stories on the development of arcade games and boards?

It seems like the annals of video game history are filled with Dooms/CodeMasters/Ralph Baers/Shigeru Miyamotos, largely the history of home and PC gaming. I've been really curious about companies like Toaplan, Data East and Irem from the "golden era" of brawlers and shooters. I'm curious to know more information about the engineering and info about proprietary arcade boards and the games made on them.

I came across this, The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers book and DVD http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/japandvd/japandvd.htm

but I'm curious if anyone knows anything else.

There's http://shmuplations.com/games/

It has a lot of translated developer interviews.

Both those links have some really interesting stuff.

One thing I read through and found fascinating was the archive of emails and memos/status reports from Atari/Atari Games Vax system, from 1983-1992 (the arcade part of the company). A lot of it is mundane stuff, but there are some interesting bits of info in there.
http://www.jmargolin.com/vmail/vmail.htm

Vax84 almost predicts modern MMOs with real-money trading:

The one difference between this and EVE Online is that the house percentage in EVE Online is a pilot's license extension (PLEX), an in-game token that can be redeemed for a month of service. It's analogous to the fee to rent a poker table.

I read through some of Vax85, and after "Building Access Hours" by Dan Van Elderen & Lyle Rains, I learned what physical security precautions were considered commonplace at a video game company. Now I sort of understand what Nintendo means by a "secure facility" in its developer qualifications, and why it took so long for Nintendo to warm up to home offices.

I didn't think "^H^H^H^H^H" was real until I saw the pile of \u0008 characters in "UPCOMING BRAINSTORM" by D. TRAEGER in Vax85.

And some people sounded scared of Nintendo's Vs. System. (Remember: 1985 was before the NES was available to the public.)

Did I read this correctly, or did they say that they added bogus slowdown to Castlevania on X68000, just to impress X68030 users?

First of all, you're talking about this article, right? http://shmuplations.com/akumajox68000/



It means their target hardware limited the animation and visual effects they wanted. An example earlier the article talked about how the CPU speed affected the water fountain and how smooth the gears in the clock stage turned. Nothing I would consider bogus slowdown.

It's also strange reading how difficult the team was to control in terms of inside jokes that nobody outside of the development team would understand. I suppose that's complete opposite to keeping tight to a script and design document like AAA games of this current decade.

Was animation limited on the original x68000? Did it have to use the CPU as a DMA, and thus a faster CPU meant faster animation updating?

It reminds me of playing games on the old 68000 Macintoshes, where on older machines there was no QuickDraw acceleration, which made the CPU speed suddenly very important for graphical updates.