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The design and performance of a new front-end acquisition system is presented in this paper. It was developed to be used with muon array with resistive plate chamber (RPCs) for tagging air showers (MARTA's) RPC detectors that measure the muonic component of cosmic ray air showers. The system is hybrid and capable of counting active channels and performing a charge measurement. It is low power (1.43 W per 64 channels), compact (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">21.6 \times 14.4\,\,\mathrm {cm^{2}} </tex-math></inline-formula> per 64 channels), stable, and reliable to comply with the strict demands of field operation associated with experiments that measure air showers. The front-end is based on an application-specified integrated circuit [Multi Anode Read-Out Chip (MAROC)] with 64 input channels, which is responsible for the digitization of the RPC signals. While a simple threshold measurement is applied after a fast shaper to count particles, the charge measurement is performed by an analog to digital converter that reads the peak of a slow shaper. An field-programmable gate array is responsible for control of all the digital part which includes storing the MAROC outputs and sending them to a Central Unit [via low voltage differential signal (LVDS)] or PC (via USB). Both the count and charge measurement performance are assessed. The threshold efficiency curve is measured for different temperatures. For all the conditions tested, the efficiency is 100% for charges higher than 52 fC. The overall efficiency to detect muons is studied by placing an RPC between a hodoscope and comparing the efficiency of the front-end with another established data acquisition system. The efficiency results are consistent within the statistical uncertainties of the measurements showing that the MARTA front-end does not introduce unwanted inefficiencies in the setup. The charge measurement is tested in the laboratory using a signal generator. Different shaping conditions and input charges are used to study the waveform of the slow shaper. A linear dependence between input charge and the value measured by the MAROC was found and taken as the calibration curve for the particular channel tested.