Taito SJ System

The SJ System is a standardized arcade game system built by Taito and used in a number of their games in the early 1980s. Among the better-known titles based on the SJ System are Elevator Action and Jungle Hunt.

The system consisted of several printed circuit boards connected together with ribbon cables to individualize the system for different games. The main central processing unit (CPU) was a Zilog Z80 running at 4 MHz. A second Z80 running at 3 MHz was used to control the sound effects, which were produced using four General Instrument AY-3-8910s running at 1.5 MHz. The system produced a video resolution of 256 horizontal by 224 vertical lines in its NTSC versions, and 250 vertical in PAL, but games running on the PAL version generally left the top and bottom rows blank and used the same 224 line graphics.

References

• "Taito System SJ hardware". System 16 Arcade Museum.
• The Video Games Guide: From Pong to Playstation 3, Over Forty Years of Computer and Video Games. Boxtree. 2006.