The CP System (CPシステム, shīpī shisutemu, CPS for short and retroactively known as CPS-1) is an arcade system board developed by Capcom that ran game software stored on removable daughterboards. More than two dozen arcade titles were released for CPS-1, before Capcom shifted game development over to its successor, the CP System II.

Among the 33 titles released for the original CP System include Street Fighter II: The World Warrior and its first two follow-ups, Street Fighter II: Champion Edition and Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting.

History

After a number of arcade game boards designed to run only one game, Capcom embarked upon a project to produce a system board that could be used to run multiple games, in order to reduce hardware costs and make the system more appealing to arcade operators.

Capcom began developing the CPS hardware around 1986, when Capcom president Kenzo Tsujimoto came up with the concept inspired by the success of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). He saw the rise of home video games as competition for the arcades, so said the “only way we can make money is to give people twice what they can get at home”.^[1]

Capcom developed the CPS hardware for about two-and-a-half years, during which time they developed two custom microchips that they called the CPS Super Chips, equivalent to the power of ten normal arcade printed circuit boards (PCBs) at the time.^[2][3] The two chips cost £5,500,000 or $9,800,000 (equivalent to $24,000,000 in 2022) to develop.^[2]