Atari System
Encyclopedia

Atari System 1

The Atari System 1 was Atari Games
Atari Games
Atari Games Corporation was an American producer of arcade games, and originally part of Atari, Inc..-History:When, in 1984, Warner Communications sold the Atari Consumer division of Atari Inc...

' first upgradeable arcade game
Arcade game
An arcade game is a coin-operated entertainment machine, usually installed in public businesses such as restaurants, bars, and amusement arcades. Most arcade games are video games, pinball machines, electro-mechanical games, redemption games, and merchandisers...

 hardware platform. Introduced in 1984, the System 1 platform was used for the games:
  • Marble Madness
    Marble Madness
    Marble Madness is an arcade video game designed by Mark Cerny, and published by Atari Games in 1984. It is a platform game in which the player must guide an onscreen marble through six courses, populated with obstacles and enemies, within a time limit. The player controls the marble by using a...

  • Road Blasters
  • Peter Packrat
    Peter Packrat
    Peter Pack Rat is a 1984 platform game released by Atari for the Atari System 1. Only 500 units were produced, either as a standalone Coin Op Arcade Cabinet or as an upgrade kit to existing Coin Op Arcade Cabinets...

  • Road Runner
  • Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
    Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (arcade game)
    Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom is a 1985 action arcade game developed and published by Atari Games, based on the 1984 film of the same name, the second film in the Indiana Jones franchise...



The hardware used a large circuit board with a Motorola 68010
Motorola 68010
The Motorola MC68010 processor is a 16/32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1982. In line with the Motorola 68000 naming convention, it is usually just referred to as the 010 ....

 main CPU running at 7.159 MHz, a MOS Technology 6502
MOS Technology 6502
The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch for MOS Technology in 1975. When it was introduced, it was the least expensive full-featured microprocessor on the market by a considerable margin, costing less than one-sixth the price of...

 sound CPU running at 1.789 MHz, a system ROM
Read-only memory
Read-only memory is a class of storage medium used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM cannot be modified, or can be modified only slowly or with difficulty, so it is mainly used to distribute firmware .In its strictest sense, ROM refers only...

, text and graphics display hardware, and control interfaces. Two large edge-card connectors allowed a "cartridge board" to be plugged in; the cartridge board supplied the main program ROMs, sound program ROMs, graphics ROMs, graphics shift registers, a "SLAPSTIC" copy protection chip, a Yamaha
Yamaha
Yamaha may refer to:* Yamaha Corporation, a Japanese company with a wide range of products and services** Yamaha Motor Company, a Japanese motorized vehicle-producing company...

 YM2151 FM sound generator, a POKEY
Atari POKEY
The Pot Keyboard Integrated Circuit is a digital I/O chip found in the Atari 8-bit family of home computers and many arcade games in the 1980s. It was commonly used to sample potentiometers and scan matrices of switches...

 and (for some games) TI
Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments Inc. , widely known as TI, is an American company based in Dallas, Texas, United States, which develops and commercializes semiconductor and computer technology...

 TMS5220
TMS5220
The Texas Instruments LPC Speech Chips are a series of speech synthesizer DSP ICs created by Texas Instruments beginning in 1978. They continued to be developed and marketed for many years, though the speech department moved around several times within TI, until finally the speech department...

 LPC
Linear predictive coding
Linear predictive coding is a tool used mostly in audio signal processing and speech processing for representing the spectral envelope of a digital signal of speech in compressed form, using the information of a linear predictive model...

 speech synthesis
Speech synthesis
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware...

 chip. System 1 was capable of generating a max resolution of 336 x 240 with 256 colors from a palette of 1024 colors.

Converting one System 1 game into another generally required replacing the cartridge board, attraction marquee, control panel, and in some cases installing additional controls (e.g., foot pedal for Road Blasters).

Several games (most notably Gauntlet
Gauntlet (arcade game)
Gauntlet is a fantasy-themed hack and slash 1985 arcade game by Atari Games. It is noted as the first class-based multiplayer game. Released during the emergence of popularity of other role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, the game was a sensation, being one of the first true dungeon crawl...

 and Gauntlet II
Gauntlet II
Gauntlet II is a 1986 arcade game, the first sequel to the game Gauntlet, released the previous year. Gauntlet II, like its predecessor, is a fantasy-themed hack and slash.-Overview:...

) used hardware that was electrically very similar to System 1, but implemented on a single board rather than using a cartridge board.

Early System 1 boards and cartridge boards used large numbers of 7400 series
7400 series
The 7400 series of transistor-transistor logic integrated circuits are historically important as the first widespread family of TTL integrated circuit logic. It was used to build the mini and mainframe computers of the 1960s and 1970s...

 TTL chips. These boards were later replaced by the functionally identical "System 1 LSI Main" and "LSI Cartridge" boards, which used ASIC
ASIC
ASIC may refer to:* Application-specific integrated circuit, an integrated circuit developed for a particular use, as opposed to a customised general-purpose device.* ASIC programming language, a dialect of BASIC...

s for reduced manufacturing costs.

Modular or upgradeable video games were not commonly offered by the major video game companies in the 1970s and 1980s, because it was more profitable to sell an entirely new machine. System 1 was the only major exception, though there were many smaller companies that sold conversion kits for competitors' hardware.

The System 1 and its games are noted for the use of "raw" sounding FM Synthesizers for sound effects and music: that is, the music many times used instruments that had the modulation settings turned too high or too low to emulate realistic sounding instruments, instead creating a warbly or noisy sound.

Atari System 2

Very soon after the introduction of the Atari System 1, the Atari System 2 was introduced. The System 2 platform was used for the games:
  • 720°
    720°
    720 Degrees, or 720°, is a 1986 arcade game by Atari Games. 720°, a skateboarding game, is notable in that along with BMX Simulator, it is one of the first extreme sports video games, and has a unique timed structure that requires the player score points in order to keep the game going...

  • Paperboy
    Paperboy (video game)
    Paperboy is a 1984 arcade game by Atari Games. The players take the role of a paperboy who delivers newspapers along a suburban street on his bicycle. This game was innovative for its theme and novel controls.-Gameplay:...

  • Championship Sprint
    Championship Sprint
    Championship Sprint is an arcade game that was released in 1986 and was the sequel to Super Sprint. It was later ported to ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64...

  • Super Sprint
    Super Sprint
    Super Sprint is a 1986 arcade game by Atari Games. The player drives a Formula One-like car on a circuit that is viewed from above.-Gameplay:...

  • APB : All Points Bulletin
    A.P.B. (arcade game)
    A.P.B. is a 1987 arcade video game by Atari Games. In the game, the player assumes the role of "Officer Bob," a rookie police officer.-Gameplay:...



Probably the most noticeable difference between the System 2 and System 1 games was the fact that the System 2 used higher resolution graphics. The video resolution was 512x384 and as such a medium resolution monitor was used (System 1 used low resolution).

The hardware was similar to its predecessor in the fact that it used 2 main circuit boards. In this case it used a "CPU board" and a "Video Board". The EPROM
EPROM
An EPROM , or erasable programmable read only memory, is a type of memory chip that retains its data when its power supply is switched off. In other words, it is non-volatile. It is an array of floating-gate transistors individually programmed by an electronic device that supplies higher voltages...

s were split between both boards.

The main CPU was a Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...

 (DEC) T-11
DEC T-11
The T-11, also known as DC310, is a microprocessor that implements the PDP-11 instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation. The T-11 was code-named "Tiny". It was developed for embedded systems and was the first single-chip microprocessor developed by DEC...

 microprocessor
Microprocessor
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...

 running at 10 MHz.

The sound CPU was a MOS Technology 6502
MOS Technology 6502
The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch for MOS Technology in 1975. When it was introduced, it was the least expensive full-featured microprocessor on the market by a considerable margin, costing less than one-sixth the price of...

 running at 1.789 MHz, and the sound chips used were a Yamaha
Yamaha
Yamaha may refer to:* Yamaha Corporation, a Japanese company with a wide range of products and services** Yamaha Motor Company, a Japanese motorized vehicle-producing company...

 YM2151 running at approx. 3.579 MHz, 2 POKEY
Atari POKEY
The Pot Keyboard Integrated Circuit is a digital I/O chip found in the Atari 8-bit family of home computers and many arcade games in the 1980s. It was commonly used to sample potentiometers and scan matrices of switches...

s at approx. 1.789 MHz and a TMS5220
TMS5220
The Texas Instruments LPC Speech Chips are a series of speech synthesizer DSP ICs created by Texas Instruments beginning in 1978. They continued to be developed and marketed for many years, though the speech department moved around several times within TI, until finally the speech department...

running at 625 kHz.

External links

  • The code t11.c here is an example that emulates the DEC CPU within the MAME program.
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