Namco Pole Position

The Namco Pole Position was an arcade system board, which was first used by Namco in 1982 for the Pole Position arcade games; it was one of the first system boards to utilize stereo and quadraphonic sound, and used NVRAM to save its high scores after a machine was turned off. It was also the first arcade system to use 16-bit microprocessors, with two Zilog Z8002 processors.^[1][2] It was the most powerful and expensive arcade system upon release, costing $4200^[2] ($8.03 thousand in 2016). The hardware is capable of pseudo-3D, sprite-scaling.

Namco Pole Position specifications

• Board composition: CPU board, video board, audio board^[3]

Processors

• Main CPU: Zilog Z80 @ 3.072 MHz^[4]
  • Performance: 8/16-bit instructions @ 0.445 MIPS (million instructions per second)^[5]
• Secondary CPU: 2× Zilog Z8002 @ 3.072 MHz^[6]
  • Performance: 16/32-bit instructions @ 1.536 MIPS (0.768 MIPS, 4 cycles per instruction, per CPU)^[7]
• I/O MCU: Fujitsu MB8843 @ 1.54 MHz & Fujitsu MB8844 @ 1.54 MHz^[8]
  • Performance: 4/8-bit instructions @ 3.08 MIPS (1.54 MIPS, 1 instruction per cycle, per MCU)^[9]
  • Capabilities: Input/output controllers (type 1) handle the controls^[10]
• Sound CPU: One of the secondary CPU's used for sound,^[10] possibly additional Zilog Z80 for sound^[11]
• Sound chips:^{[6][11][12][13]}
  • Namco 52xx Audio Processor @ 1.536 MHz: 6 PCM wavetable synthesis channels, 4-16-bit audio depth, up to 48 kHz sampling rate, stereo & quadraphonic output
  • Namco 54xx Audio Generator @ 1.536 MHz: Explosion sound generator,^[6] noise generator,^[14] 4-channel quadraphonic muxer
  • 2× Fujitsu MB8843 MCU @ 1.54 MHz:^[8] 4/8-bit instructions @ 3.08 MIPS,^[9] handles speech^[10]
• GPU chipset: 3× Namco 02xx GFX Shifter^[11] (16-bit video shifter),^[6] 2× Namco 03xx Playfield Data Buffer,^[11] Namco 04xx Sprite Address Generator,^[6] Namco 09xx Sprite RAM Buffer^[11]

Memory

• RAM (random-access memory)^[4]
  • Z80: 8 KB
    • Battery back-up NVRAM: 2 KB
    • Video RAM: 5 KB (2.5 KB SRAM, 2 KB sprite RAM^[6])
    • Sound RAM: 1 KB
  • Z8002: 8 KB video RAM (3 KB SRAM, 4 KB sprite RAM^[6])
• ROM (read-only memory)^[4]
  • Z80: 16 KB
  • Z8002: 240 KB

Graphics

• Video resolution: 256×224 to 384×264 pixels^[6]
• Color palette: 4096^[15] (12-bit RGB)
• Colors on screen: 3840^[6]
• Graphical planes: 2 tilemap layers (1 background, 1 text), 1 road layer^[6]
  • Tile size: 8×8 pixels^[6]
  • Colors per tile: 3^[6]
  • Scrolling: Horizontal and vertical^[15]
• Sprite capabilities: Line buffers, vertical position buffer,^[15][16] sprite-scaling,^[6] sprite flipping, mid-frame palette swap^[15]
  • Colors per sprite: 16 (4-bit)^[6]
  • Sprite sizes: 16×16 (64 bytes) and 32×32 (256 bytes)^[6]
  • Sprite RAM: 6 KB^[6]
  • Sprites on screen: 24 (32×32) to 96 (16×16)
  • Sprite pixels per scanline: 512^[15]
  • Sprites per scanline: 16 (32×32) to 32 (16×16)

List of Namco Pole Position arcade games

• Pole Position (1982)
• Pole Position II (1983)
• Top Racer (1982) - bootleg of Pole Position

References

External links

• Namco Pole Position hardware page at System16.com - The Arcade Museum