Atari System 1

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The Atari System 1 was Atari Games' first upgradeable arcade game hardware platform. Introduced in 1986, the System 1 platform was used for the games:

The hardware used a large circuit board with a Motorola 68000 main processor, a MOS Technology 6502 sound processor, an operating system ROM, 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, and (for some games) TI TMS5220 LPC speech synthesis chip.

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

Several games (most notably Gauntlet and Gauntlet II 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 TTL chips. These boards were later replaced by the functionally identical "System 1 LSI Main" and "LSI Cartridge" boards, which used ASICs for reduced manufacturing costs.

There was an attempt to produce a System 2, but only one game (Paperboy) used it.

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.

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