Mirco Games
Mirco Games Inc. was a manufacturer of coin-operated games based in Phoenix, Arizona founded in 1973. The company was a subsidiary of electronics manufacturer Mirco Inc, producing foosball tables and coin-operated video games through the 1970s. They notably created a few of the earliest games incorporating microprocessors, including '' The Spirit of ’76'', the first commercially available pinball utilizing the technology. The company was eventually sold in 1980 to Amstar Electronics. History The roots of Mirco Games lie in the company Arizona Automation, an importer of foosball tables founded by Richard “Dick” N. Raymond and John L. Walsh. Walsh and Raymond had worked together at General Electric in Germany and discovered the popularity of foosball in Europe, which had not yet taken off in the United States. Raymond opened Arizona Automation in a 600 foot office space in 1970 in Phoenix, Arizona with Walsh serving as the import agent in Germany. Their tables were marketed ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Phoenix, Arizona
Phoenix ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of cities and towns in Arizona#List of cities and towns, most populous city of the U.S. state of Arizona. With over 1.6 million residents at the 2020 census, it is the List of United States cities by population, fifth-most populous city in the United States and the List of capitals in the United States, most populous state capital in the country. Phoenix is the most populous city of the Phoenix metropolitan area, also known as the Valley of the Sun, which in turn is part of the Salt River Valley and Arizona Sun Corridor. The metro area is the Metropolitan statistical area, 10th-largest by population in the United States with approximately 4.95 million people , making it the most populous in the Southwestern United States. Phoenix, the seat of Maricopa County, Arizona, Maricopa County, is the largest city by population and area in Arizona, with an area of , and is also the List of United States cities by ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Motorola
Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 and had been named Motorola since 1947. Many of Motorola's products had been radio-related communication equipment such as two-way radios, consumer walkie-talkies, cellular infrastructure, mobile phones, satellite communicators, pagers, as well as cable modems and semiconductors. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, Motorola was split into two independent public companies: Motorola Solutions (its legal successor) and Motorola Mobility (spun off), on January 4, 2011. Motorola designed and sold wireless network equipment such as cellular transmission base stations and signal amplifiers. Its business and government customers consisted mainly of wireless voice and broadband systems (used to build private networks), and public safety communications systems like Astro and Dimetra. Motorola's h ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Phoenix (1980 Video Game)
''Phoenix'' is a fixed shooter video game developed for arcades in Japan and released in 1980 by Taito. The player controls a space ship shooting at incoming enemies that fly from the top of the screen down towards the player's ship. There are five stages which repeat endlessly. The fifth is a fight against a large enemy spaceship, making ''Phoenix'' one of the first shooters with a Boss (video games), boss battle, an element that would become common for the genre. The game was created in Japan by an unknown developer. Following the game's release in Europe and Japanese arcades in 1980, ''Phoenix'' was distributed in the United States by Centuri, where it helped the company turn a profit after a loss the previous year. Atari, Inc. contracted the rights to develop a home port for the Atari 2600 and sued Imagic for their game ''Demon Attack'', which they felt was too similar to ''Phoenix''. The 2600 version was released in 1983. The Atari port of ''Phoenix'' received positive revi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Fairchild Camera And Instrument
Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation was a company founded by Sherman Fairchild. It was based on the East Coast of the United States, and provided research and development for flash photography equipment. The technology was primarily used for DOD spy satellites. The firm was later known for its manufacture of semiconductors. History Fairchild Aviation Corporation Fairchild Camera and Instrument was incorporated in Delaware in 1927 as the Fairchild Aviation Corporation (also see Fairchild Aircraft), which comprised seven aircraft businesses that were the outgrowth of Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation, which had been incorporated in 1920. The merger made Fairchild Aviation the second-largest manufacturer of commercial airplanes and the fourth-largest aviation organization in the United States. Fairchild Aerial Camera manufactured aerial cameras for military and commercial aerial mapping that were used in Russia, Poland, and throughout South America. They were the offi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Fairchild F8
The Fairchild F8 is an 8-bit microprocessor system from Fairchild Semiconductor, announced in 1974 and shipped in 1975. The original processor family includes four main 40-pin integrated circuits (ICs); the 3850 CPU which contains the arithmetic logic unit and a scratchpad, the 3851 Program Storage Unit (PSU) which contains of program ROM and handles instruction decoding, and the optional 3852 Dynamic Memory Interface (DMI) or 3853 Static Memory Interface (SMI) to control additional RAM or ROM holding the user programs or data. The 3854 DMA is another optional system that adds direct memory access into the RAM controlled by the 3852. A minimal system containing a 3850 and 3851 also included four 8-bit data ports, 64 bytes of RAM, and a user program on ROM. This allowed microcontroller applications to be built using just two chips. Doing the same on more traditional designs like the 8080 or 6800 normally required seven. It also meant that any application that did not fit the sim ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pinball
Pinball games are a family of games in which a ball is propelled into a specially designed table where it bounces off various obstacles, scoring points either en route or when it comes to rest. Historically the board was studded with nails called 'pins' and had hollows or pockets which scored points if the ball came to rest in them. Today, pinball is most commonly an arcade game in which the ball is fired into a specially designed cabinet known as a pinball machine, hitting various lights, bumpers, ramps, and other targets depending on its design. The game's object is generally to score as many points as possible by hitting these targets and making various shots with flippers before the ball is lost. Most pinball machines use one ball per turn, except during special multi-ball phases, and the game ends when the ball(s) from the last turn are lost. The biggest pinball machine manufacturers historically include Bally Manufacturing, Gottlieb, Williams Electronics and Stern P ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Electro-mechanical Game
Electro-mechanical games (EM games) are types of arcade games that operate on a combination of some electronic circuitry and mechanical actions from the player to move items contained within the game's cabinet. Some of these were early light gun games using light-sensitive sensors on targets to register hits, while others were simulation games such as driving games, combat flight simulators and sports games. EM games were popular in amusement arcades from the late 1940s up until the 1970s, serving as alternatives to pinball machines, which had been stigmatized as games of chance during that period. EM games lost popularity in the 1970s, as arcade video games had emerged to replace them in addition to newer pinball machines designed as games of skill. Definition EM games typically combined mechanical engineering technology with various electrical components, such as motors, switches, resistors, solenoids, relays, bells, buzzers and electric lights. EM games lie somewher ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Dave Nutting
David Judd Nutting (December 26, 1930 – September 23, 2020) was an industrial design engineer who played a role in the early video game industry. He also designed the exterior of the Jeep Wagoneer. Career David Judd Nutting was born in 1930 to parents Harold Judd Nutting and Margaret P. Peet in River Forest, Illinois. He was the youngest of four brothers, including the second oldest brother William Gilbert "Bill" Nutting. David came to be interested in engineering, disassembling and reassembling household items to understand how they worked. Despite pressure from his father to become a department store salesman, David joined the Army Corps of Engineers and intended to follow a career path in engineering. After a year studying at Denison University, Nutting learned about the discipline of industrial design. He switched colleges to the Pratt Institute in their industrial design program, then rejoined the Army Corps of Engineers. Thereafter, he joined prestigious industrial design ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Motorola 6800
The 6800 ("''sixty-eight hundred''") is an 8-bit microprocessor designed and first manufactured by Motorola in 1974. The MC6800 microprocessor was part of the M6800 Microcomputer System (later dubbed ''68xx'') that also included serial and parallel interface ICs, RAM, ROM and other support chips. A significant design feature was that the M6800 family of ICs required only a single five-volt power supply at a time when most other microprocessors required three voltages. The M6800 Microcomputer System was announced in March 1974 and was in full production by the end of that year. "Motorola's M6800 microcomputer system, which can operate from a single 5-volt supply, is moving out of the sampling stage and into full production." The small-quantity price of the MC6800 is . The MC6820 PIA cost . American Microsystems was licensed as the second source. The 6800 has a 16-bit address bus that can directly access of memory and an 8-bit bi-directional data bus. It has 72 instructions with ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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8-bit Computing
In computer architecture, 8-bit integers or other data units are those that are 8 bits wide (1 octet). Also, 8-bit central processing unit (CPU) and arithmetic logic unit (ALU) architectures are those that are based on registers or data buses of that size. Memory addresses (and thus address buses) for 8-bit CPUs are generally larger than 8-bit, usually 16-bit. 8-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 8-bit microprocessors. The term '8-bit' is also applied to the character sets that could be used on computers with 8-bit bytes, the best known being various forms of extended ASCII, including the ISO/IEC 8859 series of national character sets especially Latin 1 for English and Western European languages. The IBM System/360 introduced byte-addressable memory with 8-bit bytes, as opposed to bit-addressable or decimal digit-addressable or word-addressable memory, although its general-purpose registers were 32 bits wide, and addresses were contained in the lower 2 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pong
''Pong'' is a 1972 sports video game developed and published by Atari for arcades. It is one of the earliest arcade video games; it was created by Allan Alcorn as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, but Bushnell and Atari co-founder Ted Dabney were surprised by the quality of Alcorn's work and decided to manufacture the game. Bushnell based the game's concept on an electronic ping-pong game included in the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console. In response, Magnavox later sued Atari for patent infringement. ''Pong'' was the first commercially successful video game, and it helped to establish the video game industry along with the Magnavox Odyssey. Soon after its release, several companies began producing games that closely mimicked its gameplay. Eventually, Atari's competitors released new types of video games that deviated from ''Pong'''s original format to varying degrees, and this, in turn, led Atari to encourage its sta ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Video Games
A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual feedback from a display device, most commonly shown in a video format on a television set, computer monitor, flat-panel display or touchscreen on handheld devices, or a virtual reality headset. Most modern video games are audiovisual, with Sound, audio complement delivered through loudspeaker, speakers or headphones, and sometimes also with other types of sensory feedback (e.g., haptic technology that provides Touch, tactile sensations). Some video games also allow microphone and webcam inputs for voice chat in online gaming, in-game chatting and video game livestreaming, livestreaming. Video games are typically categorized according to their hardware platform, which traditionally includes arcade video games, console games, and PC game, comp ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |