Taito before Space Invaders — the 1975-1977 drawings¶

This wiki began Taito in 1978, with Space Invaders. Here is what came before: eight games from 1975 to 1977, and 88 factory drawings, hand-drawn. These are not eight separate games — they share boards, and the drawings show it.

What this page covers¶

Game	Year	Documents archived
Speed Race Deluxe	1975	4
Attack	1976	8
Interceptor	1976	15
Speed Race Twin	1976	2
Cross Fire	1977	13
Fisco 400	1977	22
Gunman	1977	15
Super High-Way	1977	9
		88 in total

⚠️ This wiki has no platform page for these games, and is not creating one: they are hard-wired logic machines, each with its own board. This page is the inventory of the drawings and what they reveal in common — not a monograph per game.

One master drawing, the game name written in by hand ✅¶

The same power supply board, two games, one word changed

The drawing AAM 60001 — Power Supply P.C. Board in the Fisco 400 folder and the one in the Gunman folder are the same drawing: same drawing number, same date 52.2.14 (14 February 1977), same issue stamp, same parts list down to the component.

⚠️ One box differs: the 機名 (machine name), filled in by hand — FISCO-400 on one, Gunman on the other.

ⓘ That is Taito's reuse mechanism, visible to the naked eye: a common board drawing, with the game's name inked in for each application.

Three more drawings confirm it, all read off the images:

Drawing	Name carried	Title-block date	Seen in the folder of
AAM 60001	Power Supply P.C. Board	52.2.14 (14 Feb 1977)	Fisco 400 · Gunman
AAM 60003	Power Supply P.C. Board — board AAO 17727, ⓘ "5V 8A用" (for 5 V 8 A)	52.7.22 (22 Jul 1977)	Cross Fire
AAM 50007A	Drive P.C. Board Assy	52.6.21 (21 Jun 1977)	Cross Fire · Gunman
BKN 00005	Sound Mother PCB	52.6.17 (17 Jun 1977)	Cross Fire · Gunman
AAM 10006	Video Amp P.C. Board Assy	52.9 (Sept 1977)	Gunman

⚠️ AAM 60001 and AAM 60003 are not the same board. The first carries three transistors (TR1, TR2 as 2SD114-Y, TR3 as 2SA473-0) on board AAO 12926; the second one (TR1 as 2SD110-Y) on board AAO 17727, annotated 5 V 8 A. ⓘ "AAM 6000x" is a family of power supplies, not a power supply.

⚠️ The prefix says which game the board was drawn for, not where it is used

BKN 00005 carries the BK prefix, Cross Fire's — and the same drawing sits in Gunman's folder. ⓘ Reading the prefix as ownership therefore leads you wrong: it dates the design, it does not limit the use.

How to read these title blocks¶

Taito's drawings of this period are handwritten, in Japanese, and all carry the same structure:

Box	Contents
機名	the game name, written in by hand
名称	the board name, in English and katakana
図番	the drawing number (AAM…, BKN…, FSN…)
日付	the date, in the Shōwa era — ⓘ 52 = 1977, 50 = 1975
出図 stamp	the date the drawing was issued by the 技術部 (engineering department)
parts list	part numbers AAO… (bare board, hardware), AAT… (semiconductors), MSO…

⓵ Two lines recur on every sheet, and neither is technical:

bottom right, パシフィック工業株式会社 — ⓘ Pacific Industrial Co., Ltd.: not Taito. The title block is that of the drawing office that produced the sheets.
bottom centre, 御使用後ハ必ズ返却願イマス — ⓘ "please return without fail after use". ⚠️ A circulation reservation, reproduced here rather than smoothed away.

The monitor: a supplier's drawing, with no "machine name" box ✅¶

Toei GMM-8 — a model this wiki did not know

The drawing AA069521 / C-151-2 is the connection diagram (接続図) of the TOEI model GMM-8 monitor, dated 4 August 1975 (昭和50年8月4日).

ⓘ It appears identically in two folders — Speed Race Deluxe (1975) and Interceptor (1976) — with no difference whatsoever: ⚠️ it is a Toei drawing, not a Taito one, so it has no 機名 box to fill in. Taito's drawings change game name; a supplier's drawings are filed as they are.

What the schematic carries in plain sight: 50 Hz or 60 Hz, fuse (DC) 1.5 A, transistor TR202 = 2SC1276, R205 = 30 Ω 5 W, C201 = 2200 µF/35 V.

ⓘ Toei is already in this wiki's chassis table (TC-RM251S, CM-F20U, CM-14) — ⚠️ the GMM-8 was not → Other CRT chassis.

ⓘ Other monitors appear with no maker named: a TV Monitor sheet in Attack and in Cross Fire, and a c-222 TV Monitor in Super High-Way.

A turning point visible in the batch ✅¶

⚠️ The Super High-Way (1977) folder holds two sheets the other seven games do not: AAR00137-CPUPC and SW00002 — CPU.

ⓘ A CPU board, where the others have only hard-wired logic. This is the transition that leads to Space Invaders the following year → Taito classics. ⚠️ This wiki does not say which processor: the sheets have not been read component by component, and nothing is inferred from a title.

Inventory of the archived drawings ✅¶

Where these labels come from

⚠️ The designations below are those of the archive's file names, not a reading of all 84 title blocks. ⓘ A sample of six drawings was read off the images (those in the table above) — and one of the six did not match: the file says "AAM50007", the title block says AAM50007A. ⓘ Check the title block before ordering or citing a reference.

Speed Race Deluxe (1975) — 4 documents

Attack (1976) — 8 documents

Interceptor (1976) — 15 documents

Speed Race Twin (1976) — 2 documents

Cross Fire (1977) — 13 documents

Fisco 400 (1977) — 22 documents

Gunman (1977) — 15 documents

Super High-Way (1977) — 9 documents

Sources & attribution¶

Documents archived locally, harvested from Internet Archive's arcademanuals collection on 15 August 2026. ⚠️ The items declare no licence — kept for preservation, provenance named. ⚠️ The sheets carry the line 御使用後ハ必ズ返却願イマス ("please return without fail after use") and the title block of パシフィック工業株式会社 (Pacific Industrial Co., Ltd.).

✅ The four Fisco 400 drawings my harvest lost are back

Internet Archive's Fisco 400 item holds two folders — schematic set 1 and schematic set 2 — with the same file names on both sides and different scans. ⓘ My harvest script flattened the paths: the second set overwrote the first, without a single error, because the size check applied to the file that had just been written.

✅ Scope measured across the whole harvest: 8 documents out of 4,449 — all 8 are recovered. Internet Archive answered 500/502 on those paths on 17 August; on 12 September the same request succeeded first time. ⓘ The failure was theirs, not the method's — and concluding nothing from a 502 was the right reading.

ⓘ The two drawing sets are now distinguished in the inventory (set1 / set2): they are different scans of the same sheets, not different sheets. ⚠️ Four of them were byte-identical duplicates after recovery — discarded.

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.