I gave a talk on Tuesday about reverse-engineering the 1982 arcade game Robotron: 2084. Using the schematics from the original game, we located the major elements of the design, derived the system architecture, and then analyzed individual blocks of circuitry. We discussed the video subsystem – how pixels get to the screen and how the game deals with inverting the video image in a cocktail version of the game.

Robotron: 2084 Title
Robotron: 2084 Title

I've posted my PDF slides of the talk to the Open Source Bridge wiki. The slides file is very large (114MB) due to the vast number of schematic images I used. Sorry about that… While you wait for the PDF to download, here's a few slides to whet your appetite:

Robotron Architecture
Robotron Architecture
Analog Video Signals
Analog Video Signals
Robotron Video Serialization
Robotron Video Serialization
Robotron Hardware Implementation Video Fail
Robotron Hardware Implementation Video Fail