Bubble System

The Bubble System was a modular arcade system board that Konami designed and used for several arcade games released in 1985. Its distinguishing idea was to store each game on a bubble memory cartridge, which let an operator swap games without replacing circuit boards. The board ran a Motorola 68000 processor at 10 MHz, with a separate Zilog Z80 handling sound through two AY-3-8910 chips, a custom Konami SCC chip and a Sanyo VLM5030 speech synthesizer. Because bubble memory has to be warmed to roughly 30 to 40 degrees Celsius before it works, and the game then has to be copied into RAM, machines showed a long warming up sequence at power on. The board proved a commercial failure: it cost considerably more than boards using ROM chips and was highly sensitive to electromagnetic fields, which could ruin a game. Every title was eventually ported to ordinary ROM chips and the system was discontinued.