Mazan: Flash of the Blade

Similar to Konami's 2001 arcade game Blade of Honor, the game could accurately detect the player's hand gestures using electromagnetic tracker technology, which worked in a similar manner to the Wii's accelerometer technology. Mazan's virtual katana blade matched the player's movements precisely.

The arcade machine was released in Japan, the United States, and United Kingdom. However, the game's electromagnetic tracker technology was too expensive and required significant floor space, so it was not as widely available in the US or UK outside of the larger arcades.

Arcade hardware

The game's arcade machine, based on the Sega Naomi hardware, used expensive electromagnetic tracker technology for the accurate motion-sensing technology. Namco produced their own custom GPU cards in order to provide enough power to run the unit. Each custom GPU card was capable of 1.4 GigaFLOPS, and up to 16 could be inserted into the unit, where they would automatically function as a multi-core system. With 3 GB of EPROM on each card, they could be assigned dedicated tasks, such as monitoring the electromagnetic trackers in real-time. This made Mazan's custom arcade hardware considerably powerful for its time.

• Dual-core CPU (Central Processing Unit) setup: 2x Hitachi SH-4 @ 200 MHz each
  • Bit length: 32-bit RISC, 128-bit floating point
  • Instruction performance: 720 MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second)
  • FLOPS (floating-point instructions/sec) performance: 2.8 GFLOPS (GigaFLOPS / billion FLOPS)
• Sound chip: ARM7 Yamaha AICA @ 45 MHz
  • Internal sound CPU: 32-bit RISC @ 45 MHz
  • ADPCM (adaptive differential pulse-code modulation) channels: 64
• Default multi-core GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) setup
  • Main dual-core GPU: 2x NEC-VideoLogic PowerVR2 (PVR2DC)
  • Performance: 14 million polygons/sec, 500-1000 MPixels/sec (million pixels/sec)
• Additional multi-core GPU setup: Up to 16 custom Namco graphics cards
  • FLOPS performance: 1.4 GFLOPS each (up to 22.4 GFLOPS combined)
  • EPROM (erasable programmable read only memory) memory: 3 GB each (up to 48 GB combined)
  • Performance: 7-112 million polygons/sec, 500-8000 MPixels/sec
• RAM (Random Access Memory) memory: 112-232 MB
  • Main SDRAM (Synchronous Dynamic RAM) memory: 32 MB @ 100 MHz
  • Main VRAM (Video RAM) memory: 64 MB (32 MB Main, 32 MB Model Data)
  • Additional VRAM: 8-128 MB (8 MB per custom Namco GPU card)
  • Sound RAM: 8 MB

External links

• Mazan: Flash of the Blade, Virtual Worldlets Network
• Mazan: Flash of the Blade (Arcade) Review, Pure Waffle
• Mazan: Flash of the Blade, GameFAQs