Atari 5200 Expansion

Atari 5200 SuperSystem expansion port pinout — a rear-panel connector providing bus signals for future peripheral modules, never commercially exploited.

The Atari 5200 SuperSystem (1982) includes a rear expansion port behind a removable door, intended as provisional circuitry for future peripheral development. The port exposes a subset of the console’s internal bus — including address and data lines, serial I/O, clock, audio, and control signals — but no compatible expansion device was ever released commercially by Atari. The connector carries both 6502 bus signals and POKEY-derived serial and audio lines, reflecting the console’s internal architecture based on the same custom chips (6502 CPU, ANTIC, GTIA, POKEY) used in the Atari 8-bit home computers.

Atari 5200 Expansion connector diagram

PinName
1+5 VDC
2Audio Out (2 port)
3Ground
4R/W Early
5Enable E0-EF
6D6
7D4
8D2
9D0
10IRQ
11Ground
12Serial Data In
13Serial In Clock
14Serial Out Clock
15Serial Data Out
16Audio In
17A14
18System Clock 01
19A11
20A7
21A6
22A5
23A4
24A3
25A2
26A1
27A0
28Ground
29D1
30D3
31D5
32D7
33Not connected
34Ground
35Not connected
36+5 VDC

Notes

The expansion port sits behind a removable door at the rear of the console. Atari described it as provisional circuitry for future development; no pinout specification was published by Atari and no commercial expansion device reached the market. Pin 2 (Audio Out) is specific to the 2-port model variant.

Signals

  • +5 VDC — regulated 5 V logic supply (pins 1 and 36)
  • Audio Out — analogue audio output from POKEY (2-port model)
  • Ground — common ground reference (pins 3, 11, 28, 34)
  • R/W Early — read/write direction signal from the 6502 CPU (early phase)
  • Enable E0-EF — chip-enable for address range $E000–$EFFF
  • D0–D7 — 8-bit bidirectional data bus (D0 on pin 9, D1–D7 distributed across pins 29, 8, 30, 7, 31, 6, 32)
  • IRQ — maskable interrupt request line
  • Serial Data In — POKEY serial data input
  • Serial In Clock — POKEY serial input clock
  • Serial Out Clock — POKEY serial output clock
  • Serial Data Out — POKEY serial data output
  • Audio In — analogue audio input for mixing
  • A0–A14 — address bus lines (15 lines; A0 on pin 27 through A14 on pin 17, with A8–A13 not listed — purpose of absent address lines unknown)
  • System Clock 01 — phase-1 system clock derived from the console oscillator
  • Not connected — pins 33 and 35 are unpopulated

References

Category:Cartridges - Expansions Connectors