| System 573 | |
| Developer: | Konami |
| Cpu: | MIPS R3000A @ 33.8688 MHz |
The System 573 is an arcade system board made by Konami based on the original PlayStation. The hardware was used primarily for Konami's Bemani series of music video game arcades, including the popular Dance Dance Revolution series introduced in 1998. The System 573 is available is configurable with various expansion IO boards to add extra input or output, such as the analog and digital I/O boards for Dance Dance Revolution and other Bemani games. Systems with these IO boards are often called System 573 Analog and System 573 Digital respectively. There is another variant called the System 573 Satellite Terminal which allows for up to eight cabinets to be networked to a central one.
The name of the board is rooted in Japanese wordplay; each number in Japanese can be read with a number of different names, with Konami's name being one of many possible readings for "five-seven-three."[1]
See main article: article and PlayStation technical specifications.
The System 573 uses the same system design as the original Sony PlayStation but with a few upgrades. Notably the 573 uses double the work RAM and video RAM and is missing the CD controller from the PlayStation. Also added was an IDE port, RTC with battery backed SRAM, dedicated JAMMA and JVS interfaces, a security cart which could be used to easily add basic expansion I/O hardware and dual PCMCIA slots, although these are only wired up as memory devices and cannot be used for I/O cards.
The System 573 exists in several configurations, sharing the same base motherboard but being packaged into various cases and with addon IO expansions for different games. Such configurations include:
Konami's e-Amusement service was available on some games with the use of a separate network PCB, which plugged into the System 573 using the lower PCMCIA slot. It used a system-on-a-chip design and ran a customised version of Toshiba's NetNucleus software to connect to the service and download data onto a 20GB IDE hard disk drive.