Atari Coin Executive -- the 1982 answer to managing a video game arcade
Powered by an Atari 800. Plus a handheld 6507 computer. And it was even open source. Seriously.
1982 was a big year for Atari video arcades — with the release of such classics as Gravatar, Millipede, and Space Duel (complimenting the already massive number of popular Atari games filling video game arcades).
In order to make the management (and, primarily, the accounting) of video game arcades easier — and more future-y — Atari developed and released the “Atari Coin Executive”.
And it is incredibly cool.
The central brain of the Atari Coin Executive was an Atari 800 computer (with 48k of RAM) with a number of accessories, including:
2 x Atari 810 Disk Drives
An Atari 850 Interface Module (which added RS232)
An Atari 825 printer
An Amdek 13 inch color monitor
How the Atari Coin Executive worked was both simple… and incredibly cool.
The basic process:
A “Coin Monitor” was installed in the coin slot of every arcade game.
Each Coin Monitor is connected back to the Atari Coin Executive workstation (that Atari 800) via “telephone type wiring”.
The arcade manager can then use that Atari 800 to see how much each game is earning.
Fun fact: The Atari Coin Executive software… was open source and written in a combination of BASIC and Assembly. Or, as Atari put it in 1982: “In Basic and 6502 Assembler - Source listings and manual supplied”
You can find images of the Atari Coin Executive software over on the AtariAge Forum.
In addition to the above mentioned setup, the Atari Coin Executive also included a handheld computer called the “Data Recorder”.
The “Atari Coin Executive Data Recorder” was powered by a MOS 6507 CPU with 16K of RAM (8 2k chips), and communicated with the Atari Coin Executive computer via 300 baud serial. It even had a small built-in printer.
This allowed people to manage several arcades, in separate locations, by:
Plugging the Data Recorder into each arcade machine equipped with a Coin Monitor.
Then taking the Data Recorder back to the Coin Executive computer and downloading the data into the Coin Executive software.
Finally, here’s a color picture of the whole setup — including the custom desk which was used for the Coin Executive. Fern not included.
That’s amazing. It’s a shame that this type of setup didn’t become more common. Atari and Commodore both had such amazing lines of hardware. IBM just couldn’t allow others to be successful if they could help it.