How game "HARDWARE" is made?

[QuickSciFi]

I'm having the hardest time trying to find such a link. Everywhere I go, it talks about the concept of developing the software. There's even talks about PR and marketing, but nothing on the actual production of cartridges, or even disc-based games.

...No, I'm not interested in How CDs/DVDs are made. I'm actually interested in How these are packaged (including the game manuals). Moreover, I really would love to know how a cartridge is(was) made (if there's still a chance at all). And, to a lesser extent, I'm interested in how game systems are produced (NOT INVENTED).

can anyone help with a link or two?

P.S.> And yes, I'm actually talking about the "Hardware" aspect of CDs and Cartridges. That's why we call them hard copies, after all (as opposed to the electronic ectoplasmic hell we now call downloadable content )

[retrospiel]

I imagine that if you're looking for information on Audio CDs and Video DVDs you'll find a lots of info as the process is identical.

[QuickSciFi]

Perhaps. But jewel cases aside, on that topic, I'd be looking for how a game disc is burned, it's label printed, the game manual printed and bound, the insert printed and cut, the game case molded and pressed and all the goodies put together in a neat package.

As for cartridge gaming, from the molding of the cartridge, to the silicon board and it's circuitry formed, to the glue applied for the label, to the loading of the game itself, and then the molding and pressing of the plastic clamshell, or the printing and cutting and gluing of the cardboard box, the manual and so on.

[kool kitty89]

Commercial discs are never "burned", they're pressed from blank pieces of polycarbonate and then get a reflective layer and sealed top surface added. (or for DVDs a full sandwich of a 2nd polycarb layer)

Only CD-Rs/RWs (and DVD/BD counterparts) are burned, and they're manufactured in a significantly different manner.


Likewise, ROMs for commercial games are not usually "burned" as such (as with flash/EPROM/PROM/etc), but are masked onto silicon rather like other commercial integrated circuits... that's only for high production commercial games though and most repros/homebrew stuff (as well as a lot of pirate games) are done with PROMs or flash memory.
I'm not sure, but I think the ROM used for DS games is still mask ROM, but I've seen some references to high volume flash memory actually being more cost competitive. (I'm not sure if that's true to full high-volume masked ROMs though, but I could certainly see it being advantageous over PROM/EPROM stuff -if flash really is used for DS games, you can expect a far more limited shelf life than conventional mask ROMs)


Carts are very simple... just a single PCB with an edge connector and traces (the little wires etched into the PCB) connecting pins from a ROM chip to the contacts of the edge connector: in some cases with some added capacitors or resistors for buffering and sometimes added RAM (or EEPROM/flash memory) for save games or RAM expansion. (for save games you need a battery, in either case you usually also have a couple logic circuits on the board to interface the RAM)
You may also have bank switching logic, but for most higher volume games, that's embedded into the ROM masks. (you have other cases with coprocessor, sound chips, or memory mapping logic chips on the cartridges)
Some carts also have RF shielding over the ROM chips (some very early 70s/80s games did that in the US, as did most N64 games), and some used glob top ROM chips rather than conventional packaging.

The cases are usually made from injection molded plastic and screwed together (often with security screws) or sometimes using clips or a combination of clips and screws. (I think cards are usually glued or melted/fused together)


As for the console hardware, that technology hasn't changed a whole lot in the last 30 years in some areas, but hugely in others... one thing that's virtually gone unchanged is the use of printed circuit boards to hold and connect all the chips/components (similarly, ribbon cables have changed rather little), though triple layer PCBs (sometimes more) are common where double sided (or sometimes even single sided) PCBs were used before and pretty much everything is surface mounted rather than using through-hole construction. (that became the de facto standard in the mid 90s even, though we've also seen a progression to several different types of surface mounted tech, most of which is still in use from glob tops to LLCs to QFPs to inline flat packages, to BGAs, etc)



Then there's the construction of moving components for drives and such and the semiconductor/integrated circuit components in general, and that goes pretty broad and with a lot of historical and obsolete stuff to consider too.


If you gave more context to exactly what you want to know and why, that would simplify things a lot more... otherwise you could get pages upon pages of info on the subject. (and that's just if summarized... otherwise you'd have whole books to go through)



If you want to know if you could practically reproduce old game hardware using modern processes, then yes, definitely. If you want to know if that could be done on a fairly small scale basis (or even a single/homebrew project basis) then that gets a bit shakier... carts would be the easiest, but a whole console is a lot more work to replicate. (you could probably manage it with a few RAM chips, some logic gates to interface that and a decent sized FPGA, but you'd need to resynthesize all the logic and components into that FPGA, print the circuit board, etc, etc and it would be a lot of work... for commercial clones, that's generally what has happened over the years -though usually it's a mass produced ASIC rather than PGA -the same thing was done for the Flashback 2 with modern tech -years earlier Sega made their own versions of single chip consoles in late generation releases and likewise Atari used a single chip 2600 chip in late Jr models -though I think that was still NMOS technology)


But back to carts: case in point with Pier Solar, they manufactured all-new PCBs and cases for the carts (with a production run large enough to facilitate that) and I believe flash memory was used for the ROM, but I'm not positive. (I assume they used external bank switching logic as well -given it's an 8 MB game)
For small-scale homebrew stuff it's more practical to use "donor carts" (ie cannibalized games), and that's what many repros and small-scale homebrew releases have done.

I'm not sure is Pier Solar used pressed CDs or CD-Rs, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was pressed given the fairly decent sized production run.

[QuickSciFi]

Thanks man. That was very informative.

Indeed, I was looking to grasp just how these guys at WaterMelon and SFT are managing to pull off a feasible run on these old carts and, even, plastic clamshells at an afordable price.

[nathanallan]

Thanks man. That was very informative.

Indeed, I was looking to grasp just how these guys at WaterMelon and SFT are managing to pull off a feasible run on these old carts and, even, plastic clamshells at an afordable price.

From what I gather, lots and lots of wheeling and dealing to get older tech used again in this new gaming world. Making "a" cart is no problem. Getting carts made en masse is a bit of a problem since not too many people dedicate hardware to that much these days. From my personal research finding the right person to do it that still has viable hardware to make the boards/plastics/rom package is hard.

[TmEE]

just go to china...