I was an intern at Fisher Price when they introduced the Pixter Color. I did QA on some of the games, the Dora one comes to mind. You can imagine the torture playing a level over and over.
The games were developed overseas (India I think?). I would send them bug reports in Mantis and overnight they would send a new build. Sometimes they would even fix the bugs. I would burn the builds on to EEPROMs and verify them the next day. The EEPROMS had a little round window so they could be erased in a UV box before programming.
Fisher Price used a video codec from Actimagine to fit video clips onto the game cartridges. That's how I learned about Virtualdub. I remember editing clips from a show called Winx.
The big competition was the Leapster LeapPad and they were trouncing us.
One fun thing the engineers did periodically was a toy teardown to see how competitors saved on cost. Cost was critical. They told me how Walmart basically dictates toy cost because they controlled the shelf space.
The games were developed overseas (India I think?). I would send them bug reports in Mantis and overnight they would send a new build. Sometimes they would even fix the bugs. I would burn the builds on to EEPROMs and verify them the next day. The EEPROMS had a little round window so they could be erased in a UV box before programming.
Fisher Price used a video codec from Actimagine to fit video clips onto the game cartridges. That's how I learned about Virtualdub. I remember editing clips from a show called Winx.
The big competition was the Leapster LeapPad and they were trouncing us.
One fun thing the engineers did periodically was a toy teardown to see how competitors saved on cost. Cost was critical. They told me how Walmart basically dictates toy cost because they controlled the shelf space.