D-Con

D-Con is a two-player arcade shooter released in 1992 by Success Corp, and today we are playing it on the MiSTer FPGA with full gameplay and commentary. If this is your first time here, welcome. This channel exists to cover classic arcade games and retro gaming, and we play them exactly as they were meant to be played.

The setup is straightforward but demanding. One or two players control a spaceship and must defend a city by shooting enemy spaceships across multiple waves of increasing difficulty. The arcade cabinet used an 8-way joystick and 2 buttons for controls. The hardware was solid for 1992, running a Motorola 68000 processor at 10 MHz for the main CPU and a Zilog Z80 at 4 MHz handling sound duties. Audio came from a YM3812 and OKI6295 sound chip combination running in mono.

This was a coin-operated arcade release during the era when arcades were packed with crowd-pleasing shooter games. D-Con never achieved the same household recognition as some of its contemporaries, which makes it a perfect candidate for rediscovery. The gameplay is relentless, the two-player co-op is where the real fun happens, and the difficulty ramp is designed to pull more coins from your pocket if you actually wanted to progress back on the original cabinet.

The MiSTer FPGA is running this at full arcade accuracy, which means the sprite animation, the sound, and the input lag are all faithful to what you would have experienced standing in front of the actual machine. No filters, no upscaling, no modern conveniences. Just pure 1992 arcade.