OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/26616/Recreating_Pong_in_its_original_hardware_forn Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 18 Jun 2013 04:34:21 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com Nerd porn! http://www.osnews.com/thread?545436 http://www.osnews.com/thread?545436 [Drool]!

--The loon Sun, 16 Dec 2012 21:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (looncraz) Comments The fascinating world of earliest video games... http://www.osnews.com/thread?545438 http://www.osnews.com/thread?545438 ...some also earlier than Pong. IMHO one of better gems is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar! - its 1962 version running on PDP-1 emulator: http://spacewar.oversigma.com/

Think about it - the code you can play under that link has half a century, made only 17 years after the end of WW2; the people involved are dying out.

Another gem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Space (also dedicated hw; so far no emu, it seems :/ - or in this case, would that have to be a circuit simulator?)Edited 2012-12-16 21:30 UTC Sun, 16 Dec 2012 21:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zima) Comments RE: The fascinating world of earliest video games... http://www.osnews.com/thread?545442 http://www.osnews.com/thread?545442 Going even further back: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_for_Two It wasn't digital, but it was a computer game. Sun, 16 Dec 2012 22:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Kroc) Comments RE[2]: The fascinating world of earliest video games... http://www.osnews.com/thread?545468 http://www.osnews.com/thread?545468 First thing I thought of when I saw the headline. If I recall correctly, someone on Hackaday.com created a version of that on their own oscilloscope. In fact...

Ahh, here we are! http://hackaday.com/2011/08/01/want-to-play-pong-on-your-oscillosco... Mon, 17 Dec 2012 03:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Morgan) Comments Still have something similar http://www.osnews.com/thread?545531 http://www.osnews.com/thread?545531 Can't remember what brand it is (Magnavox I think) but I have a pong-type game up in my attic. I should dig it out of there for the hell of it. Mon, 17 Dec 2012 14:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Drunkula) Comments FPGAs http://www.osnews.com/thread?545554 http://www.osnews.com/thread?545554 Even the smallest FPGA could handle this little project.

This reminds me of that Clint Eastwood movie, Space Cowboys, where he has to explain his own ancient hardware schematics to youngens (with Masters and Phds) that couldn't read logic schematics anymore.

When I was back in college, 1 particular grad student had his very own ICL 1904 built out of transistor boards working in a spare room. As each board failed he would wire up a TTL logic board replacement work alike.

Then there was that BBC show that ran on PBS last year that reset a British family back to 1970 and had them relive the 70s and 80s in a month going through all these toys 1 day every year. Mon, 17 Dec 2012 18:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (transputer_guy) Comments Emulated version http://www.osnews.com/thread?545683 http://www.osnews.com/thread?545683 Since this contained no code... only logic chips, and emulator would actually need a simulation engine.

I did a simple google search for Pong hardware emulator and found a comment on this page...

http://www.metafilter.com/106370/The-world-of-perfect-video-game-em...

... stating that the DICE (digital integrated circuit emulator) requires a 3GHz processor to run Pong at 5-10 frames per second.

Incredible. Though, this is a general purpose IC emulator. Perhaps a Pong could be coded up more efficiently rather than going through something so general purpose.
Look at the schematic, isolate the logical portion from the analog portion, and I'm sure the requirements would go way down. Tue, 18 Dec 2012 18:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (FunkyELF) Comments RE: Emulated version http://www.osnews.com/thread?545722 http://www.osnews.com/thread?545722 I disagree. There is nothing incredible in it. Modern computers simply can do it. If somebody tried to emulate Pong hardware at atomic level it would require even higher clock speeds and higher amounts of memory but it still wouldn't be incredible.

Incredible you can , for example, call methods and tools that engineers at MOS Technology used to create 6502 chip. Tue, 18 Dec 2012 19:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (levi) Comments RE: Emulated version http://www.osnews.com/thread?545833 http://www.osnews.com/thread?545833 There is really no need to run a detailed event driven gate level or device level PSpice like simulator for this at all.

The amount of logic in this game is so small that a very simple cycle accurate simulator would need very few resources.

Essentially every gate or flop is declared as an expression or master slave register and these are arranged into a C like for loop that looks a lot like a Verilog always @CK block with all the expressions in their time order feeding a master input that cycles back to the slave register variable and back to the top of the loop. If there are RS latches or other analogish circuits those have to be modified into normal clock logic. Did this loads of times for chips thousands of times more complex than Pong.

You could probably even run it on an Arduino board or any MicroChip or Arm chip only running at a few MHz, maybe even a PicoBlaze state machine.

In fact the ARM chip itself was built in exactly this way in BBC Basic on a Beeb, converted to HDL by VLSI Inc and it pretty much worked on first silicon. The Beeb emulator might well have been able to run some early ARM firmware at a few instructions per sec. Wed, 19 Dec 2012 06:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (transputer_guy) Comments RE: FPGAs http://www.osnews.com/thread?545871 http://www.osnews.com/thread?545871
When I was back in college, 1 particular grad student had his very own ICL 1904 built out of transistor boards working in a spare room. As each board failed he would wire up a TTL logic board replacement work alike.

Reminds me of http://www.mycpu.eu/ & http://members.iinet.net.au/~daveb/simplex/ringhome.html

Do you remember the title of the BBC show? (too many of them; /me is afraid of Wiki effect ;p ) Wed, 19 Dec 2012 14:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zima) Comments RE[2]: FPGAs http://www.osnews.com/thread?545912 http://www.osnews.com/thread?545912 I couldn't remember, but thanks to google and a few guesses it came out as "electric dreams", but search for "bbc electric dreams" or you'l get the movie.

Perhaps its still be up for streaming on pbs or bbc.
And its on youtube in snips.

There is a wiki page on it too. Thu, 20 Dec 2012 02:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (transputer_guy) Comments RE[2]: FPGAs http://www.osnews.com/thread?545978 http://www.osnews.com/thread?545978 I just found out about Micro men on youtube, the battle between Uncle Clive and Chris Curry, Sinclair vs Acorn, 85mins well spent. Thu, 20 Dec 2012 16:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (transputer_guy) Comments RE[3]: FPGAs http://www.osnews.com/thread?546116 http://www.osnews.com/thread?546116 Thank you for your time spent on searching it! Fri, 21 Dec 2012 19:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zima) Comments RE: Still have something similar http://www.osnews.com/thread?546117 http://www.osnews.com/thread?546117 Any chance it's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnavox_Odyssey ? ;> Do dig yours out. Fri, 21 Dec 2012 19:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zima) Comments