Hey Arcaders!
Before we talk about the future of Data East, lets talk about what put them on the map- the DECO cassette system. Snuggled between the end of the Bronze and the beginning of Golden age of arcades, THIS was the very FIRST arcade system. Four years before Atari’s System 1, and TEN years before SNK created NEO GEO, Data East tried something that had never been tried before- TO CHANGE A GAME BY CHANGING THE MAIN BOARD’S SOFTWARE!
The DECO Cassette System is an arcade board developed by Data East and released in 1980. It was the first standardized arcade board and also the first to use interchangeable media to store the games, in this case cassette tapes, instead of ROMs. The cassettes would come with a resin module for copy protection. Upon inserting the tape on the machine’s deck and turning it on, it would copy the tape’s contents to the machine’s RAM, after which the game could be played freely until the system was turned off.
Using cassette tapes made it possible to replace game titles at a low cost, but on the other hand, it took about 5 minutes to load each time the power was turned on. The cassette deck uses a dedicated and unique unit, and a full logic type that can control rewind, pause, retry, etc. from the board side is adopted. For this reason, even if a read error occurs, it has an epoch-making mechanism that automatically performs operations such as automatically rewinding and restarting from the point where the error occurred.
Despite being well received, especially in Japan, the DECO Cassette System was discontinued in 1985 due to the unreliability of both cassette tapes and security modules-as well as the inconsistent quality of its games.
There were 48 games for the system- some you may know!
The ones in bold characters are the video games that were also released in dedicated arcade cabinets.
- 01: Highway Chase (also known as Mad Alien)- I actually owned this board set, cassette, and dongle back in the early days of my collection!
- 02: Sengoku Ninja Tai (also known as Ninja)
- 03: Manhattan
- 04: Terranean
- 05: Missile Sprinter
- 06: Nebula
- 07: Astro Fantasia
- 08: The Tower
- 09: Super Astro Fighter
- 10: Ocean to Ocean
- 11: Lock ‘n’ Chase
- 12: The DECO Kid (also known as Flash Boy)
- 13: Tournament Pro Golf (also known as Pro Golf or 18 Hole Pro Golf)
- 14: DS Telejan
- 15: Lucky Poker
- 16: Treasure Island
- 17: Bobitto
- 18: Explorer
- 19: Disco No. 1 (also known as Sweet Heart)
- 20: Tornado
- 21: Mission-X
- 22: Pro Tennis
- 23: 18 Challenge Pro Golf
- 24: Tsumego Kaisyou
- 25: Angler Dangler (also known as Fishing)
- 26: BurgerTime (also known as Hamburger)
- 27: Bump ‘n’ Jump (also known as Burnin’ Rubber)
- 28: Cluster Buster (also known as Graplop)
- 29: Rootin’ Tootin’ (also known as La-Pa-Pa)
- 30: Skater
- 31: Pro Bowling
- 32: Night Star
- 33: Pro Soccer
- 34: Super Doubles Tennis
- 35: Bumpoline (also known as Flying Ball)
- 36: Genesis (also known as Boomer Rang’r)
- 37: Zeroize
- 38: Scrum Try
- 39: Peter Pepper’s Ice Cream Factory
- 40: Fighting Ice Hockey
- 41: Oozumou – The Grand Sumo
- 42: Hellow Gateball
- 43: Kamikaze Cabbie (also known as Yellow Cab)
- 44: Boulder Dash
- 45: Tokyo MIE Shinryoujo (Tokyo MIE Clinic)
- 46: Tokyo MIE Shinryoujo 2 (Tokyo MIE Clinic 2)
- 47: Geinoujin Shikaku Shiken
- 48: Burmazon
As you can see, the project was ambitious to say the least- especially for an unknown arcade manufacturer! Here’s more about the DECO cassette system.
We will be hitting quite a few of these titles in the coming weeks ( some you have heard of- and actually played!) Some of these hits did get released through other companies as you will see- a rarity for Data East. Some even on their own dedicated boards!
Now, to end this article- I give you the DECO Cassette System load screen!
Keep Playin’ Like It’s 1981!
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