PONG! in a Breadboard - Can We Build it?

[@DavesGarage]

NB: My apologies for thinking Jack Tramiel was president of Bally! I crossed some wires on my history, as Mr. Tramiel was at Commodore at the time. There's no indication that he rejected Pong - that was on whoever WAS the CEO of Bally at the time, not Mr. Tramiel as I indicated.

[@bensonwr]

Sounds like a thing Tramiel would do though. so completely believable. :-)

[@ropersonline]

@@bensonwr In terms of the brash impulsiveness, yes. In terms of the bad instincts, no. Tramiel had excellent instincts.

[@bertjesklotepino]

he would probably turn over in his grave if he heard any of this or urn

[@SixOThree]

BTW the Coleco Telstar Marksman included a rifle for the shooting game. I think I have one in the garage if it's important I might be able to open it up.

[@SlavTiger]

Now do it without the arduino. I feel like the arduino could probably do everything on it's own anyways so let's replace it with a normal square wave generator. How about the ic555?

[@metal571]

I really hope Ben Eater sees this. One of the best ever technical educational channels. Thanks again Dave for the deep dive!

[@idjtoal]

I'd like to see him build the main chip there from discrete logic.

[@metal571]

@@idjtoal discrete breadboard edition. I agree

[@DavidLindes]

@@metal571 et al: that'd be fun. Then again, the actual video aspects of this are less complicated than the VGA stuff he's already done, it seems to me? So... I wonder if Ben would actually find such a project sufficiently interesting. Dunno! It'd be fun if he did, though. ;) P.S. The nerd sniping continues??!? The Technology Connections one was pretty great to see.

[@MaxQ10001]

Ben actually makes his stuff, not hooking up a ready made chip. This is so not Ben Eater.

[@DavidLindes]

@@MaxQ10001 largely agree. Though... his 74xx chips were ready-made. ;)

[@TheFleetz]

Built one of these in the mid 70’s…..I was an apprentice radio tradesman who completed black and white TV servicing during my apprenticeship. This brought back memories which I thought were lost forever!

[@johnolson9469]

Thank you, Dave. Watching this took me on a great trip down memory lane. I started programming about the time Pong came out. My father was a Ham radio enthusiast, worked for Control Data, and he built a “home” computer with a paper tape reader as input and used a teletype for output. I wrote my very first computer program (blackjack) using that at about age 14 and submitted it to Byte magazine but they wrote back to let me know it wasn’t going to be published simply because they had already received many similar programs. Rather than squash my dreams, that experience fueled my interest in all aspects of computers and what we could do with them. The technology evolved at an exponential rate from that point forward which paired well with my ADHD brain because, even after 38 years of IT employment I still don’t get bored at work because there’s always something new and challenging awaiting me the next day!

[@SeanBZA]

Paddles work by resetting both RC circuits at the video vertical blanking interval, and then using a pair of comparators to measure the number of times the horizontal clock was generated. If the voltage went above the threshold on a particular line it set a latch, and enabled another counter that counted lines, and put that as the paddle position, Then the counter that was running to generate horizontal elements on the display would and this. This would go to two places, first to video out, as the paddle, height being a certain number of lines, and also to another and gate that has the horizontal position of the ball, so that if it was in the way the ball would have the direction reversed and returned, and if not it would be classed as a losing ball. Very simple, and the sound was generated out of internal counter overflows, using the logic for the hit to do the beep, gating in the clock for the paddle display, and for others using other counter outputs and different frequencies.

[@DavesGarage]

I'd love to be able to understand the full TTL impl of the original! But this is more my speed for now... thanks for all of the details and context!

[@johnjohnson5028]

Great details. I was hoping to see something like this. Having hobbied with tube radios in the 1960s, worked with TTL in the 1970s, and then with 8031, 8088, 80286, in the 1980s, I lived the progression in technology. Dave (IMO), I think it is important that younger engineers understand that computers, microprocessors, and devkits are not necessarily the universal answer to everything. Thanks (new sub)

[@bitcortex1991]

Awesome. Pong was the genesis of my (currently) 37-year career and obsession with computers. A family friend brought over a home Pong console - probably smuggled into my country - sometime around 1976. For reasons I'll never understand, the fact that this little box could control the image on our TV absolutely blew my young mind. It was beyond magic. We moved to the USA, I got an Atari VCS, sold it to buy an Atari 400, and my path was set.

[@BitwiseMobile]

Similar story here. Although all electronics mesmerized me as a kid. I have pictures of me when I was 3 with all the wires pulled out of the electric car my dad got me. I was apparently trying to figure out how it worked, and so my fate was sealed. I got into coding because I wanted to control the electronics. My parents had bought an IBM XT clone called a Leading Edge, and I taught myself x86 assembler so I could control the PIC and other aspects of the machine. You can only get so far with PEEK and POKE, so assembler was what I needed in order to implement my own interrupt handlers. I didn't know about C at the time, since my only tools on the PC were GW BASIC, and DOS Debug (which was sort of an assembler/disassembler rolled into one). Then I discovered MASM :D That ended up parlaying into a career as an embedded developer. It's the best of both worlds really :).

[@foogod4237]

As a kid, my family actually owned a "pong" game console (called "TV Scoreboard", if I recall correctly) made by Radio Shack which also came with a light gun and did enable the "shooting" modes. I remember playing those game modes (and being amazed at how it could actually tell where I was pointing the gun when I pulled the trigger. It really did seem like magic). And yes, I'm pretty sure the way it is detecting the paddle setting is by bringing that input pin down to ground, which will drain the capacitor, then letting it float, and timing how long it takes the capacitor to charge up (and the voltage on the pin to rise to a certain threshold), then repeating the cycle all over again. It was a common technique for measuring resistive analog inputs such as these (and analog joysticks, etc) at the time. If it drains the capacitor through a different, known-value resistor, then it can really just compare the ratio of charge to discharge time to determine the input value in a fairly accurate way (which actually doesn't even depend on the value of the capacitor used), though I don't see any indication that it's actually doing that here, so it's probably just using the raw charge-up time as the input.

[@larrybud]

We had an Odessey game when I was a kid. For those not familiar, some games came with a translucent plastic overlay that you'd put on your TV which was your gamefield, such as a tennis court. So "Tennis" was essentially the same as pong, except with the overlay. I always loved the "Haunted House" game. The plastic overlay was a haunted house, and IIRC, you had to find the "ghosts" which were hidden on the screen.

[@MichaelSmith-us9ch]

Always a good story. I lived above a shop when I was first married, and the shop next door repaired pinball machines. There were always about 10/12 of these in various states of repair. One day Ron, the engineer, asked if I'd like to see a new machine he had - PONG! It wasn't working and he asked if I'd take a look... coffee spill killed the psu which was a simple fix. We then spent half a day raking up games. Magic! Thanks Dave.

[@joshhelmuth7097]

Imagine the same chip was used in the Coleco Telstar Ranger, which did have the light gun accessory for the shooting games, labeled 'Target' and 'Skeet'. Fun seeing this video! That Ranger machine is the oldest in my collection, passed down to me from my mom and uncle. Thanks Dave!

[@connecticutaggie]

I am an old school Electrical Engineer and I have been helping a guy restore an Asteroids arcade game and the interesting part is that rather then raster scan (like a TV uses) it does vector drawing by directly controlling the CRT's x and y deflectors. I have a suspicion that original Arcade Pong game probably did the same thing - which would not have worked at all with a home TV set.

[@gqinc1202]

The original pong arcade game cabinet used normal raster scan, it actually used off-the-shelf TVs that were modified to accept composite video. I have an original pong cabinet that I restored So while it wouldn't plug directly into most home TVs at the time (they didnt have composite video input), it could be connected by bypassing the tuner and putting the video straight into the board, which is what they did for the tvs put into the arcade cabinet. You could also connect it to any modern TV that has composite input

[@jameshughes3014]

I know pong wasn't the first video game of all time.. but i feel like it at least marked the start of the gaming industry. It's amazing that in my life we've gone from this to realtime raytracing human characters that look photorealistic, and VR games.

[@rittol2365]

What was the first??

[@georgeprout42]

@@rittol2365 iirc OXO in 1952, it comes down to how you define a video game. There's an excellent Ahoy video on YT "The first video game" that goes into great detail, well worth a watch.

[@jameshughes3014]

@@rittol2365 I'm not sure, I'll bet there are conflicting stories. I've heard that the first 'video games' were played on an oscilloscope.

[@Tarex_]

And being the last generation to have seen the world before the internet xD and in such a short time it has become scary to see how young the eyes glued to phones and tablets are.. we'll have a future either parallel to idiocracy or minority report lol

[@jameshughes3014]

@@Tarex_ I feel like that's a bigger issue than people realize. Anytime anywhere access to the net is the one thing I would change about the tech revolution if I could.

[@bryanramer6439]

I really appreciate what you do Dave. It's nice to see a video that I don't have to question the accuracy, or try to verify the information with more searching

[@DavesGarage]

Thanks! There are still mistakes no doubt, but I try!

[@articchar-lf]

Thanks for taking us along the way

[@DavidLindes]

OP: you may want to check the pinned comment. ;) ;) (Sorry,@@DavesGarage. You're doing great, and all good. I just found this comment funny to read after having seen that one.)

[@bryanramer6439]

I Appreciate you even more now. Thanks for the reply and thank you for everything you share with us

[@thatcreole9913]

I actually LOL’d in RL at the Ben Eater quip.

[@MarianoLu]

Hi Dave your content is always a sight for sore eyes. Especially when you get into old tech like this one or the KIM-1. Your take on the paddles seems correct, there is probably an internal capacitor in the chip that is discharged in a regular interval and an internal counter that counts how many cycles until it gets changed by the external RC circuit created by the potentiometer. Once charged (goes high) it will take the value of the counter to set the position. That is why with no pot connected it assumes the position is all the way in an extreme (high or low depending on the logic they choose). By the way thanks for the book, my daughter is also living in the spectrum :)

[@iandavidson6604]

I remember as a young engineer being sent from our base in Scotland over to the GI plant in Hicksville, Long Island, to help set up the automatic test equipment for this chip. Compared with our normal fare of testing single chip calculators and X9 / 10 devices, this chip with it's (for the time) very high data volume was a nightmare. In addition to any obvious functional failures, any 'snow' on the screen meant a fail so *everything* had to be verified. If I recall, the decision was finally taken by GI to use auto-testing to verify that the die at least showed the basic vital signs then leave the rest of the test to a human tester in GI's plant in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Many thanks for the trip down memory lane.

[@lactobacillusprime]

An enhanced pong retrofit would actually be quite interesting to see.

[@dh2032]

the colour looked interesting too, in the day black & white was the norm, so even if there where colour models made, the where more than like connected mono tv's, ( and the getting a light pen working too (making light pen from scratch, like the rest on machine too from it's parts) )

[@dinoscheidt]

And you could do it in a scale of 1 : 20 today ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[@patientallison]

4k 120fps pong

[@alexanderstohr4198]

authoring rights do phase out some 70 years about the authors death. if there is a legal holder then not even a commercially provided kit might be possible without his agreement.

[@alexanderstohr4198]

@@dh2032 - who could afford a color TV then would probably go for the color version of the game as well. that means the number could be few in the beginning but increasing steadily.

[@guyprovost]

I have such a vivid memory of when my dad came home one day with it as a gift to me because I was so hooked on the arcade game. Fun to see it live once again!

[@electronron1]

Back in the day, I worked for a company that in addition to making Dental Operatory furniture, made game tables for bars, etc. these had pong or hockey and places built into the table for the players to set their drinks. We spent our lunch breaks playing these games of course, after all they needed to be tested before they were shipped. The circuit boards used a lot of discrete chips as at the time there wasn't a dedicated pong chip available.

[@johnrumm4786]

That brought back some memories Dave. Here in the UK, in the late 70s, we got a Binatone branded console. A orange and black "wedge", It had two paddles, four games, and was B&W only. Sound from a small speaker in the console. As you read through the chip spec, I was mentally ticking off the features! it was obviously based on the same chip. It was pretty good fun, but also my first introduction to something akin to Moore's Law, as not long after we had that I saw the first colour version and lusted after that. Then one day at a local department store, I saw two squaddies (aka soldiers) in the TV department playing the shooting version with a light pistol. I stood and watched in awe! Eventually I persuaded my mum to ta ask them if they would not mind letting me have a go. I was obviously a natural, as I found I could rattle through to a perfect 15 score in about 5 seconds flat. One of the soldiers said to the other "cor, look at this kid!" I eventually got tired of the limitations of the Binatone, and built myself a ZX80. It's only now seeing your video I realise that I actually had the shooting game all along and never knew it!

[@camib2864]

My brother had one of these, cause 70s, per usual, I ended up with it because he wasn't interested. Started a lifelong love of electronics/PCs that created the next gen nerd in the family, me. I would love to see you build this out, it would be fun to watch and might light a fire in some nosy kids I know.

[@fazerider9287]

In the UK there was a kids’ TV variety show called Crackerjack that ran from the mid 50’s for nearly 30 years. Sometime early in the 70’s it included a Pong contest as a regular feature, fascinating to begin with, but the novelty soon wore off and it became the most boring part of the programme. Many years later, I started work at the BBC as a studio engineer and eventually found myself working with a senior engineer called Eric Putt who had constructed the device used on the show. Apparently he’d become aware of the game’s existence (I don’t think there were any actual examples in the UK at that stage) and decided to build one for himself out of TTL purely for the challenge. It caused much interest among his peers and eventually some production staff got to hear of it, hence its inclusion in ‘Crackerjack’. Eric designed a number of ingenious devices - my favourite was a video signal generator that produced circular colour bars, again constructed out of TTL (about a square foot of closely-packed ICs that ran rather hot as I recall). I lost touch with him after he retired, but he must be in his 90’s now if he’s still alive.

[@kimcolwell362]

Dave, Thanks for the trip down memory lane .. in the early 1970's I was working at National Semiconductor in San Diego, and they came up with a working prototype of a Pong-type console game (TV connection; three games; sound effects, etc.). I'm sure it was a knock-off of the ATARI or another similar games. That Christmas, they gave copies of the game to many employees to take home & 'play' with with their families. I didn't have a family at the time, but had the games for many years and (eventually) my children enjoyed the games whenever I would hook it up to our TV. I ultimately lost the game in a move somewhere along the way (but only a few years ago) and it played well for 30 + years!

[@bensonwr]

Thank you for this video. I remember building one of these with my older brother . along time ago. this project and the time with my brother inspired my whole career in IT and broadcast engineering. It was so achievable as a project. Just a few external components and you have yourself a working game. Oh and I love the teletype sound effect on your listing

[@alansimons141]

It looks like the chip pulls the paddle pins low periodically and measures the time the RC network takes to recharge to a set threshold. As you turn the potentiometer, the total series resistance goes from 10k to 1 Megaohm. With a 0.1uF capacitor, the RC time constant changes from 6 milliseconds to 0.6 seconds. Some logic must translate this delay time into position on the screen.

[@8bitwiz_]

The tricky part you're missing is that the R/C is "measured" by how long it takes to reach a scan line, in real time. You have to think in terms of where the CRT beam is as the R/C is recharging.

[@johnglielmi6428]

I got one of those for a Christmas present when I was a kid. I was born in 1960 so seeing this tennis or ping pong game being played on a TV was the coolest thing ever. remember there were no video game consoles back in the day.

[@NeilRoy]

My cousin and I used to spend HOURS playing our PONG game on a B&W TV in our room... hard to imagine now, but it really was unique and new. One cannot understand the fascination looking back knowing what we have today. You truly had to live back then when all we had was pinball machines at the arcade (which I loved) that cost ten cents and a couple new games like space invaders. To be able to play any sort of video game in the home was amazing.

[@LambOfLucifer]

Love your channel Dave! This has got to be one of the most interesting channels on KZbin at the moment. You deserve way more subs.

[@ITPMMentor]

You are not the only one who didn't get it. Great video. You're really becoming a wonderful story teller.

[@automan1223]

That is a mighty big bread board you got there Dave ! A child of the 1970's there was no greater joy than playing outside until the sun went down then coming indoors to work on projects like this. Although back in the day we only had circuits from Radio Shack, Layfette Electronics, Radio Electronics and such. Pong & Atari probably drove more foot traffic to malls, Sears & other big retailers than we will ever know. My electronics & shop classes were the best !

[@bprosman]

It was actually my first electronics project as a kid. An electronics kit based on a schematic by a Dutch magazine called Elektuur , this one had a basic UHF modulator so that you could hook it up to your antenna input of the TV.

[@caramba10]

Is this the TTL one you're referring to? I still have those early Elektor magazines and bought the pcb for their ttl version. It had no sound though as far as I can recall, I ran out of funds to complete it and in the meantime the AY-3-8500 game chip became available so I bought one and built a six game version on Veroboard, also using a TV modulator and a couple of potentiometers in Veroboxes for controllers. Happy Days.

[@bprosman]

@@caramba10 No this one is the AY-3-8500 version. The TTL is older.

[@grantbanstead1971]

Elecktor is still going strong and you can subscribe today to get access to all the past projects.

[@bprosman]

@@grantbanstead1971 I know ☺️ But I have all magazines in PDF since 1964 , and the English ones since 1980

[@davec200i]

Dave, this video was a link to me buying your book. I finished it last night, and today I have requested an ASD assessment from my GP. Just wanted to say a big thank you!

[@hughatkins]

Please continue this as a series! I was addicted to that game at the time, and would like to make on, with the color changing effects too. Thank you for making this video, and I hope to see more!

[@MompfDompf]

Pong was one my first game back in the early 80th, and catched me. Later i started with the classic C-64, which was my daily driver till 1992. 1992 I switched to a 80286 and upwards till now. I love retro stuff, it keeps me reminding of my childhood, an where it all began. Thank you so much.

[@NKCSS]

6:27 I'm sure Ben will love that shoutout 😊 He's the Goat for breadboard stuff and explaining things in a clear way

[@stevesmith3890]

1975, spring senior year digital circuit design course, MIT. Your final project was to build something significant in the lab, and everyone pretty much did some sort of video game copy. I remember all we had were TTL gates and FFs and some crude shift register memory. The projects were built on vertical racks. Each rack held maybe 60 cards, each card had 2-4 TTL chips. A finished project took 3-5 racks. My project was a Game Of Life simulator but there were multiple Pong, Brickout copies. Good times but a lot of pressure. Countless late nights.

[@BrewskyAZ]

Dave, as a young kid in the early 70's, my dad bought us a Magnavox Odyssey gaming system. Not only did we play pong, but there was also a haunted house game that used a rifle to shoot the ghosts.

[@natethefighter]

Fun fact: the beeps and boops are just the vertical count signals routed through an audio output, since they're frequencies within human hearing. Duncan Harrower (the creator of the "pong-on-a-chip") had some interesting anecdotes about the chip when I interviewed him a few years ago.

[@MikePerigo]

⚠BEWARE⚠ SPAM comment replies that link to TELEGRAM addresses⚠

[@chrisr7847]

Thanks Dave for the deep dive into how the technology works. I was born just after pong was created but my dad would typically find me with the clock, Walkman or any other electro-mechanical device torn completely apart to feed my curiosity. (I usually got it back together) Please keep it up!

[@fixitalex]

Dave that's amazing! Looks pretty much like what we did back in the days based on schematic published in soviet "Radio" magazines.

[@charchar635]

amazing to think how far we've come that the thing you use for a clock input would be able to do all of this tenfold and it's considered rudimentary now

[@theoldtexan5500]

In the mid 70's I was working for a little Dutch company who had recently purchased Magnavox. Near the end of the year a decision was made to liquidate the Magnavox Pong Consoles. Memory is a little fuzzy due to time passage, but I think we were able to purchase them for $16.00. A lot of family and friends were playing pong on Christmas morning that year.

[@johnstevens2163]

Here in Australia I used to repair machines called pub pong in the 1970s. Lots of local bars had them. They were not single chip machines. Most of the faults were due to wear and tear on the controls. I don't remember who made them.

[@gordonspond]

17:32 I grew up in Europe and the console my older (married) sister had, did have the shooting game. Years later I took the gun apart and it did exactly work like you explained.

[@stickyfox]

Back in the day I had an electronics book that detailed the creation of a pong-style game with only transistors, passives, and logic chips like gates, latches, and counters. I no longer have it but maybe someone else here remembers it. (possibly Heiserman, How to Design and Build Your Own Custom TV Games")

[@Golunghe]

That's the first book I thought of when I saw the title of this video! It was published by TAB books in the late 70's. It had a few other games as well. Copies are available on Amazon and there is a PDF of it floating around.

[@winstonsmith478]

I suspect your paddle pot value changing the time required to charge the cap guess is correct since that is also exactly what was done in the Atari 2600. I would love to see more done with this custom IC.

[@TheDynamite333]

I agree. I built a serial port temperature sensor circuit years ago, using same logic with a thermistor. Very basic A/D conversion...

[@SansNeural]

The original "Game Control Adapter" for IBM PC used a similar electronic concept, with the pots feeding inputs on a 558 quad timer and the digital side being a pulse width that PC code had to translate to a numeric value representing joystick position.

[@Hyxtryx]

@tripplefives1402 That doesn't sound quite right. The chip itself will short the capacitor to ground and start the counter. It then releases that short, and STOPS the counter when the cap charges to a certain point. The count is then used as the paddle value. So the capacitor is triggering the stop of a counter, not the start. The process keeps repeating, so there is another start of the counter immediately afterward.

[@Hyxtryx]

@tripplefives1402 Of course it would work. That's how it's done on the old Atari paddles. The capacitor would charge to 63% of its capacity in about 1ms when the pot is turned all the way down. 10Kohm * 0.1uf = 1ms. That's way below the clock rate of the IC. When the pot is turned all the way up to 1Mohm, it would take 0.1 seconds to charge. Easily done, and easily disproves your "there would be almost no difference between max and min values". 10K ohm to 1.01M ohm. Big difference. Look up RC time constants. Your "giant electrolytic" on the 555 timer is also paired with a resistor, that you seem to be forgetting. You pretty much have the idea, I was just pointing out that saying "the capacitor triggers a counter" is a little simplistic and misleading. It triggers the stopping of a counter. Or a "save the value and reset the counter". It might not even be using a counter at all. As someone else pointed out, it's probably just using the charging time to determine how long to wait after vertical blanking to start drawing the paddle. ...in an analog fashion, no counter needed.

[@Boffin55]

The sync runs through an alternate path, because it needs to be more negative than the 0 point of the video signal. So in the composite signal; black might be 1v, white 5v and but sync is 0v

[@RealJohnnyDingo]

Nice job resurrecting that old chip! i wish we could see the layout of the gates inside the chip. Chips of that era had so few gates maybe even a mere mortal like me could understand it 😂

[@jimlawson629]

Another great video Dave, I'd love to see you run with the idea and retrofit an old console.

[@WarPhotographer1974]

This is one of the best channels on KZbin.

[@richardthunderbay8364]

A nice project video. My mother brought home a Pong console back in 1976. I and my brothers played it so often that the paddles wore out after a few months.

[@mattvoce1091]

I remember Tandy in Australia sold a seperate rifle for the shoot facility. Electronics Australia ( magazine)published a diy rifle for the enthusiast. In Australia again Dick Smith electronics marketed a full electronic kit. The first issue of the kit had no sheild, or modulation shielding, you were required to manually tune the video signal to each TV that you connected too. Later the kit was modified with specific TV channels “ built in “

[@vcv6560]

A story long worth telling. Radio Shack sold a home game console based on that chip, 1978 catalog pg 123. To avoid legal questions they called it simply Video Scoreboard. You've got to see if Wozniak will accept a guest interview spot. His HW based Breakout was an achievement in how few chips it used built from 7400 family logic, no microprocessor on those early designs.

[@bubbavonbraun]

Loved the video, I recall the chip cost nearly a months wages in the day. My parents were leery about letting me connect it to our TV, thinking I might blow it up! This lead me to a short career repairing pinball and video games, though by then Pong wasn't a thing. Thanks again for the great video and a walk back in time for me.

[@laserfloyd]

I love that the frequency (488hz, 976hz, and 1.952khz) and duration (32ms) for the beeps and boops, for pin 3 I assume, were included with the PIP functions. I used a tone generator and, yep, those are pong sounds. 🧐 Fun video! I would like to see a retrofit. (The sheet said 1.95khz but it looks like they just doubled 488 to 976 then doubled that again so it's presumably 1.952kz. 🤷🏻‍♂)

[@RandomInsano2]

I was born in 1986 but the Coleco Telestar was my first ever video game! This should be a good video!

[@TheEmbeddedHobbyist]

I think that to measure a analogue voltage on a chip with no ADC, then as you say you can use a capacitor. That action is something like the following. Feed the voltage to be measured through a resistor to the capacitor with the other end of the capacitor connected to ground. Connect the junction of the resistor and capacitor to the chip pin. 1. Short the pin to 0V internally. To discharge the capacitor. 2. Release the short and measure the time it takes to be detected as a high. 3. The higher the voltage the faster the capacitor will charge and so the quicker it will be detected as a high. Used to do this on pic’s before they got ADC’s Set pin to output a low to short the cap and discharge it. Set pin to input and again time how long till it’s detected a 1. Crude adc when you don’t have one.

[@7272nighthawk]

Matches between my sister and I were brutal !! and Adults were no match for either of us !!!

[@trueriver1950]

While I was at Uni a friend who was studying electronics built a pong derivative from standard components not related to any game. If I remember right it was entirely analog. It doesn't really need a custom chip, as he didn't use a huge number of parts beyond standard circuitry to create a blank raster He also designed a cheat function on a hidden switch which tied one bat to the vertical position of the ball, guaranteeing that he hit every time.

[@medicallyunexplainedsymptoms]

The 'spare' half of the 4072 buffering the sync also adds the same propagation delay to the sync signal as the 4072 that is ORing the signals, so both signals are delayed by the same amount.

[@DavesGarage]

Thanks, good info!

[@dieSpinnt]

@@DavesGarage Oh, for conservation: Can you please provide high res images of the PCB? Not much to find on the interwebs. Just the usual botch video mod and therefore only the backside of the circuit board. Thanks! :)

[@dieSpinnt]

@@DavesGarage (Butchered comment ... by KZbin censor BS follows:) Thanks for the informative and entertaining video about a hero of our childhood, Dave!:) Oh, and 4072 is CMOS-Logik not TTL.

[@dieSpinnt]

MedicallyUnexplainedSymptoms: That t_PH is below 100ns. It is just not of relevance or in the ballpark that this delay has any effect on the sync output of pin 16. This will vanish in the oscillator jitter or other tolerances of the chips. They are mostly used to drive the primitive resistor mixer stage, which they can. In the "Black And White Bats w/ gray Background"-Configuration the same circuit with only 1/2 4072 is used and an additional 4001 (in DRIVER-configuration, Pin 1+2 shorted) buffers the sync signal.

[@dieSpinnt]

see also the ay-3-8515 datasheet, sync (via Wikipedia, the GIMINI1978 document contains it on page 25).

[@cyberflotsam]

I had a Binatone game console back in the early 80s that had these exact games, including the two shooting games. As I'm in the UK, the hockey game was branded as soccer.

[@DrHarryT]

Everybody born knows about a Ping-Pong table, [At least in the 60's and was common knowledge] so when Pong came along the correlation was automatic since the table was turned into a TV screen and exactly the same principal of play.

[@robsku1]

My, you did it! At the beginning, I was disappointed when I realized you weren't going to build your own Pong device from scratch, but more like doing multiple broken ones to one working kinda fix. But that wasn't really it, was it? No, this was so much better than what my silly assumpsion (based on nothing) would have been - and to be trutful, some of it flew right over my head, I'm not good with electronics (though I know a little - emphasis on the little). Awesome!

[@stephenmorrish]

I'm in the UK and the first electronic game we had when I was a kid back in the '70s was a "Binatone TV Master" . It must have had this chip in it as the games you have shown were on that early console. We didn't have the "gun" for the shooting games, but they were selectable. Not long after this we got a Sinclair ZX81 and I've not looked back.

[@jfniv]

FYI with regard to questions about the shooting game beginning 17:10 ... I have fond memories of being a child in the latter part of the 70's in the USA and playing a home console "pong' game my parents had bought. No idea the make but in addition to "pong" it had an attachable light gun with two styles of game, one like skeet where the target traversed the screen without bouncing and (if I remember correctly) another version where it could bounce once or twice. The light gun even had a plastic attachable stock to turn it from a "pistol" into a "rifle". I spent a truely amazing amount of time as a little boy target shooting white dots on a black and white TV.

[@3DSage]

Very fascinating! I enjoyed seeing and learning about the actual chips and hardware!

[@albing1397]

When I worked at Allen Bradley in the early 70's, Magnavox sent a console to us to select a photocell (we had an optoelectronics product line) for the rifle game. I don't know if a part was successfully identified, but we sure had fun playing tennis! We did manage to get a photoresistor to work, using a long tube as a gun barrel.

[@williamyf]

Dave, 2 of the not gates of a 74HCT14 and 2 carefully chosen resistor+Cap will give you a very stable and beautifull 50% TTL square wave in frequencies from 8Hz all the way to 2~4Mhz A real lifesaver, instead of dealing with the vagaries and extra elements of the 555 or a crystal oscilator (+divider). Was my secret weapon at the Lab while studying Electronic Engineering in the 90's.

[@willemvdk4886]

Love the Ben Eater reference! Haha

[@captcorajus]

Oh man. Got one of those for Christmas.. 1977 What a great Christmas that was! And yes, I want to see the full build!

[@CapeCodCNC]

Wow that brings back memories, we got ours late 72 early 73 and the entire neighbor was my house for weeks! Playing on a 13" BW TV with rabbit ears that got 3 channels....

[@chrisharvey1091]

The paddle is a variable resistor, essentially a light dimmer switch, and the difference in output voltages between left and right is based on the varying level of resistance as you travel through the full sweep of the knob. The 0V output would mean that you're in the maximum ohm resistance section and that as you turn it to the lowest ohm resistance section the voltage will increase up to the 5V output.

[@DavidWonn]

My grandpa bought me a Radio Shack clone of Pong when I was very young. Little did he know at the time, it would help spark my interest into video games, though the Atari 2600 and NES were a bit more instrumental in accelerating that hobby interest (at least until visual problems forcibly ended that in recent years.)

[@pskry]

We built pong in EmbeddedEng. 6th sem. using an FPGA. Including VGA "driver" (porch-timing, blanks etc). And 2x2 debounced push-switches. Glorious times.

[@mfratus2001]

Years ago, I found several Pong pcb's that were all analog. One worked OK, but the other one developed "gravity" and the ball eventually got stuck at the bottom of the screen. No processor, no fancy chips. All cmos logic and 4016 chips. Video out + sound.

[@richardcarpenter6167]

As a class project some fellow high school friends and I wrote a pong game that ran on a Dec PDP 8 using an analog oscilloscope as the display. We used the front panel of the PDP as the controls for the paddles. We could sample the key control keys positions in real time. The Top 1 bit were for the left paddle and the 1lowest bits were for the right-side paddle. The only drawback was that there was no neutral position, so the paddles were always moving either up or down. We were going to change to 2 bits for the paddle, but in the excitement of playing the game we ended up breaking the toggle switches a couple of times and our instructor banned us from playing the game on the computer, so we moved on to character-based games like Trek and Adventure. Which if anyone out there has used a KSR teletype machine before knows how loud that is.

[@RebrandSoon0000]

I certainly did not know Pong! was a play on Ping, Pong. That's a cool tidbit.

[@Hacker-at-Large]

That RC circuit is probably directly controlling the vertical timing where the paddles are drawn. The pulse from the capacitor will get squared and get AND’d with the horizontal timing (which would be strictly periodic). The paddle size control just stretches that vertical timing pulse to a greater or lesser extent.

[@Thatdavemarsh]

I’d like to understand how it calculates a contact with the paddle.

[@zibbazabba905]

I've always been interested in how pong was made pre-programming since the episode of That 70s show where they tried to make smaller paddles

[@ntsecrets]

When I was a kid we had a triangular shaped Telstar with a rifle and steering wheel and a chrome painted cartridge on the top. Kinda neat to see how they did this back before then!

[@8bitwiz_]

That's the Telstar Arcade, the main chip was in the cartridge, and they made four of them.

[@garyseymour6319]

YES! Having PONG and others on a console back in 1978 (ISH) in the UK was amazing!

[@eyankee01]

I don't recall which brand we had, but the game system we had in the 70s did have a gun for target shooting (in the US). Of course we quickly learn that you could just point the game gun at a light instead, and get a perfect score.

[@sixter4157]

Growing up we had the Atari motorcycle/pong console. That was worth many hours of entertainment. Then we got the Atari 2600. It was cool to hear the General Instrument name. I worked for the TV Satellite division in the mid 90's through the rename to Next Level and left before the sale to Motorola. I was a lowly warehouse/shipping worker. I had no idea about their connection with Pong.

[@nateadkins1919]

When Jack Tramiel’s name came up, I was all over it until I then saw the thumbnail placed in the corner. He actually started a company using the name “Trammel” because it was more important to him that people pronounced his name right rather than spell it right.

[@DavesGarage]

I know. But I didn't know until after I recorded it. I tried to voiceover but it sounded weird, so added the note...

[@devfromthefuture506]

My god! I'm a professional programmer since 2009, I played pong as a child, and just Yesterday I learned that pong had no programming. I saw it on Reddit, it was the most upvoted on post sub engineering po*n. And then I dreamed about it. Today I searched on KZbin and found this amazing video from just 22h ago. That's why I love internet. If was living in 1984 I would never ever find this information in my town.

[@davo2225]

On the paddle control resistor / capacitor circuit, I’m building the arcade version on breadboards to see if it’s possible and that circuit is really cool. It uses a 555 timer to set a delay, before it starts setting the output high at the right time for 15 scan lines to draw the paddle, and then low again. If you turn the potentiometer all the way up, it wait longer and draws the paddle at the bottom of the screen, and if there’s a tiny delay the paddle draws near the top. The game is full of simple but brilliant things like that.

[@8bitwiz_]

This is how it works on the Atari 2600 as well, you reset the R/C circuits at the top of the screen, and the R/C circuits will stop at the scan line where your paddle begins. Then you check the inputs every scan line. When a paddle input trips, you count how many scan lines to show the paddle as a "player" graphic. The only difference is that discrete logic Pong games do all this with just flip-flops and counters.

[@mattwuk]

I've been in the industry for 25 years and Dave has forgotten more than I know and still remembers more than me 😂😂

[@andymouse]

Love to see you complete the project with a box and all the gubbins ....cheers

[@MaxCarponera]

In the middle '70s mi father built a kit very similar to this, with a single chip, possible this same. It hadn't a video modulator but a RF generator, so you didn't need to connect it to the TV, just tune the TV VHF channel to its frequency. Many memories, a pitty it got lost in time.

[@fredflickinger643]

I'd also like to see an upgraded retrofit! Having played Pong to the point of burning in the screen this was a good dive into the inner workings.

[@rager1969]

I heard the origins of Pong-like games was a game called Tennis For Two that was played on an oscilloscope. I believe it was created in the late 50s or early 60s, and that's where Ralph Baer got his idea for his version of the game.

[@grottyboots]

I lived in southern Ontario when Pongh came out. My dad bought us a clone during the yearly xmas shopping trip to Buffalo. Played the crap out of it. And it rocked! Do SpaceWar next!

[@InssiAjaton]

My first play was "Moon Landing" on an HP pocket calculator. I quickly figured out that I only needed one retro burn at a specific time and a specific duration to land without crashing. Then there was no more any fun playing it. The next one I played was Tetris. That remained interesting for quite some time, maybe even a year. But eventually I decided there were better things to do on computers than to play games. And have never looked back. Call me a dull guy, or whatever, but if you know when Tetris was one of the favorites, you can calculate how many years I have survived without computer plays.

[@davidfinch7418]

I remember playing a variant back in the '70s. Whlist waiting for my sisters to finish their game of tennis, I was mucking around with the gun and discovered that I could shoot the ball... it would disappear, and one of my sisters got points mid-match. Since that moment, I've always considered that every Tennis match should include a component of competitive rifle marksmanship thrown in to add to the excitement. What could possibly go wrong?

[@ou7shined972]

It looks so cool in orange and black. I'm in the UK. We had the Philips console and yes there was a gun with a light in it for playing skeet.

[@flyer617]

We did this in engineering lab. It's kind of fun. Too few people today actually making things like this.

[@charlestoddii4461]

The "shooter" games were enabled on the "deluxe" version of the console. I can't remember the specific brand (probably Magnavox from Sears) as I was around 8yo when we had ours. I do remember the shooter game... It had a handgun shaped controller for each player and visible inside the barrel was an LED (probably a light detector in actuality). I remember this very well because our ones were out of alignment and you had to aim a specific angle off the target (not moving but would be in one spot for a count and randomly move to another spot and on and on) to score a "hit". In my very first "electronic repair" I got a long screwdriver and put it down into the barrel and bent them until they were aligned correctly for the aim of the gun. (also I am from the US if that helps)

[@Fahnder99]

There is also the original schematics flying around.

[@LiamVonOahu604]

Fascinating. This was the first video game I had ever seen. It was back in 1977 at my uncle's place.

[@Zhuge_Liang]

I liked this episode so much, I had to comment so I could like that, too.