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[TheMonkeyTail]

#chapter one - something from our past



every time you think in a game you think in Mario, Sonic, Zelda, Cuphead... but, there so many games that didn't have a screen...
you find these games in lots of places with diferent boxes with lots of colors and light, yes, I'm talking about pinball, airgames, whac-a-mole and lots of games that you can find in gamecenters, parks, some restaurants, cassinos and go on...

we worked a lot in this market here in Brazil, we made lots of machines like jukeboxes, karaokes, basket machines, airhockey and soccer games, including a special edition with Coca-Cola to a world cup...

but, after the illegal gambling market here in Brazil this market was dead, even working just with music machines, legal music machines where we pay all the rights to the musicians, we was visited by the police, lots of times, and always we need to prove that we didn't work with gambling... so, by stress and some gangs pressure, we quit the market and moved to home entertainment, like videogames or pc and we said never work with that again... (something near 2005)

we learned a lot these years, we used directx, opengl, torque, unity, unreal, gamemaker, contruct, had contact with Microsoft, Google, Intel, Nokia, Apple... today we have access to Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony devkits... but, last year (2016) a guy from our past visited our studio here in São Paulo, and he was looking for a new product...

he was looking for a machine to sell game coins, so you add the money and get coins... thats was easy, so, we got some stuff we had here from when we developed these machines and build a small prototype using a arduino... the plan was, develop it fast and start to sell it asap, we was a little out of money, and we still are xD, so, lets make it simple and easy...

we made it in one week, got my last R$50 and I bought some coins to show it working... he loved, we made it fast, it was working, but, he didn't need it anymore...  
BUT, he said, we have some machines that we buy from a guy from Rio, but, there so many bugs... you think that you can develop something like this??

sure we can, we made lots of this machines! it's easy, but it will take lots of time and money... I said, can I talk with my brother first?

some days later, me and my brother was in a meeting with this guy, we was about to say no, but he said, we are selling 10 machines a month (and it's lots of machines!) and we will start to send to canada, we made a better price than china (WOW! now you got our attention!), but the guy from Rio isn't producing for all of this...

he was talking about just one machine, the airhockey, 10 machines a month is a lot for this market! but develop a new hardware take so much time and money... if there a way to make it easy and much more important, cheap...

#end of chapter one

[TheMonkeyTail]

#chapter two - entertainment is in our blood



we always had the videogame in our life... my first interaction with the videogames was with a Atari 2600 and a MSX computer, as my parents had a electronics maintenance store we had a really early access to the Famicom/NES, and later, the Genesis and Super Nintendo... Usually from someone who came from a US or Japan and wanted to convert the signal from NTSC to PAL-M (this is different from the EU PAL)

I played Super Mario Bros in a time where videogame in Brazil was just an Atari 2600 or some pong clone, the 8bits era was really far from our reality...
It just changed in the beggining of 90's with the Master System when TecToy becomes our SEGA, and by the first time, we had access new videogames and games translated to portuguese!

the public entertainment was really expensive, as the videogames, there was nothing here in Brazil, you only get arcades PCB from US or Japan, we had some pinball clones, but almost everything was from another coutry... and a guy who I really didn't remember the name asked to my parents if they can create a small project, something to convert the videogames joysticks into arcades joyticks and change the signal to RGB to use videogames inside arcade cabinets...

and with a help of a friend of my dad, they made a PCB board that makes the videogames compatible with jamma... they sold it a lot, but, that time they didn't see this as a real stuff, was just an extra money...
but, some guys who can create new stuff here in Brazil was really hard to find in that time with no internet, the true is, even the telephone was hard to find here in Brazil in that time xD
but that small project becomes something really great! they started to meet more and more guys from that market looking for something new, for something fresh!



they started to stop the maintenance and work only with development, the big change was the jukebox and the karaoke machines, that was a huge success, both machines was developed with Diverbras and Eletromatic (or Divermatic).
the jukebox was the first brazilian jukebox ever made and the karaoke was developed with a partnership of Videokê... you can find these machines still running in Brazil even today, and both was made 199X :p

with this success it's the time to create more stuff! new and original stuff!

later they developed a basketball machine, by the first time, with music and voices, my brother voice.

now it's my time to start to create some stuff! I know a little of Visual Basic and there a new technology for digital musics here! let's see what we can do with that MP3...

#end of chapter two