Recreating a Chuck-E-Cheese animatronic CPU board

Evan’s Techie-Blog has been looking to recreate the boards used in the animatronics control unit f(left, above) or Chuck-E-Cheese restaurants.

The first board I’m going to talk about is the CPU board for the Chuck-E-Cheese Cyberamic Control Computer (right, above). The first generation of this card was designed some time around 1979 according to the schematics and has some design choices that you might recognize. It is made up of a 6502 processor, two 6532 RIOT chips for the RAM, stack, timers, and some I/O, and three 2708 EPROM chips for storing the program.

This board fits into a card cage, and only in one specific card slot. This backplane does not have a bunch of parallel wired slots like you might find in an s100 computer of the era, it has a couple large slots for the CPU, Transport, and Audio cards to be installed as well as a bunch of identical slots for character and lights cards to be installed depending on the show configuration.

You can find the design up on GitHub here. This goes along with the adapter I made to connect the buttons and lights to the backplane. I will have more details on how the other subsystems work and which versions are compatible with each other coming up.

You can read all the details in the post here.

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