They also had a much higher part count in their systems than is common today, so even a low rate of bad parts would result in a lot of malfunctioning systems.
You might be surprised. Modern electronics are highly integrated; a modern smartphone is probably no more than a few dozen ICs. Vintage arcade hardware tended to rely heavily on discrete logic; even a simpler game like Asteroids had somewhere around a hundred ICs on its main board.
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They also had a much higher part count in their systems than is common today, so even a low rate of bad parts would result in a lot of malfunctioning systems.
Mobile phones and computers today have a pretty high IC count.
I mean, an arcade board is pretty big, but the parts density is also pretty low.
You might be surprised. Modern electronics are highly integrated; a modern smartphone is probably no more than a few dozen ICs. Vintage arcade hardware tended to rely heavily on discrete logic; even a simpler game like Asteroids had somewhere around a hundred ICs on its main board.
I'm no stranger to 74xx. ;)
iPhone X has 72 integrated circuits on the main board, and quite a few more on other assemblies.
I agree that Asteroids has approximately 100. We're really not too far apart in device count.
Then when you look at, say, pin count, there's no contest at all.