Y3 in action on a 3D glasses-free display made for arcades
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When news began to trickle out about the upcoming JAMMA show in Japan, we found out early on that SI Electronics was planning on showing off a new arcade hardware platform called the System Board Y3 but beyond the name there were no details revealed about that hardware – until today. AM-Net linked to an official SIE document detailing the hardware specs on the Y3(also picked up by Andriasang) and the big surprise is that it’s been developed with glasses-free 3D games in mind. Here are the specs:
■ SYSTEM BOARD Y3 Overview (tentative)
CPU: PowerPC 800MHz
Memory: DDR2-800 1GByte
Graphics: 2D Drawing up to 18 billion pixel/sec
Polygon: Drawing up to 10 billion pixel/sec
Movie Playback: Supports Full HD video (implies 1080p resolution)
Sound: 32ch
Media: Undecided
Output: Video, Analogue, D-Sub 15pin x 2
Sound: Stereo 2ch, RCA Connector
Game I/O: JAMMA Connector, JVS I/O Connector
Serial: 1ch
GPIO: 16ch
The board will be at the Kaga Amusement booth, but we don’t know if they will have a game to show off using the technology or it will simply be a technology demo. Hopefully this will not be interpreted by anyone as some new game console but the chances of that are pretty low since SIE isn’t known as a console maker to begin with. 
On another JAMMA related note, Sega has revealed that the new multiplayer Pengo arcade title that was recently tested in Japan will be at the show. The game uses the Ringwide hardware but the page the announcement was made on suggests that it will be a four player game as opposed to an eight player one (which is was tested as). Perhaps they’ll have a unique cabinet made just for the game instead of putting it onto stock machines and such a design wouldn’t work out for the eight player concept. But the screenshots on the announcement page still show 8 players as being possible so they may not have ruled it out quite yet. As Pac-Man Battle Royale will be at the same show it should be fun to see the two games compete since they will be gunning for each other. I’m surprised that Sega hasn’t enhanced the graphics beyond giving it a widescreen but that should mean that development costs for this are quite low. It’s similar to Sega Racing Classic in a way but that didn’t stop them from charging way too much for that game. Hopefully the lesson was learned and we won’t have to see the situation repeated with Pengo.
