Time Attacker is an interesting arcade game made by Japanese company Shonan in 1983. It’s kinda like a more advanced version of Breakout. Besides the usual bricks you destroy with a square ball, there’s also oil zones that mess with the ball’s movement, and some “enemies that” get in the way and make things harder. I’ve spent some time messing around with the game’s hardware and trying to get it emulated. Thanks to Kale (Angelo Salese), the game is now fully playable in MAME. Here’s partial schematic i made:

The hardware is interesting. Main CPU is a Z80, with 2KB of ROM and 1KB of work RAM. Pretty minimal setup, but enough to run the core logic.

Video hardware it’s kinda a mix of “newer” tech ideas (for the 80s) like a tilemap for stuff like text and score, and old-school discrete logic graphics - built from RAM, counters, comparators and all that, running on pixel clock. That’s how it draws the bricks, ball, bat and so on. The soudn hardware is interesting.. it’s discrete plus Epson 7910CQ Multi-Melody chip, often used in doorbells and alartm clocks in 80’s. The controls are analog, and’there’s a bunch of potentiometers on the PCB to tweak game settings - like paddle width, ball size and stuff like that.

Herfe’s a video from real hardware i recorded years ago: