September 07, 2003
Living room archeology
Now, that the summer has apparently ended things get busy again. I spent the weekend cleaning up my room, building new shelfspace for all new the books that piled up over the months and did some strategic excavations in a number of boxes that I had not looked into for a while.
One of the very interesting things that I unearthed (besides a 3D holographic image of a kitsch-Madonna with lightbeams and some other strange stuff) is a Tomy Alien Attack arcade game.
The game is (c) Konami Industry and sports a very nice feature list
DINAMIC MULTI SCREEN
LSI-CPU
FIP INDEX PANEL
(the typo is original)
It has a switch to select the difficulty of the game labeld "AMA / PRO", a up/down control, a firebutton and a on/off switch.
The display looks very nice
The display technology is something called Vacuum Flourescent Display, or VFD for short. A good explanation how this works can be found here (thanks to xzivi for the link).
I remember buying it at the flea market, spending some time on cold solderrings and rotten battery contacts until it worked again. The production date is from 1981, a modern antique.