Name the Early Cartridgebased Systems That Actually Shipped Maskrom Games

# Name the Early Cartridge-Based Systems That Actually Shipped Mask-ROM Games

## 1. Name Specific Early Systems

The Fairchild Channel F, released in 1976, is widely credited as the first home video game console to use swappable cartridges holding a mask-programmed ROM, under the name "Videocarts," rather than a single fixed game built permanently into the console hardware. The Atari Video Computer System (the system later widely known as the Atari 2600), released in 1977, adopted the same cartridge-ROM approach and built a much larger commercial library and business around it, becoming the dominant example of the cartridge-publishing model described in Step 10 through the early 1980s. Both systems depended on exactly the addressing and mask economics covered earlier in this series: a console-side address decoder selecting rows of the cartridge's fixed bit pattern, and a publisher committing to a multi-week mask design-and-fabrication cycle, with full respin cost on exposure to a late-discovered bug, for every game title released.

## 2. State the Limit of This Claim Precisely

This step names these systems as historically documented examples of the cartridge-ROM business model described in Step 10; it does not retell either console's own internal CPU architecture, video hardware, or any device-level mechanism already covered elsewhere in this knowledge base, and it makes no claim beyond what is well-documented in the historical record about these two systems' use of mask-ROM cartridges specifically.

Step 12 turns to the third named application beyond the 4001: microcode ROM, storing a CPU's own internal control sequences rather than a user-facing program.