A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

Random thought: You can pretty much trace where the lion's share of tech R&D money was going at any given point by following the nature of arcade hardware.

Prior to the mid 90's or so, arcade machines were on the absolute tip-top of the cutting-edge stack, followed by home computers, followed by home game consoles. In the mid 90's, particularly with the advent of the Sony Playstation, things began to shift in a big way.

Why? Because Sony happily licensed the PS1's chipset out to arcade manufacturers to basically do with whatever they pleased. Graft on a ROM board and security IC? Can do. Faster clock rate? Easy. A hard drive? Yup. DVD, CD, *and* an HDD? No problem.

These aren't just hypotheticals. In order of what was previously mentioned: Namco System 11, Namco System 10, Konami GQ, Konami Bemani Twinkle hardware. All of which (and more) can be looked up on the aptly-named http://system16.com/ .

By the end of the 90's, it wasn't just Sony getting in on the action: The Sega Naomi arcade platform was more or less a Dreamcast with double the RAM and the option for either a ROM cartridge or a GD-ROM reader.

Then, just a few years later, you see the Sega/Microsoft Chihiro hardware, based on the Xbox. Sega/Namco/Nintendo Triforce hardware, based on the GameCube. Namco System 246 and others, based on the Sony Playstation 2.