I used to manufacture the old Pong games

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   I found a circuit somewhere and started making the Pong game. It was fun. I mounted a few in boxes for people to play and started selling them.

They were simple minded things with only about 45 of the 74 series TTL logic gates for 'intelligence' but people were fascinated with them. You coud make an entire game now in an Arduino in software for one tenth of the price and in one twentieth of the time.  

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machine Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 06 October 2005 Location: Australia Online Status: Offline Posts: 10	Quote Reply Topic: I used to manufacture the old Pong games Posted: 11 February 2012 at 12:12pm
	I found a circuit somewhere and started making the Pong game. It was fun. I mounted a few in boxes for people to play and started selling them. They were simple minded things with only about 45 of the 74 series TTL logic gates for 'intelligence' but people were fascinated with them. You coud make an entire game now in an Arduino in software for one tenth of the price and in one twentieth of the time.

barythrin Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Senior Member Joined: 20 July 2011 Location: Texas Online Status: Offline Posts: 152	Quote Reply Posted: 14 February 2012 at 2:00pm
	That's really neat, do you remember what circuit or something out there today on doing games like that? A similar post on another forum (programming pong on Apple II) brought the question from me up again on how did you program it so the computer would lose or was it just two player human error at the time? I know allowing for a much quicker movement via paddles probably helped by allowing the human to overcompensate vs moving +1 or -1 unit. When I programmed it years back just as a proof of concept to myself (after realizing bouncing a ball around the screen was pretty simple) I ended up with that problem. Ball and players both move a y +/- 1 so really if you were paying attention neither player could really ever lose. If I let the ball move +/- 2 then both of us would lose too often.

machine Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 06 October 2005 Location: Australia Online Status: Offline Posts: 10	Quote Reply Posted: 26 February 2012 at 11:08pm
	There was no programming, no microprocessor. All the game intelligence was in the hardware. There's probably still some old circuits around the net somewhere. Someone would have those things. What are you doing now?

barythrin Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Senior Member Joined: 20 July 2011 Location: Texas Online Status: Offline Posts: 152	Quote Reply Posted: 27 February 2012 at 2:16pm
	Eh, nothing too interesting myself. System administration, computer collecting. I don't program too many things as often as I used to but mostly due to lack of free time. When I was younger programming for my friends and I was just about as interesting as gaming. Just a challenge to ourselves to see what we could do and amuse ourselves. This was all after the microcomputer revolution though, not nearly as interesting as electronics and hardware logic. I did find an old book at the bookstore that was about the concept of video on te.ion. Course it's sitting my cool pile awaiting the free time to actually read it.