The Yakuza Series

The new Yakuza series represents the largest advancement in board technology and software that I've created since the inception of Tadao Technologies. It's not that writing the software to drive an LCD or OLED display is difficult. The difficulty lies in finding small enough screens and supporting components to use in existing guns that have little or no room for such things. Fortunately the technology has caught up with the demand. Boards like the Yakuza series for the Bob Long Marq actually have two boards (a sandwich design) that provide more space for components and line up the screen with the side of the frame.

On the software level, running an LCD or OLED display is relatively easy, assuming you don't have to fire a paintball gun.

So on top of making everything fit in the marker, we also have to display information on the screen that is intuitive, legible, and updates correctly as a player uses the board. It's one thing to turn an LED on or off with a single instruction that executes in 0.00000025 seconds. Displaying two full lines of text across a 96x16 pixel display can take over 10 milliseconds, which is 1/100th of a second. Anyone who plays paintball knows that this kind of delay can cause a trigger pull to be missed, as the most common default debounce on any board is typically 10 milliseconds.

Despite the cool visuals and extremely easy-to-use interface, the Yakuza software doesn't give up even one processor cycle to make it look pretty. It never sacrifices firing performance for visuals. When you need to fire that string of paint at 13.3 bps on the break of the PSP finals, any inconsistency that occurs will not be caused by the Yakuza software.

Another common misconception is that Yakuza is just Musashi 7 plus a screen. This couldn’t be further from the truth. If the software was based on previous revisions, it would have been named Musashi 9. Instead, it is named Yakuza, and it was written from scratch. Names of modes and settings are reused, but all other similarities end there. The software was rewritten so it is optimized to the new microcontroller used with all Yakuza series boards. It’s much faster, has more memory, and uses a more advanced instruction set. This has led to even faster response times, more reliable operation, and with the addition of the OLED screen, a much more intuitive and easy-to-use product.

Yakuza uses all new hardware, too. I’ve chosen very high quality components such as the PIC18 series microcontrollers, Texas Instruments voltage regulators and boosters, Panasonic capacitors, International Rectifier MOSFETs, and Omron microswitches. These parts add robustness and reliability to the circuit board, and reduce the fragility of the electronics powering your favorite paintball marker.

The software, as mentioned before, is completely different. New standout features include a fine rate of fire adjustment, allowing you to tune your maximum rate of fire in 0.5 ms increments. Want your gun to shoot 13.2 bps? No problem. Another new piece of software is the anti-breech bounce code, which dynamically adjusts the cyclic rate when a loader starts to run low on paint. This helps prevent chops when a fast loader actually throws a paintball down into the breech and it bounces up, since there are no paintballs stacked above it. As many users have requested, there is also a ramping percentage setting, adjustable from 10% to 500%, so you can tune any of the ramp based fire modes. Lastly, there are setting profiles, which allow you to save your favorite settings and load them later with just a few button presses, making it infinitely easier to switch between tournament marker rules.

Altogether, Yakuza gives you the fastest, easiest-to-use, and most reliable circuit board available.

When compared to an LCD, OLED screens have several advantages, including better durability, lower power consumption, and higher contrast, especially in sunlight.

Unlike an LCD, each pixel of an OLED is a light emitting diode, and therefore emits its own light. This makes the power consumption directly proportional to how many pixels are lit. With an LCD none of the pixels light up on their own, so a backlight must be used, which drastically increases power consumption by lighting up the entire display instead of only the pixels that are active. Paintball markers that use LCDs, like the original Bob Long Intimidator, were (and still are) very difficult to read when viewed in the sun, and impossible to read at night.

Another major factor is vibration and moisture resistance. OLED technology takes a step in the right direction because the manufacturing process involves fully sealing the organic films that make up the matrix of LEDs. By comparison, LCDs are made of multiple layers of polarizing material with a liquid crystal solution between them, and can be easily destroyed with excessive vibration (i.e. a paintball marker firing repeatedly).

Presently, the only drawback to OLED technology is the cost, but as the manufacturing techniques mature, the costs will go down. Given the overwhelmingly clear advantages of OLED, the Yakuza series is proud to bring this latest break-through in electronic display technology to mainstream paintball.