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Atari before the microprocessor — the TM manuals of 1974-1980

44 original manuals from Atari and Kee Games, archived and indexed by their TM number. This wiki had only three Atari pages — system, vector, cojag — and nothing at all on the decade that precedes them.

What this page covers

⚠️ This page does not sort the games by architecture. Some of these titles are hardwired logic, others already carry a microprocessor — and ⓘ this wiki has no way to settle it game by game without reading all 44 parts lists. What it can do, and what needs no guesswork, is index the documents and record what they have in common.

The TM numbering is the spine ✅

23 of these 44 manuals carry a TM number on their title page. ⓘ The same series covers games and monitors: the Matsushita 19″ is TM-220, the 13″ colour Amplifone TM-222, the Sharp XM-2001N TM-304 and the Sanyo EZV TM-311. ⚠️ A TM number therefore does not tell you whether you hold a game or a display — only that it is an Atari technical manual.

TM Game Pages Address
TM-004 Gran Trax 20 26 Los Gatos
TM-007 Pin Pong 13 Los Gatos
TM-008 Space Race 9 —
TM-019 Pursuit 46 Los Gatos
TM-025 Anti-Aircraft 50 Los Gatos
TM-026 Indy 800 102 Los Gatos
TM-027 Early Atari Jet Fighters Schematics 12 —
TM-028 Highway 55 Los Gatos
TM-048 Crash 'n Score 66 Los Gatos
TM-055 Indy 4 78 Los Gatos
TM-058 Breakout 46 —
TM-060 Quiz Show 52 Los Gatos
TM-061 Drag Race by Kee/Atari 55 Sunnyvale
TM-075 Flyball 62 Los Gatos ⚠️
TM-077 Le Mans 73 Los Gatos ⚠️
TM-089 Dominos 48 Sunnyvale
TM-091 Triple Hunt 73 Sunnyvale
TM-096 Avalanche 104 —
TM-098 Super Bug 64 Sunnyvale
TM-104 Sprint 4 52 Sunnyvale
TM-118 Super Breakout 97 Sunnyvale
TM-144 Soccer 37 Sunnyvale
TM-149 Monte Carlo 68 Sunnyvale
The 21 manuals with no TM number legible on the title page

Los Gatos, then Sunnyvale — and two exceptions ✅

Here the address orders things — which happened at no other maker

This wiki has twice run into a maker's address: at Bally/Midway (10601 W. Belmont / 10750 W. Grand) and at Taito America (660 Wheeling Rd. / 1256 Estes Ave.), it places without dating. ⓘ At Atari, it orders.

Read on the title page only, across the 23 numbered manuals:

Address TM numbers
14600 Winchester Blvd, Los Gatos TM-004 to TM-060
1265 Borregas Avenue, Sunnyvale TM-061 to TM-149

⚠️ Except two. TM-075 (Flyball) and TM-077 (Le Mans) still carry Los Gatos although they sit above the switch. ⓘ This wiki draws no thwarted rule from it: an address does not change on a date, it changes at the rate letterhead runs out and templates get redrawn.

ⓘ What remains usable: across this corpus, an Atari manual at Los Gatos predates one at Sunnyvale, bar two documents, and those two are named.

Tank 8 — what a 1976 manual says, and later manuals no longer do ✅

A General Electric television, gutted

The Tank 8 manual (TM-063, © 1976, Los Gatos, 55 pp.) has a SPECIFICATIONS chapter that later operator manuals no longer carry. On the display, it writes:

"General Electric Model 25MB color monitor with tuner, IF, and audio modules removed, and with chroma module replaced by Atari unit."

⚠️ This is not an arcade monitor: it is a consumer television, stripped of its reception stages, with its chroma module replaced by an Atari board. ⓘ None of the makers in this wiki's chassis table — Wells-Gardner, Electrohome, Sanyo, Sharp, Toei, Zenith, Motorola, Matsushita, Amplifone — covers this case, and repairing it falls under none of their documentation.

And a doorway dimension, given explicitly

Item What the manual writes
Height 84″ with the canopy in place · 40½″ without
Width and depth 44½″ both
ⓘ Disassembled ⚠️ "narrowest dimension of cabinet frame is 28 inches"
Mains 110 V, 60 Hz single phase, ⓘ ≈ 330 W
Fuses monitor: ½ A and 2.5 A slow-blow · rest of the game: 5 A slow-blow
Interlocks ⚠️ four safety switches, one behind each of the four side panels
Coin mechanisms eight, identical, quarters only · one cash box per two mechanisms
Power cord ≈ 13 ft, grounded three-prong plug
Remote control box 14-ft cable — credit and team-play selection
Environment 32 to 120 °F · humidity 0 to 80 %, non-condensing
Game time 16 settings, roughly 60 to 210 s, in 10 s steps

ⓘ The 28-inch figure is rare and valuable: most manuals give the assembled cabinet's footprint, never the dimension that decides whether it gets through the door once taken apart.

The on-screen message, to order

ⓘ The same chapter describes an option ordered at the factory: the game permanently displays a message on screen, "ATARI MAKES GREAT GAMES" by default.

"In place of the standard message, any other message up to two lines long (with a 23-character maximum in the first line and 17-character maximum in the second line) can be ordered."

⚠️ And it specifies that the message is produced by the game's internal circuitry — on a machine with no program, an on-screen message is a character generator built from logic, not a string in memory. ⓘ Hence the 23- and 17-character limits, which are not arbitrary.

What these manuals contain, and the later ones do not ✅

⚠️ The same publisher, two audiences

ⓘ The manuals on this page are technician documents: Operation, Maintenance and Service Manual, with theory of operation, schematics and troubleshooting.

⚠️ That stops being true later. The Battlezone Cabaret TM-166 (© 1980, 64 pp.) has only three chapters — setup, maintenance, parts lists — and its maintenance chapter is headed "Printed-Circuit Board Replacement".

ⓘ The shift shows in the titles themselves: Service Manual (TM-008), Operation · Maintenance · Service Manual (TM-063), then Operator Information and Illustrated Parts Catalog (TM-104). ⚠️ The word "service" disappears, and the content that went with it disappears too.

Sources & attribution

Documents archived locally, harvested from Internet Archive's arcademanuals collection. ⚠️ The items declare no licence — kept for preservation, provenance named. ⓘ TM numbers, addresses and page counts are read off the title page, not inferred from a catalogue.

Review & corrections

How this space is used

Spotted a wrong value, an outdated procedure, a chip reference that does not match your board? Say so here, with what you observed (model, board revision, serial number, measurement). Every report is cross-checked against a source before anything changes — an unverifiable correction is published as “reported by …, not cross-checked” rather than silently applied.

Reading is open to everyone; posting requires signing in with Discord. Reports from the wiki's declared reviewers are handled first; anyone else's are read too, but go through a human before anything is changed.