Trisha Shetty (Editor)

Namco Galaxian

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The Namco Galaxian was an 8-bit arcade game system board, which was first used by Namco for Galaxian in 1979; it was the first board from the company to use the Zilog Z80 microprocessor (as opposed to the older Intel 8080). It used specialized graphics hardware supporting RGB color, multi-colored sprites and tilemap backgrounds. Its introduction of colorful tilemap graphics distinguished it from the Taito 8080 monochrome framebuffer system of Space Invaders. Namco Galaxian also introduced a sprite line buffer system, which was adopted by later systems such as the Namco Pac-Man, Midway's Tron hardware and Sega Z80.

Contents

Namco Galaxian specifications

  • Main CPU microprocessor: Zilog Z80 @ 3.072 MHz (8-bit & 16-bit instructions @ 450,000 instructions per second)
  • Sound chips: Namco custom sound hardware
  • Audio channels: One programmable 4/8-bit waveform channel, three 4-bit square wave channels, two 17-bit noise channels, one modulated noise pulse channel
  • Graphics chipset: Namco custom video hardware
  • Display resolution: 256x224 to 384x264 (horizontal), 224x256 to 264x384 (vertical)
  • Refresh rate: 60.60606 Hz (V-sync)
  • Color model: RGB
  • Color palette: 224
  • Colors on screen: 32
  • Background planes:
  • Tilemap plane: 8x8 tile sizes, vertical scrolling
  • Bitmap plane: Star generator, vertical scrolling
  • Sprite capabilities: Line buffer, 8x8 to 16x16 sizes, 4 colors per sprite, 15 sprites (7 main sprites, 7 shells, 1 missile) per scanline, 240 sprite pixels per scanline, sprite flipping, sprite animation

    • King & Balloon

    King & Balloon adds the following audio upgrades:

  • Sound CPU: Zilog Z80 @ 2.5 MHz (8-bit & 16-bit instructions @ 364,000 instructions per second)
  • Second sound chip: Namco custom DAC
  • Audio capabilities: Speech synthesis

    • Namco

  • Galaxian (1979) - Namco's first big hit
  • King & Balloon (1980) - one of the first games to feature synthesized voices

    • References

    Namco Galaxian Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA