Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Untold Story of the Invention of the Game Cartridge

Posted by timothy on from the complete-with-diagrams dept.

harrymcc writes In 1973, an obscure company which had been making electronic cash registers looked for a new business opportunity. It ended up inventing the game cartridge--an innovation which kickstarted a billion-dollar industry and helped establish videogames as a creative medium. The story has never been told until now, but over at Fast Company, Benj Edwards chronicles the fascinating tale, based on interviews with the engineers responsible for the feat back in the mid-1970s.

2 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Better than replacing socketed UV-EPROM chips! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I worked with lots of embedded systems in the '80's that stored their program on banks of UV-EPROM chips that we'd have to upgrade using a a chip-puller (screwdriver) and a chip eraser and burner.

    The sockets would eventually fail, requiring repair/replacement of the entire CPU board (about a square foot in size).

    When we saw our first game system with replaceable ROM cartridges, there was much forehead slapping, since we were already using board-edge connectors (on a bus very similar to the S-100).

  2. Hacking the Atari by Snotnose · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We figured out the Atari cartridge was nothing more than a popular PROM (2716?) with one of the control signals reversed. We made our own cartridges that used an EEPROM, then used our EEPROM burner to read cartridges and store the contents on a floppy. We'd then burn EEPROMs of the games we wanted, and pop them into the ZIF socket on our home made cartridges.