Namco Galaxian

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.^[1] Its introduction of colorful tilemap graphics distinguished it from the Taito 8080 monochrome framebuffer system of Space Invaders.^[2] 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^[3] and Sega Z80.

Namco Galaxian specifications

• Main CPU microprocessor: Zilog Z80 @ 3.072 MHz^[4] (8-bit & 16-bit instructions @ 450,000 instructions per second)^[5]
• Sound chips: Namco custom sound hardware^[6]
  • 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^[6]
• Graphics chipset: Namco custom video hardware^[1][6]
• Display resolution: 256x224^[7] to 384x264^[8] (horizontal), 224x256 to 264x384 (vertical)
• Refresh rate: 60.60606 Hz (V-sync)^[6]
• Color model: RGB^[9]
  • Color palette: 224^[1]
  • Colors on screen: 32^[6]
• Background planes:
  • Tilemap plane: 8x8 tile sizes,^[6] vertical scrolling^[1]
  • Bitmap plane: Star generator, vertical scrolling^[1]
• Sprite capabilities: Line buffer,^[3] 8x8 to 16x16 sizes, 4 colors per sprite,^[6] 15 sprites (7 main sprites, 7 shells, 1 missile) per scanline, 240 sprite pixels per scanline, sprite flipping,^[1] sprite animation^[10]

Expansions

List of Namco Galaxian arcade games

References

External links

• Namco Galaxian hardware page at System16.com - The Arcade Museum
• Namco Galaxian Arcade at UVList
• Galaxian hardware at coinop.org