If you ever played a Williams Bally/Midway pinball machine from the 1990s dot-matrix era (Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, etc), all of the artwork and animation for those displays was done entirely by hand in Deluxe Paint Animation for MSDOS.
The features like stenciling and animbrush were incredibly powerful. And with a little bit of extra software the exported files could be converted directly into a format for the game software to use.
We switched to C++. Nobody had a problem with the switch, although multitheading became a sticky point with some of the developers so we had to write an API to simulate nonpreemptive tasking like the old assembly system.
I was working on an 8-bit system back in this same time period. We couldn't afford flash devices and the kit required to reprogram them. But we did a similar trick with an extra write pin located near the ROM socket, then used a special daughterboard filled with SRAM that replaced the ROM and also touched the write line. Now we could just use our cheap debugger and blow an image into the address space the ROM used.
Only downside was that you lost the image on power down, so I can see why EEPROM was more important to Apple in developing their systems.
And a lot of smaller microcontrollers still use a UART port and serial protocol to reflash the device. It's the lowest common denominator for hardware interface and the simplest thing that works.
And, not you specifically, but you're the guy that ruins RTO for everyone else.
I'm hybrid and every Wednesday there's a wave of people that slide in, put in their earbuds, and shout into Teams calls for eight hours. It's impossible to concentrate.
I've managed to get some of them to get self aware and use conference rooms or those silly phone booths, but it's a nonstop problem now.
My kid routinely asked for access to Photos, which seemed pretty benign. Turned out she was screen recording entire Netflix movies and saving them in her Photos cache, not only bypassing every single restriction but also tanking my iCloud storage quota.
Given how people stuff their carts, seems like you could easily bury something expensive at the bottom. If the store is super busy the receipt checkers probably won't disassemble your whole cart.
That's right. Bally/Midway left the city for the suburbs during the boom years, with offices in Rosemont and factories in Franklin Park and Bensenville.
The Franklin Park factory is actually still in use. It now makes equipment for Life Fitness, which has a historical tie back to Bally.
The more likely reason is that it was a test machine, as shown by the paperwork in the cabinet and the low play count. It was put on location for a few weeks to gather earnings data and then probably pulled back to the factory. A lot of those test/proto machines were then scrapped or sold at a very low price to someone on the design/production team if they had the means to take it home.
Back in this era it was very rare for an arcade cabinet to be sold directly to the home. Aside from being very expensive, you had to buy from a distributor much like a car dealer. Most local distributors hated dealing with home owners (too many questions, couldn't fix it themselves, delivery was a bitch, etc).
Given this was found in a Chicago suburb I'm going to take a wild guess and say it was a Bally/Midway employee that kept it in their garage or basement for a few decades and then decided it just took up too much room. Or it was handed off to a friend or neighbor over the years but either way it really hasn't left the city and never saw hard use in an arcade. Galloping Ghost has taken great advantage of this situation and obtained many pieces that are more rare then Discs of Tron.
The reason I know this is because I have a few engineering sample games in my basement as well.
One embedded platform I worked on was developed in the late 80s, launched in 1990, and code I wrote in 1994 is still running. It's a 6809 processor with a little bit of RAM and 512KB of EEPROM attached. The entire code base is pure assembly language. That doesn't mean it doesn't have bugs, it just means no stdlibs to lean on.
The key isn't the longevity of the CPU, it's whatever is attached to it. Input and output stages fail, power supplies spike, things burn out, things wear out. So the processor can keep going strong...but what are you controlling?
But TDLR the answer is use the oldest sustainable tech you can find. Think like Gunpei Yokoi and build a Gameboy, not a Steam Deck.
I'm friends with someone that worked at Atari around that era and he'll be the first to tell you it was a very loose atmosphere there.