A report on a retro arcade game exhibit in Japan

One rainy day, I decided to make a trip with my son to the Retro Games exhibit at Skip City in Saitama.  The location for this event is a visual media museum that also covers the development of movies & TV.  Guests can operate a zoetrope, sit behind a TV camera, and enter a Playstation 1 game...  So anyway, here are some photos from this fun and fascinating game event!

(I'm sorry for the overall poor quality of the pics, but the museum space was actually very dark.)

"Skip Mart": Wanna get your food from out of a Skip? ;-)   Actually, I misjudged this shop.  Apparently it's a cool gift shop with things like plush Sega Saturns!

There are about 20 historically-relevant arcade games playable -- which itself is great -- An added bonus is that the exhibit features original design sketches and documents for many of the games!  (Look towards the bottom of this page.)

Ride-on SEGA arcade machines ruled the central room here.

Some PCB Porn: Xevious & Sega X/Y/Outrun(?) boards

The next room showcased the evolution of home console & computer hardware through some choice software selections.

The music exhibit covered game sound chips' evolution from PSG->WSG->FM->PCM (the last via a Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard). The Famicom is running Konami's keyboard peripheral & FDS DoReMikko software.

Designs & Artifacts

SEGA ride cabinet designs from 1986...('89?)

In this series of pictures, Namco sound engineers are shown analyzing sound spectra in order to recreate WSG samples for their arcade machine sound hardware (like Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, Pole Position...).  WSG means "Waveform" Sound Generator; a single wave loop (~32bytes) is stored as samples.  This technology was also used in the PC-Engine, Gameboy, WonderSwan...

Darius II design documents

Game Music sheets & data: Darius, Salamander, Twinbee...

Xevious... and Game Freak fanzine #1

Taito sound hardware schematics...