CP System

• 1. Introduction

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  The CP System, Capcom's arcade board, traces back to 1986 and a worry about living rooms. That year, Capcom president Kenzo Tsujimoto watched the Nintendo Entertainment System, known in Japan as the Famicom, take over home play. He saw cheap home games as a threat to arcades, and he summed up his answer in one line: "the only way we can make money is to give people twice what they can get at home".

  The Capcom Play System, or CPS for short, was the machine that grew out of that worry. It was later renamed CPS-1 to separate it from its successor. Its games arrived on removable daughterboards, so one cabinet could be given a new game. What did Capcom build inside it? How did arcade owners guard against pirates? And what happened when the company tried to bring it home?

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• 2. Two Custom Chips

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  About two-and-a-half years of work went into the hardware before it reached a single arcade. Capcom had already built boards that could run only one game each. This time the goal was a single board for many games, which would lower hardware costs and make the system more appealing to arcade operators.

  The result was a pair of custom microchips called the CPS Super Chips. Together they matched the power of ten ordinary arcade boards of the time. They also served as the graphics hardware of the whole system. Developing the pair cost around 5,500,000 pounds, a bill meant to be shared across many games rather than carried by one.

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• 3. Inside the Board

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  A Motorola 68000 processor running at 10 MHz did the main thinking, and some later boards stepped up to 12 MHz. A Zilog Z80 at 3.579 MHz acted as the secondary processor. The two Super Chips sat alongside them as co-processors.

  Two chips handled sound. A Yamaha YM2151 ran at 3.579 MHz, while an Oki OKI6295 ran at 1 MHz and played samples at 7.576 kHz.

  The 68000 had 64 KB of work memory plus 192 KB of shadow video memory. The Z80 made do with only 2 KB of work memory. The graphics unit carried its own 192 KB of video memory and 16 KB of cache.

  On screen, the board drew a raster image of 384 by 224 pixels at 59.6294 Hz. Its 16-bit color scheme combined 12-bit RGB with a 4-bit brightness value, which gave 65,536 possible colors. Only 4096 could appear at once, arranged in 192 global palettes of 16 colors each.

  Up to 256 sprites could be shown on each scanline. Sprites measured 16 by 16 pixels, with 15 unique colors and one transparent slot. Background tiles came in 8 by 8, 16 by 16 and 32 by 32 sizes. Three tile maps could span 512 by 512, 1024 by 1024 or 2048 by 2048 pixels. Sprites could also be flipped vertically and horizontally by the hardware itself.

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• 4. The Arcade Library

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  Forgotten Worlds, a shoot 'em up released on the 13th of May 1988, opened the catalog. Ghouls'n Ghosts followed in December 1988, and the platformer Strider arrived in March 1989. In all, 32 games are listed for the original board.

  Dynasty Wars, released in April 1989, is the earliest beat 'em up on the list. Final Fight reached arcades on the 1st of December 1989. Then came The King of Dragons on the 11th of July 1991, Captain Commando on the 28th of September 1991, and Knights of the Round on the 27th of November 1991.

  Not every release was a brawler. Three Wonders, from the 20th of May 1991, packed several games into one. Quiz games such as Adventure Quiz: Capcom World 2 and Quiz & Dragons appeared in the summer of 1992. Pokonyan! Balloon, a children's ride from the 22nd of March 1994, sat beside Ken Sei Mogura: Street Fighter II, a whack-a-mole game made with Togo and Sigma. Pnickies, a puzzle game made with Compile, came out on the 8th of June 1994. Pang! 3, built with the Mitchell Corporation, followed on the 11th of May 1995, and a puzzle title called Gulun.Pa! is listed as never released.

  Head-to-head fighting arrived with Street Fighter II: The World Warrior on the 6th of February 1991. Champion Edition came on the 13th of March 1992, and Hyper Fighting on the 9th of December 1992. The first of them was about to hand Capcom a problem it had not planned for.

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• 5. Pirates and Suicide Batteries

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  In some countries, bootleg copies of Street Fighter II were more common than the official version. Piracy plagued the whole system. Capcom virtually eliminated the problem only with the later CP System II.

  A year before that successor appeared, Capcom released the CP System Dash. It introduced features the CP System II would later use, including QSound chips. Its four interlocking circuit boards sat inside gray plastic boxes, an enclosure idea the later system reused.

  The Dash also carried a weapon against copying, known as the suicide battery. The battery kept volatile memory alive, and that memory held the manual settings for the display hardware registers and the priority registers. If its voltage dropped below +2V, the settings Capcom had entered at the factory vanished. The graphics processor could no longer find the register set that its game required, and the game stopped working. The operator then had to send the board to Capcom for repair, at the operator's own expense.

  The Dash's sound ROMs were encrypted using chips known as "Kabuki" Z80s. Its 68000 code, by contrast, was not encrypted at all.

  Five games were released for the Dash, all developed and published by Capcom. Warriors of Fate came on the 2nd of October 1992, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs on the 1st of February 1993, and The Punisher on the 22nd of April 1993. Saturday Night Slam Masters followed on the 13th of July 1993. The last of the five, Muscle Bomber Duo: Ultimate Team Battle, reached arcades on the 6th of December 1993.

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• 6. The Home Console Gamble

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  In November 1994, the Capcom Power System Changer, or CPS Changer, went on sale in Japan. It was a home version of the arcade system, built to compete with SNK's Neo Geo AES. Capcom initially made only 1,000 units, and the venture is remembered as an unsuccessful attempt to enter the home console market.

  The launch package cost 39,800 yen. It held the console, one CPS Fighter joystick controller, and Street Fighter II (Dash) Turbo. Additional games sold for about 20,000 yen each.

  Inside, the adapter was essentially a cased SuperGun, which is a television adapter for the JAMMA arcade standard. It worked with most JAMMA boards. Capcom's only defense against its use with other arcade boards was the physical shape of the device. On an ordinary JAMMA board it would not seat firmly and leaned at odd angles, but it still worked. It offered composite video, S-video and line-level mono audio. Two Super Famicom and Super NES controller ports meant that any pad for those consoles would work, as well as the six-button CPS Fighter.

  Every CPS Changer game was simply an arcade board in a plastic shell made for home use. The shells matched those of the CP System Dash games, and the CP System II had tried the same idea a year earlier. Eleven games were released, from Final Fight to Street Fighter Alpha. Some were altered slightly for home release, sometimes with debugging features or other easter eggs.

  The final game was a backport of Street Fighter Zero, also called Street Fighter Alpha, dated 1995. Sold in 1996 at a premium 35,000 yen, it was downgraded from its CP System II original. It ran at a slightly slower frame rate and used a lower color depth and palette. Its soundtrack came entirely from the system's own sound chips, with fewer sound effects, all sampled at a lower rate.

  Street Fighter Zero also had a limited arcade release overseas as Street Fighter Alpha, for publicity testing. It was sold as a standard CP System release, especially to operators who could not afford the CP System II upgrade. Mega Man: The Power Battle, which arrived on the 6th of October 1995 as the CP System version of Rockman: The Power Battle, got similar changes. It never reached the CPS Changer, because no new releases followed Street Fighter Zero.

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• 7. The Final Years

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  On the 11th of May 1995, Capcom ceased production of the CP System hardware. Development had already moved on, as the company shifted to the CP System II after more than two dozen titles on the original board.

  New software kept appearing anyway. Ganbare! Marine Kun, listed as the last game on the roster, was released on the 11th of April 2000.

  Capcom ended technical support for the hardware and its games on the 31st of March 2015, long after that last game reached arcades.

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