Was Contra Really This Demanding on Hardware?

The sudden news left Sam reeling, and he was too excited to sleep all night.

Early Sunday morning, barely at daybreak, he contacted the contract manufacturer, ready to go discuss production.

As for Lin Lixin, he had to take over Sam's shift and head to GAMENOVA early to mind the store.

"Looks like I really do need to hire a store clerk."

Lin Lixin stretched, making up his mind.

With his skills boosting him, he actually only needed two or three hours of sleep to stay fully rested all day.

But given the chance, who wouldn't want to enjoy a good lie-in?

Clunk.

He set a large cardboard box on the table behind the counter. Inside were a brand-new C64 and an assortment of development tools.

With this machine, being at the store wouldn't hold up his development work.

"Boss, hurry up and open!"

"Open up, manager! We're your people!"

"It's already six and you're still not open! Are you running a business or not?"

Before Lin Lixin had even finished arranging his things, the players lined up outside were already protesting.

Their shouts rose in wave after wave.

There were even more people today than yesterday!

"So this is the power of word of mouth..." Lin Lixin rubbed between his eyebrows, opened the shop doors again, and switched on the open sign.

Come to think of it, the term "word-of-mouth effect" seemed to have first been proposed by Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi.

It took Lin Lixin quite some effort to squeeze through the tightly packed shop floor and get behind the counter.

Leaving those fellows, now thoroughly swept up in their revelry, to their own devices, he turned his attention back to the computer.

Over the past two weeks and more, his progress might have seemed smooth, but the gap between him and the true giants was still as vast as heaven and earth.

Whether Nintendo, Namco, or Sega, any of them could easily put a greenhorn like him in his place.

Especially with less than a year left before Nintendo launched its full-scale push into the North American market.

If he couldn't build up his own forces before then, he would have little power to contend with them.

Until then, all he could do was develop as many hit games as possible, even snatching up the Famicom's lineup of masterpieces before Nintendo could, to weaken its grip on North America.

Once his funds reached a considerable scale, he could start laying the groundwork for entering the home console market.

"Super Mario and Contra..."

Lin Lixin drummed his fingers rhythmically on the table, considering how to tackle these two games.

In terms of influence, he could probably count on one hand the games in this world that could rival Super Mario.

Contra, meanwhile, was the signature title of Konami, the first developer to join after Nintendo opened development to third-party game companies.

Yet at the thought of Contra, Lin Lixin's eyes suddenly lit up.

This seemed like a good choice.

Judging by Contra's plot, that sort of heroic narrative, with a soldier single-handedly storming an enemy base to save the world, seemed highly compatible with the domestic market in the Americas.

The two Contra games on the Famicom had stood shoulder to shoulder with Super Mario in their day.

Choosing it as his weapon against Nintendo would also let him secretly trip up goddamn Konami. A win-win-he would win twice.

His mind made up, Lin Lixin wasted no more time and immediately began planning the development process.

But he ran into a major problem right at the outset.

The hardware couldn't keep up!

Contra wasn't a contemporary of Super Mario. It had only been released three years later, in 1987.

Back then, Contra ran on Konami's in-house arcade board, whose performance utterly crushed current arcade hardware in every respect.

Even looking at the processors alone, there was no point in making a comparison.

The dual-CPU architecture of a 16-bit Motorola 68000 and a Zilog Z80 already pinned every contemporary single 8-bit processor to the ground and beat it senseless.

Its custom graphics chip pushed the visual detail to a next-generation level.

By comparison, current graphics chips were completely wrung dry just implementing 1942's background scrolling and texture effects.

Not to mention its size of a whopping 256 KB. Even finding a storage medium that could hold it would be difficult.

"What are you thinking about?"

Vivian's voice came from in front of him, breaking Lin Lixin's train of thought.

She had noticed a while ago that Lin Lixin kept frowning in thought, occasionally making marks on a notepad.

"If there's anything you need help with, I might be able to lend a hand."

"Vivian." Lin Lixin nodded in greeting, a hint of surprise showing in his eyes.

After just one day apart, Vivian's panel stats seemed to have risen by several more points.

"What do you think... with current arcade hardware, how far could we go if we optimized the algorithms to the limit?"

Vivian tilted her head slightly, looking thoughtful.

"Actually, what you did in 1942 was already very good, wasn't it? Any further optimization would cost visual quality. I think the losses would outweigh the gains."

Vivian had spent a day playing 1942, and she could learn something new from almost every round.

His technical skills weren't exactly top-tier, but his approach to solving problems was very interesting and worth learning from.

"So that really is the case?"

Lin Lixin nodded. He had more or less guessed as much.

With the capabilities of this era's machines, there really wasn't much room to work on the algorithms.

The hardware limitations were practically impossible to overcome.

"But why do you ask? Are you still not satisfied with 1942's visuals?"

"Something like that. I'm planning to develop a new game, but I've hit a hardware bottleneck. It's a real headache."

If Contra really proved impossible to pull off, he could only fall back and dutifully make a platformer to take Super Mario head-on.

Unfortunately, although Vivian majored in electrical engineering, her main focus was graphics.

Sam's technical skills were on par with his own without cheats, making him even less of an option.

If only he knew an expert in hardware.

"A hardware problem?" Vivian nodded slightly. "Lin, I really don't know much about that, so I can't be much help."

"But..." She changed tack. "Do you remember me mentioning that I work part-time at a small company?"

"Hm?" Lin Lixin froze, unsure why she was bringing that up now.

"Although I work at a software company, my boss might be able to help you."

She borrowed Lin Lixin's notepad and wrote down an address and some contact information.

[VideoSoft] Gerald Lawson

The moment he saw the name, Lin Lixin's eyes went wide.

He knew that name.

Gerald Lawson, a former Fairchild Semiconductor engineer.

This African American engineer was also known to later generations as-the father of modern video game consoles/the father of programmable game cartridges.

The Channel F, the world's first game console with interchangeable game cartridges, had been his creation.