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Thread: For the record, the thing that has me the most stoked about the Game & Watch library being on the cusp of fully preserved in MAME is not that it happened, but that 10 years ago nobody ever even thought that it *could* happen.
![[ColeJ]](https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1043000626056065024/vDRPnUpt_normal.jpg)
Prior to about five or six years ago, everyone in the west was under the impression that Game & Watch games were based on ASICs or gate arrays: Discrete logic which is hellish to emulate. Nobody (except the Russians) could have imagined that they used a simple 4-bit MCU.
It was in the process of emulating other VFD-and-LCD-based systems from the late 70's and early 80's, through decapping, that Sean Riddle happened to decap a Game & Watch. Much to many parties' surprise, it turned out to be a full-on microcontroller.
The reason for my verbal hedges above is this: The relevant people in the Soviet Union knew pretty early on that this was the case. This is why exact clones exist for certain Game & Watch titles, with names such as as Ну Погоди and Космический мост.
However, this knowledge only got filtered through to those of us in the US and Europe once Game & Watch games started getting dumped. Initially, it was just Sean Riddle dumping these machines. He quickly ran out of spare time to do so, though, and so he documented his process.
This ended up leading to @algestam stepping up and exactly duplicating Sean's process, and providing an unexpectedly convenient vector for dumping: Since I decided to take point on acquiring these handhelds, and I also lived in Sweden, it drastically cut down on shipping.
Once again, @algestam's setup, similar to Sean's setup, is pretty cool: There are custom-made PCBs to which the LCD matrices get attached, which can selectively light all or individual segments. There's also a high-quality camera with a fixed tripod pointed at the setup.
The end result is the ability to get high-quality, vectorizable photos of each LCD segment. Combined with dumping the ROM data and scanning the underlays and overlays, and high-quality photos of the case, one winds up with the HD-quality artwork available for these games.
Last but not least, I want to give a shout out to an anonymous donator who agreed to essentially bankroll all of the final, practically Unobtanium, entries in the Game & Watch library. If not for him stumping up a couple thousand bucks, we'd be short several units.
We'd not have Donkey Kong Circus, or Mario The Juggler, or Super Mario Bros. Crystal, if not for this person. it's been a monumental task, but it's nearing completion. And apart from a few alternate revs, we can finally say Nintendo's Game & Watch line is preserved.
What feels like impossible shifts all the time. Right now we're at that point of 'no known method' for a bunch of the earlier Plug and Plays (single glob, ROM on CPU die) and non G&W LCD games with similar setups. As a non-hardware guy seeing the G&W breakthrough was magic.
I do still fear there are limits however - G&W did at least have the advantage that it was a standard packaged chip, and if we look back on things we now know, had been cloned many, many years earlier. I suspect some of the clone manufacturers learned to be more secure from that.
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