But what about the software?

[the1truepickaxe]

I understand that arcade games have to be printed onto PCB's before they can be used in the arcades. But what about software? I mean, before a game is converted to a PCB, they have to program it on a regular computer and create the game on there. So what software do they use? For example, what is the software for DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu?

I am really curious to know this. Please reply to this message if you know the answer.

[gray117]

Not sure, but I think it's fairly clear Cave's shmup games never ran fully in any other environment than on the arcade hardware during development. So even if they had a level design tool, a particular art pipeline, or various profiling tools, and created and compiled the code on a pc - the built result probably only ever ran altogether on (reference/dev) arcade hardware during development...

There was probably some kind of analyser to ensure any code written before building was valid for the chipset targeted, but it probably wouldn't include the actual running of the program code, nor any debugging features. Thus you most probably saw anyone writing code then flashing it to a reference version of the hardware to debug.

Perhaps where chips like the SH processors were involved (and largely intended for multimedia applications) there were probably some tools available for support - but I suspect for the most part all such tools would have been fairly restricted and intended to be used on actual (reference) hardware, since time spent on anything else would be dead time, and for each and every issue you'd have to work out whether is was a false bug due to tools error, or a legitimate issue that would be replicated on the target platform with the final code.

This isn't to say the game logic couldn't be converted, and I'm sure greater attention was put towards making this accessible around the time of the IOS+360 ports, but solving/working around those issues is basically what the conversion people [third party or otherwise] have spent their time doing post arcade release - essentially an exercise undertaken after the actual development of the game.

[BuckoA51]

When I was developing arcade software (gambling machines) we basically used the actual hardware plus a serial port for collecting debugging information, nothing more sophisticated than that really. For programming we used an eeprom emulator (PromICE). You basically cross compiled the code into a ROM file, sent it down to the EEPROM emulator which then acted like an actual ROM chip on the board.

More sophisticated development hardware existed that would have allowed the setting of breakpoints and collecting of memory dumps, but since we got by with what we had I guess management never considered it a worthwhile investment.