Namco Thunder Ceptor

The Namco Thunder Ceptor is a 16-bit arcade game system board which was used by Namco in 1986 for the Thunder Ceptor video games. It was the company's most powerful system board at the time. The hardware was capable of pseudo-3D sprite scaling and stereoscopic 3D. It was succeeded by the Namco System 1 and Namco System 2 in 1987.

Technical Specifications

• CPU: 6.0928 MIPS
  • Main CPU: 2.79552 MIPS
    • Motorola 68000 (16/32-bit) @ 12.288 MHz (2.1504 MIPS)
    • Motorola 6809 (8-bit) @ 1.536 MHz (0.64512 MIPS)
  • Sound CPU: 2× MOS M65C02 (8/16-bit) @ 2.048 MHz (1.76128 MIPS) (one each for the Yamaha YM2151 and DAC)
  • MCU: Hitachi HD63701 (8/16-bit) @ 1.536 MHz (1.536 MIPS) (handles the Namco CUS30)
• Sound chips:
  • Yamaha YM2151 @ 3.57958 MHz (music)
  • Namco CUS30 @ 96 kHz (effects)
  • DAC (speech)
• GPU chip: Namco C45 (Land Generator)
• Display resolution: 256 scanlines
  • Standard: 272×224 pixels (single output)
  • Stereoscopic 3D: 544×224 pixels (272×224 output for each eye with 3D glasses)
• Refresh rate: 60.60606 Hz
• Colors:
  • Colors on screen: 4096 (12-bit)
  • Color palette: 13,568 (PROM)
• Sprites:
  • Sprite capabilities: Pseudo-3D sprite scaling
  • Sprite sizes: 16×16, 32×32
  • Colors per sprite: 16 (4-bit)
  • Sprites on screen: Dozens
  • Sprites per scanline: 512 bytes sprite line buffer RAM, 64 to 256 bytes per sprite, 2 to 8 sprites per scanline, 512 sprite texels per scanline
• Background planes:
  • 2 tilemap layers: 8×8 tiles
  • Road layer: Proto-Mode-7-like scaling & rotation

List of Games

• Thunder Ceptor (1986)
• 3-D Thunder Ceptor II (1986)