technician too?”

“I’m a technician, but not in hardware, but in software. I’m a game developer.”

“Oh? Really? This is my first time seeing a game programmer in real life. But I guess they live a little differently from us.”

Lee Ki-cheol looked me up and down and said.

I wore my usual coat, jeans, and Air Jordans. He wore the navy blue jumper and thick slacks that you see in factories. He added a special item, a yellow goggle and a homemade ray gun.

“The command sets aren’t exactly the same. Rico has a couple more. So sometimes errors occur, but they’re rare.”

“Well, it’s not perfect. The sound is poor. Now that I look at it, the colors seem a little different? Should I say the colors are a little darker? It feels a little old-fashioned?”

I said, looking closely at the TV screen.

“Hey, I could do it perfectly if I wanted to, but I don’t have the parts and I don’t have the need to, so I don’t. I just collected parts that were lying around here and there and made something to play with in my spare time, but this is good enough.”

Lee Ki-cheol was a little excited, perhaps because his pride was hurt.

“And the color is like that because the Famicom uses Ricoh for graphics processing. Do you know how much trouble I had trying to match the VRAM address and pipeline with a different chip?”

“I see. I guess it wasn’t easy after all.”

“of course.”

“That alone is really great. But, if you can copy it perfectly, does that mean you know how to operate the Famicom perfectly?”

“Isn’t that obvious?”

“Then, wouldn’t it be possible to implement the same way the Famicom runs within the logical system? By creating a kind of virtual Famicom within the system and running it.”

As the 21st century dawned, many retro gaming consoles began to disappear. As the hardware disappeared, so did the ways to play the games we had played.

While moving and organizing the house, the game consoles, numerous game packs, and CDs that had been piled up on one side were thrown away or sold for scrap value.

Even if you keep them carefully, game consoles that are 20 or 30 years old tend to break down here and there. CRT TVs and monitors, which go best with retro game consoles, are also gradually becoming outdated.

But game developers who could never forget the games of their memories found a way. They developed emulators that implement retro consoles on computers, or virtual machines that create virtual consoles inside computers.

I asked Lee Ki-cheol if he had ever thought about creating a virtual machine.

“Oh~, that method? That might be possible. But I think that’s something that computer nerds like you should do.”

“Computer idiot?”

“Yeah, you know, the kind of person who writes software by typing on the keyboard all night long. Should I say you’re more of a gamer than a computer nerd? Anyway, I’m more comfortable with my own style. There are computer nerds in the next room too, but ugh~ It’s so frustrating, frustrating to sit hunched over all day.”

It seems like there aren’t only hardware engineers in Seun Sangga Apartment. I’ll have to find out what kind of people there are later.

“But if you’re going to create and run a virtual Famicom like that, wouldn’t the system have to be more powerful than the Famicom?”

“I guess. Because creating and running a virtual machine requires that much more computing power.”

“That’s right. But this is a little behind the Famicom. Still, there’s nothing better to play with. If you get good parts, you can modify it here and there.”

“Where do you get the parts?”

“Just here and there. See here? I mostly repair precision equipment, and sometimes I get things that come up, and sometimes I pick them up from stores I know. Sometimes I fix things that other stores can’t fix. Sometimes I sneak them in from stores that are unlucky.”

Lee Ki-cheol chuckled as he spoke.

The ‘Iron Age’ workshop was filled with shelves filled with countless mechanical devices that I couldn’t recognize.

“By the way, you said you were making a game, right? Should I show you the game I made? Want to take a look?”

“game?”

“Yeah, just wait.”

He took a machine with a palm-sized screen from the shelf. It was an oscilloscope, a measuring device that graphically displays things like waves.

“Did you make a game with this?”

“I’ll show you.”

As he turned it on and flicked the switch, a green line appeared on the oscilloscope screen. On the right was a small mountain, with a slightly larger dot above it. On the left was a small stick.

“Okay, let’s turn this and adjust the angle.”

As Lee Ki-cheol turned the nozzle on the oscilloscope, the stick moved accordingly. After a while, a green dot popped out of the stick and flew toward the mountain.

“Is that a shell?”

“That’s right. We’re aiming at the target on the mountain over there. Hey, we missed. We need to do some zeroing first.”

The shells were fired continuously at regular intervals without a separate firing button. The game involved the player continuously rotating the nozzle to find the correct angle and hit the target.

“I’ll try.”

It was my first time using an oscilloscope, but since it was a very simple game, there was nothing to learn. I had to control it with fine sensitivity by catching the difference between the angle at which the nozzle was turned and the angle at which the shell moved.

“Wow~! This is difficult?”

“It has to be very precise. Look at it. It’s so delicate like this…”

“Oh! That’s a hit!”

The two of us enjoyed the game, looking at the small screen and taking turns turning the nozzles.

It was a very simple game, but it was a game that secretly encouraged a sense of challenge because shells did not affect the terrain and there were no power-up items.

“You made this yourself? Did you copy it from ?”

“Tennis? What is that?”

“Don’t you know? There’s a game made in the US that’s exactly like this, using an oscilloscope. It’s a game where you pass a tennis ball back and forth. It was made in 1958.”

“In ’58? Wow, those guys are really amazing.”

Lee Ki-cheol was also amazing. He created his own game using an oscilloscope without knowing anything about Tennis for Two, which is called the first video game.

“You know everything. Are all game developers like that? But you know.”

“huh.”

“Why have you been speaking informally to me since earlier?”

“Huh? That’s right. I was speaking informally to you without realizing it. Are you upset?”

“No, strangely, I don’t feel that bad. Is it because we can communicate well? Anyway, I’m Lee Ki-cheol. I’m the president of the Iron Age. I’m twenty-six years old.”

“You’re five years older than me.”

“okay?”

“Should I be polite?”

“Okay, what. What’s bothering you? What’s your name?”

“Seo Nam-joon. I run a game company called Starbeat, and I recently created and released .”

“Oh~! ?!”

“Have you tried it?”

“No. What is that?”

Lee Ki-cheol laughed brightly as if he was teasing me. I snickered.

It seemed like he liked to joke around, as befitting his humor, by saying that his name was Gi-cheol and that his company name was spelled backwards, making it the Iron Age.

“Aren’t there any MSXs or G-mixes here?”

“Oh, they didn’t make it because they were too lazy.”

“Just wait a minute. I’ll go down and borrow one.”

I went down to the electronic room and came up with Jemix V and . Then I showed to Lee Ki-chul.

“Wow, that’s pretty good. Our country is now making games like this?”

Lee Ki-cheol played the game with a surprised expression. He asked me various questions while playing the game. Most of them were about how I used and processed the hardware.

“It’s actually quite surprising that a game of this caliber was made using a crappy MSX.”

“I spent a whole month working on it. There are so many things I couldn’t express properly, so I regret it.”

“That’s right. If you can do this much with MSX, there’s nothing you can’t do with 16-bit, right?”

“Right? So I’m going to try making this into an arcade game.”

“Oh! Great idea! I totally recommend it!”

“Yeah, so hyung, help me out.”

“What? Me? How?”

“If you want to make it into an arcade game, you need a special board. I want to make that. But I can make game software, but I can’t make hardware.”

“I don’t like it. It’s annoying.”

Lee Ki-cheol took off his yellow goggles and threw them on the shelf, then leaned back in his chair and put his feet on the desk. It was the most comfortable and relaxed posture in the world.

I have a feeling it won’t be easy to persuade this guy.

“why?”

I asked why.

“Why, why? I said it’s annoying. I have a lot of work to do. I’m a busy person. Do you see them? There’s a mountain of things to fix later this afternoon.”

“But you were playing Duck Hunt, right?”

“I’m not playing. I’m just gathering energy by playing a game. If I keep doing this, I’ll be so full of energy in the afternoon that I’ll just finish it in an instant.”

Ahh …

The smell of a free spirit.

He is a skilled person who can collect leftover parts to make a cloned Nintendo Famicom, to the point that all the Seun Shopping Mall engineers unanimously recommend him, but he is a free spirit who only does what he wants when he wants.

So this is what it means to be a somewhat strange person.

“There are plenty of people who can do that for you. Go down and look for them. If you just go to a place that makes cloned arcade boards, they’ll make it for you in no time. Why bother?”

“I think you’re misunderstanding something. I’m not saying I want to clone a Japanese arcade game board. I’m saying I want to create a new board specifically for our company’s games.”

“You’re making a new one? Why? Why not just put your game on a cloned board? That would be much easier.”

“It would be easy, right? But then it wouldn’t be mine.”

“Mine?”

“Yeah, what do you think this game is copied from?”

“? Well? I can’t think of anything in particular.”

“Of course. Because I didn’t copy it. There are similar games. In a broad sense, you could say it’s a variation of . But this game, set in a New York apartment building and where you evade the police and eat coins, is the original.”

Lee Ki-cheol’s face became a little serious.

“If it’s like you said, why bother making something like this? You could just copy a popular game. That would be much easier. But I don’t want to do that. I want to make my own. I want to put the game I made on a board developed by our company and release it to the world. And there are other reasons why I have to do that.”

“Any other reasons?”

“Yeah, if you copy a Japanese board and put your game on it, you can’t sell it back to Japan. The company that made the original board won’t just sit back and watch. In Korea, if there are copies circulating, the Japanese company can’t do anything about it, but it’s different in Japan or the US. They’ll sue you right away.”

“You’re selling it in Japan? By making a game?”

“Yeah, to America too. That’s my plan.”

“I just saw you and you look normal but your brain is completely crazy.”

Lee Ki-cheol looked at me with a dumbfounded expression. Well, most people would learn from American or Japanese products, repair them, and make them themselves, so this kind of thinking was ridiculous.

“Do you really like it?”

huh?

“I didn’t even know this was going to happen. Why didn’t you say so earlier?”

Lee Ki-cheol’s face, which had been serious for a moment, returned to a playful expression. His face looked as if he was dying of amusement. His eyes also sparkled with life.

“So what you’re saying is that rather than cloning the Japanese board and putting the games in it, you want to create a completely new board?”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t end there.”

“Isn’t this the end? Then?”

“We’re going to downsize the newly developed arcade board and make a home console game machine. 16-bit.”

Developing the ultimate 16-bit game console.

An old dream of mine that I’ve kept in my heart since childhood.

This time, I’m going to challenge that reckless dream.

I was ready to give my all for that dream.