$3 Game machine
I picked up this $3 Game machine in a local 100 Yen store. It was a surprisingly well executed Tetris implementation with a few variations:
The design is a very typical COB layout:
I extracted the die and stuck it under the microscope. The die looks fairly similar to the $1 calculator. The an array of square features (here at the bottom of the image), also appears on the calculator die.
On the calculator this was a 3 by 13 array. which seemed about right for storing two values and a result, assuming each “square” is somehow storing close to a single digit.
The array on the game machine looks similar, but here is 9x17. If we assume that each square is storing ~4 bits. Then we’d have 612 bits, which seems more than enough working memory for a basic Tetris implementation. At some point, I’d like to revisit this and figure out exactly what’s going on in these regular arrays:
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