Man I can't believe that was a thing like "alright let's play bounce the pixel" ooh ahh. Then of course the foresight to see what we have now (doubtful) but still, crazy.
Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
61–70 of 152 posts
Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
#62In the year 1974, Practical Wireless, a UK magazine, published a design for a pong game that connects to a television, called PW Tele Tennis. It uses sixty four NAND gates, twelve NE555 timers, two dozen diodes and some analog parts. It's about the most basic version of the game. They later published a sound effects board and an on-screen scoring board that uses a couple of dozen more chips. http://searle.x10host.com…
Seems almost more chips than the Arcade Pong? But really cool. Thanks for sharing it.
Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
#63This helps to explain what was going on in this "That's 70s Show" episode where Red and Kelso modify a pong game to have smaller paddles.
(short clip when they had finished)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Td0P9Mqu68
A recreation of that modification:
https://www.aussiearcade.com/topic/86532-smaller-paddles-big...
Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
The literal clock speed of CPUs has been stalling, but CPU performance is and has been on a massive increasing trend effectively ever since AMD released the first Ryzen CPUs. Recent product announcements from Intel and AMD show no sign of slowing down. Sure it's not the 'double performance in 1-2 generations' of the olden days, but it's definitely not stalled either.
The Ryzen 7 2700X chip I bought back in 2018 is still fairly close to the latest Ryzen 9 chips in terms of single-core performance on benchmarks (within 10% IIRC). The Ryzen 7 is an 8-core (16 thread) CPU, and now you can get 12 or 16 core Ryzen 9's, but most workloads don't take proper advantage of even an 8-core machine.
Quick online research shows a 30%-40% single core improvement from the 2700X to the 5700X, and a 40% to 50% (single core) improvement to the 5900X. Maybe you have a specific weird workload that isn't improved much, but performance improvement for the average workload is much better than 10%.
Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
#65In the year 1974, Practical Wireless, a UK magazine, published a design for a pong game that connects to a television, called PW Tele Tennis. It uses sixty four NAND gates, twelve NE555 timers, two dozen diodes and some analog parts. It's about the most basic version of the game. They later published a sound effects board and an on-screen scoring board that uses a couple of dozen more chips. http://searle.x10host.com…
In my EE degree (in year 2000), we had to implement something with external I/O as a state machine using logic gates (it was in an FPGA though, we drew the schematic). Pong is a way cooler exercise than whatever I did with a 7 segment display and a keypad. But the idea of state machines is still a big part of introductory digital logic.
Did something similar for a CompE course in 2014. We made a calculator in an FPGA. Probably one of the coolest lab projects in my memory.
Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is part of why Intel acquired Altera. On the other end of the spectrum, some of the latest AVR families have configurable glue logic akin to a tiny PLD.
PLDesque glue logic is cool, but the coolest thing I've seen is uC's with fully programmable pins, so eg the DAC device inside the chip can be connected to any of the external pins, making board layout dramatically simpler.
I'm guessing you've seen the Infineon (formally Cypress) PSoC [0] stuff too? Both analogue and digital peripherals that can be configured mostly arbitrarily.
There are also some neat mixed-signal parts from Dialog [1] - no MCU but interesting analogue and digital blocks all the same.
[0] - https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/microcontroller/32-b...
[1] - https://www.dialog-semiconductor.com/products/greenpak
Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
#67In the year 1974, Practical Wireless, a UK magazine, published a design for a pong game that connects to a television, called PW Tele Tennis. It uses sixty four NAND gates, twelve NE555 timers, two dozen diodes and some analog parts. It's about the most basic version of the game. They later published a sound effects board and an on-screen scoring board that uses a couple of dozen more chips. http://searle.x10host.com…
In probably 1976 for $1 I bought a one-page schematic for such a thing, from classified ad in the back of a magazine. I suppose it was a related version, but IIRC it relied upon 74123 style monostables.
Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
#68I implemented Conways Game of Life in TTL and oscilloscope for my 1975 MIT digital circuits lab. The clock was 6 nanoseconds or 166 MHz. The limiting chip was one kilobit RAM which was in tight supply and expensive. I think we used two for alternating generations. There are similarities to the pong circuit.
What logic family did you use? Standard 74-series TTL chips that existed in 1975 are unlikely to work at 166Mhz, their propagation delay was around 20 ns.
Wasn't ECL in use for high speed logic around that time? I assume if the parent was at MIT they would have had access to all the cool toys back then.
Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
#69Circa 1975-976, as best as I can remember, a magazine (Popular Electronics maybe, or that other one?), had an article about building a Pong game, complete with extensive schematics. There was zero code involved. It was comprised of pretty much nothing but TTL chips in DIP packages and maybe an oscillator or two. I imagined I could build it in my basement. Of course I never did.
Re: Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my EE degree (in year 2000), we had to implement something with external I/O as a state machine using logic gates (it was in an FPGA though, we drew the schematic). Pong is a way cooler exercise than whatever I did with a 7 segment display and a keypad. But the idea of state machines is still a big part of introductory digital logic.
Did something similar for a CompE course in 2014. We made a calculator in an FPGA. Probably one of the coolest lab projects in my memory.
While it has nothing to do with my current work, introductory digital systems was definitely one of my favorite classes. It was amazing to go from logic gates to adders and muxes and whatnot, to state machines, flip-flops, and useful computation. Now I work in software, and although it doesn't really come up, it's very satisfying to understand down to first principles how computers can be built up from the gate level to whatever ridiculous level of abstraction we work with on a daily basis. That's what I love about engineering generally, the ability to roughly understand what is going on around me down to some first principles.