10 ms·
How were 70s versions of games like Pong built without a programmable computer?
- coding123 2y agoA friend's Dad has Wozniak's old VCR. We used to watch movies on that all the time as kids. Interestingly this person was also working on Pong, specifically on the ball device that used to move the paddle around.
- mistrial9 2y agosome early video games were from Commodore; they had a box that generated a TV signal.. the box had knobs or perhaps a joystick. The games played by assigning a TV channel on the box, then changing the TV channel (with a knob on the TV) to that channel. The video game is now playing.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jasonjayr 2y agoIf you still have access to an analog tuner, you can do this trick with the ESP8266! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41740978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41740978
- crtasm 2y agoEven in the days of Super Nintendo we had the option of hooking it up the TV like this.
- foobarchu 2y agoThis was common on every console through the 2000s, composite cables were not the norm in my experience. While the PlayStation 2 shipped with composite cables, even it had a coaxial adapter available for tuning to channel 2 or 3.
- MBCook 2y agoThe original PlayStation didn’t come with an RF modulator. Neither did the Xbox or the N64. The Super Nintendo was the last console I remember having one. The Genesis must have too. But by 95 (PS in US) there were no longer the default. They may have still been available, I don’t know. Kind of doubt it but maybe I just didn’t notice.
- fredoralive 2y agoI think it depends on market, at least some European / PAL PlayStations did come with an RF modulator[1]. The Dreamcast also did (UK at least), but that was an outlier, other consoles of that generation had RCA composite cables and an RCA to SCART adaptor. You (nearly) always had to buy the RGB SCART cable you actually wanted for a good picture separately. [1] random eBay listing, with RFU Adaptor pictured / listed in contents: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/364907339156 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/364907339156 (Note Europe uses Belling-Lee connectors for TV antennas, so the connector is probably different to North American style RF boxes).
- 0xcde4c3db 2y agoI don't know about other regions, but in the US console-specific RF adapters were available separately up to the Dreamcast/PS2/GameCube/Xbox generation, i.e. until HD over HDMI became the prevailing standard (Wii notwithstanding). For the RF switch part, Nintendo actually recycled the NES design for all of them. It's kind of funny seeing that chunky gray box next to a GameCube logo.
- krs_ 2y agoI definitely bought an RF adapter for the N64 to be able to plug it into my old crusty TV at the time. But indeed, it was something you deliberately had to buy at that point and composite inputs were the norm.
- pvg 2y agoA big similar discussion two years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31511719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31511719
- rand0mfacts 2y agoThis site has a simulation of the hardware logic used to build Pong: https://www.falstad.com/pong/ball.html https://www.falstad.com/pong/ball.html
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- NikkiA 2y agoNotably that is Atari's clone/rip-off. Magnavox's Table Tennis used diodes and transistors and was technically purely analog. And of course Tennis For Two was also purely analog pre-dating ICs completely.
- amelius 2y agoYes, and it links to: http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~sedwards/papers/edwards2012reconstructing.pdf http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~sedwards/papers/edwards2012reco...
- holoduke 2y agoOn paper. I remember my cousin who is 50 now writing me letters, handwritten with entire programs in it. All i had to do was writing it and compile it. It often worked out of the box and was never longer than a few pages. I dont know how he did it.
- alexey-salmin 2y agoThat's not the question. There was essentially no computer at all in those videogames
- chongli 2y agoYou still use paper. Instead of writing the game in a general purpose programming language you write it using logic gates. You get abstraction and modularity by designing larger components (adders, flip-flops, timers, shift registers) on separate pieces of paper and then including them as named black boxes in a higher-level diagram. The good news for the Pong developers is that most of those larger components were already available off-the-shelf. Common families of these chips, such as the venerable 4000-series and 7400-series logic families, began to appear on the market in the mid-1960's. Edit just to add another bit of nuance. If it still seems like an extremely difficult task without much precedent, I think the lineage of these early arcade games can be traced back through their older arcade siblings: pinball machines. People had been building more and more sophisticated pinball machines over the decades since their inception in the early 1930s. For a look into pinball machines, some of their history, and an amazingly deep dive into the workings of a 1970's model, check out Alec's pinball series on Technology Connections [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg&list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVAUoqtVxFVIu2oZc2GGyDf&index=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg&list=PLv0jwu7G_D...
- yarg 2y agoWouldn't it be closer to say that the game was the computer? A very simplistic and non-general purpose computer, but a computer nonetheless?
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
- illwrks 2y agoI watched this video on Youtube a few months ago that's very insightful! It's about an arcade game from the 70's called Sega JET ROCKET: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0qlfEuzj6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0qlfEuzj6U
- hggigg 2y agoPong isn’t that complicated. If you go even further back it gets even simpler. There’s a good example here: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/oscilloscope-pong-for-1-or-2-players/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/oscilloscope-pong-for... It looks complicated but it’s really not if you break it down into small bits and think of it like you would with a piece of software I.e. abstractions.
- yarg 2y agoDid you RTFA? It covers some things that are rather counterintuitive, especially if you come from a modern programming background. Now is it complicated? No not really, I read the answer and immediately understood what was going on. But no modern programmer would ever come up with the solution of addressing x and y positions by setting timers to wake at the times when the point in the scan-line or the scan-line in the frame was reached (although sleep-sort does exist). If anything, the point of the post is the fact that it's very easy to understand, despite how counterintuitive it may be.
- ziddoap 2y ago>>Pong isn’t that complicated. >Now is it complicated? No not really, I read the answer and immediately understood what was going on. Seems like you agree? Not sure why you asked if the parent poster RTFA.
- yarg 2y ago> If anything, the point of the post is the fact that it's very easy to understand, despite how counterintuitive it may be. Much like he seemed to have missed the point of the post, you seem to have missed my point about him seeming to miss the point of the post.
- baxtr 2y agoAs a side note: I find the usage of RTFA and TFA pretty impolite and don’t like to see it on HN a lot. Many come here just for the comment section and the discussions, not the article per se.
- Dwedit 2y agoNTSC composite video isn't all that hard, you have voltages for VSync, HSync, VBlank, HBlank, Black and White. Generate the correct voltages at the correct times and you have a TV picture. But TVs then didn't have composite video inputs, so you also needed an RF modulator.
- fma 2y agoI haven't heard these terms in years. My college Digital Design had a project to create pong and output to a VGA monitor.
- bregma 2y agoDon't forget you need a balun to convert the RF from the coax output to the parallel-pair antenna input. Of course, the antenna input was already in use by the rabbit ears so you have to double up.
- squeaky-clean 2y agoThere's a scene in "That 70's Show" where Kelso and Red bond over Pong and decide to mod the game to make it harder. And a few hours later with a soldering iron, smaller paddles! The first time I saw that episode was at a friend's house. I felt so smart telling him that was impossible because you can't mod software with a soldering iron. Then his dad poked his head out from the kitchen and told me Pong didn't have software. Turns out the only impossible part of that episode is the idea of it taking a few hours. Changing the paddle size was a mod already supported by the hardware and the manual gave details on how to do it. Though it wasn't necessarily intended as a difficulty setting, it was intended to support different sizes of TVs. iirc, all you need to do is solder 1 jumper.
- 486sx33 2y agoKind of amazed Kelso disassembled something and it worked after (I think was the surprising part) lol
- al_borland 2y agoThat’s probably what Red was there for. To lend a foot every time Kelso needed it.
- jimbob45 2y agoThere was a downplayed running joke where Kelso was actually extremely skilled at engineering. In another episode, he repairs a car with Red and explains what he’s doing in high technical detail while Red just pretends to know what he’s talking about because he doesn’t want to admit that Kelso is smarter than him at something.
- saywhanow 2y agoIdk. A few hours for Kelso to solder a jumper sounds about right.
- nihilist_t21 2y agoI had no idea that scene was somewhat accurate! I just watched it and had the same feelings you did.
- chrismcb 2y agoWhat do you mean by "programmable computer?"
- dboreham 2y agoToday it means: computer. But long long ago there were things called computers (something that computed) that weren't programmable. E.g the computer that aims battleship guns in WW1.
- DonHopkins 2y agoBlip is a digital game, because you use your fingers to play it, and it used that cool BYTE Magazine computer font. BLIP video game by Tomy commercial 1979: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPA7SQbwDOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPA7SQbwDOQ Blip - 1977 Mechanical Pong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSvZbcwqlTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSvZbcwqlTw
- jburgess777 2y agoOlimex just released a 1 euro game ‘computer’ based around a tiny RISC-V microcontroller. It drives a monochrome VGA display by bit-banging a couple of GPIO lines in software. Obviously the use of a microcontroller is cheating a little, but likely makes the system cheaper than anything which could be built with discrete logic or FPGA. https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/RVPC/open-source-hardware https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/RVPC/open-so...
- 486sx33 2y agoWe used to mess around with making video output from hardware in electronics class… it’s definitely old school cool in my mind
- masswerk 2y agoI once wrote about this on the example of Computer Space (1971) — the very first coin-op video game and also the first one using this technology — and how this relates to the Atari VCS / 2600 and its TIA chip. https://www.masswerk.at/rc2017/04/02.html#basics https://www.masswerk.at/rc2017/04/02.html#basics
- pkaye 2y agoI've seen a schematic of a Pong like game made with digital circuits like counters and comparators. Each player has a Y position controller. So and Y1 and Y2 register. Then the ball has an x and y position. The game logic is controller by comparators to detect events like reaching borders or within the paddle width range. So for example if you reach the left border and is within left paddle range then bounce the ball back right otherwise the left player loses. In terms of drawing to the screen, again compare the screen pixel position to each of the two paddles and ball position. Drawing the score was a little more complex but your have a counter for each players score and that determines which lines to draw. So you OR together the output from many comparator logic to determine the pixel should be lit or not.
- Taniwha 2y agoHave a look at Tiny Tapeout which is running a demoscene competition - essentially building hardware just like this (making hardware counting scan lines and pixels to make VCA)
- LordHeini 2y agoUnrelated but important. Whatever you do if you end up in Berlin for whatever reason. Go to the computer spiele museum https://www.computerspielemuseum.de/ https://www.computerspielemuseum.de/
- mixmastamyk 2y agoLooks awesome, now I have another reason to visit Berlin.
- radicalbyte 2y agoIf you're ever in the area of Milton Keynes in the UK, TNMOC at Bletchley Park is awesome. https://www.tnmoc.org https://www.tnmoc.org
- userbinator 2y agoAs a Computer Science graduate without an Electrical Engineering background, I was trying to wrap my head around how that was even possible. I wish more CS curricula would start with digital logic and stay there for a little longer before going into the full stored-program computer. That used to be the norm. One of the first Pong ICs, the AY-3-8500, is reverse-engineered in this series of articles: https://nerdstuffbycole.blogspot.com/2018/01/reverse-engineering-ay-3-8500-part-1.html https://nerdstuffbycole.blogspot.com/2018/01/reverse-enginee...
- pjmlp 2y agoIndeed, back in the 90's our software engineering degree had lots of shared lectures with electrical engineering. Digital logic would go all the way from boolean logic to designing our own toy CPU, with implementation using discrete logic components left as optional for those that felt like going for the top score on the assignment. Additionally we also had stuff like EEPROM programming as optional selection for the total credits. Interestingly enough, stuff like Prolog and LP, was also a required lecture for both engineering degrees.
- kalleboo 2y agoIn Sweden, rather than a "computer science", there's a "computer engineering" degree that also retains a lot of the electrical engineering stuff such as building a computer starting with a diode, building a flip-flop, a shift register, etc etc. Karnaugh Maps and everything.
- pjmlp 2y agoI always have problems after all these years understanding US concept of CS being mostly theory, because in Portugal that isn't something we have as such, that is rather a specialisation of Maths degree (Maths applied to Computation, loosely translated), which only math nerds take, not those into computing. Even if we translate our degree names to CS, the contents of those 3 to 5 years are very much hands on, with many lectures requiring successful delivery of project assignments before attending respective exams.
- 6510 2y agoIt is more like a pinball machine than a video game. Now that I think of it it is really a rather unexplored field. Much more should be possible. Imagine a car printed in the center of some transparent foil then you rotate the foil to turn. For the background you could have a giant map by projecting a tiny part of a rolled up slide. You could put the road logic on a large drum or hurdy-gurdy punch card roles. Lots of possibilities.
- masswerk 2y agoThis is exactly what EM (electro-mechanical) arcade games were, which were eventually replaced by video games. There were driving games, flight simulators of sorts, bombing missions, shooters, etc. Some of the earlier video games were directly copying/recreating earlier EM games. Video games eventually won, because they were lower maintenance. Also, video games allowed for what was hardly possible with EM technology, namely player to player competition, like in Pong. (This was probably the true revolution of video games: a competitive game, where players could match on equal ground, regardless of age, sex, size, physical strength, etc.) Searching for "EM arcade game" on a video platform like YouTube may be worth it…
- lokimedes 2y agoThat really seems to draw on how radars are engineered. Is there any historical connection with defense contracting and Atari?
- bobek 2y agoSometimes we do overuse programmable devices, where simpler logic would be even better (read no corrupted memory, instant boot, etc.). One beat tool are the shift registers -- https://bobek.cz/traffic-light/ https://bobek.cz/traffic-light/
- 15155 2y agoCortex M0 chips are 10 cents and boot instantly.
- LarsDu88 2y agoJust imagine how fast llama3.2 would be without a computer
- globular-toast 2y agoIMO you can only be confused by this if you think computers are magic. They aren't magic! Build your own computer on a breadboard! I did this and it finally got rid of the last bit of magic in computers for me. Now I can appreciate the beauty fully. https://eater.net/8bit https://eater.net/8bit
- pjmlp 2y agoBasically by doing in hardware the same kind of logic decisions as we do in software. Naturally this doesn't scale beyond basic games, due to the hardware requirements. I have somewhere on my parents home a book from the 70's, from my father, dedicated to this kind of games, the precursor of BASIC games books from the 80's. If you want to experiment this today, there are companies that sell such kits still, https://www.ic0nstrux.com/products/gaming-systems/game-console-starter-kit https://www.ic0nstrux.com/products/gaming-systems/game-conso...
- alfiedotwtf 2y agoThinking about what you wrote… an llvm2electronics compiler would be cool -compile source down to analog electronics!!
- 15155 2y agoThis is called "HLS" (high-level synthesis) and exists. The emitted RTL is atrocious. Anything but the simplest programs will require way too much logic to implement with discrete components.
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- agumonkey 2y agoFascinating thread, thanks. Somehow related pinball machines were way more complex than I'd ever imagine.
- namaria 2y agoTechnology Connections on yt has a great series on dissecting a nice electromecanic model, highly recommended
- weebull 2y agoTruly a precursor to games like pong. It's just that relays turned into transistors and so we're able to operate at speeds that made manipulation of a TV signal possible.
- leoc 2y agoApparently Dave Nutting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzkGNL2AxP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzkGNL2AxP0 's reimplementation of Taito's 1975 Western Gun/Gun Fight for Midway was the first arcade video game to use a microprocessor, though I don't know if the original implementation was as 'hard-wired' as Pong or if it had evolved more towards being a full computer in TTL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_Fight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_Fight Simmilarly, when the IBM 1401 https://www.ibm.com/history/1401 https://www.ibm.com/history/1401 launched in 1959 it replaced large numbers of plugboard-based tabulating systems http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/plugboard.html http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/plugboard.html in offices.
- dwh452 2y agoHow were pinball machines built without a programmable computer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg I think the arcade industry was already comfortable dealing with complexity to make the mechanical games. The Rube Goldberg nature of the early video games probably weren't that much of a jump in effort/engineering.
- magoghm 2y agoIf you want to learn more about this, I strongly recommend reading the 1978 book "How to Design and Build Your Own Custom TV Games": https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/how-to-design-and-build-your-own-custom-tv-games.498264/ https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/how-to-design-and-b...
- EasyMark 2y agoYou can build logic circuitry with pure hardware circuitry is the simple answer, you don’t need a cpu.
- jecel 2y agoOne additional obstacle for modern audiences is that the TV sets themselves are computers running software. They take a MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 file coming in some network port and send it to some mixed parallel/serial interface to a LCD or similar panel. If you understood how a 1970s TV worked (specially the simpler black and white ones used in the first video-games) then imagining a circuit that would generate the needed signals was a bit easier.
- jecel 2y agoA very nice book is "Designing Video Game Hardware in Verilog" by Steven Hugg and is part of a series of books that is supported by http://8bitworkshop.com/ http://8bitworkshop.com/ I am writing a book somewhat similar to this (currently in Portuguese, but later in English and other languages) using the Digital simulator in Java for the examples as schematics, though they can be exported as Verilog for implementation in FPGA boards. https://github.com/jeceljr/LivroComputadoresEVideogames https://github.com/jeceljr/LivroComputadoresEVideogames Each chapter represents a video-game console generation, with hardwired Pong and Soccer in the first chapter. I am now working on replacing the game logic in Soccer with a 16 bit version of RISC-V for the second chapter and then improving the video and sound to Colecovision levels. In chapter 3 we will have a 32 bit RISC-V with NES level graphics and sound, with a pipelined RISC-V with something like the Gameduino for chapter 4. The 8 Bit Workshop will let readers program the actual consoles from each era and not just our retro designs.
- sargstuff 2y ago"Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor" : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31511719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31511719 VM's just provide the software version of asic boolean logic ------------------ a) Boolian logic / explicit constructions to generate results. aka pong on specific purpose computation device. b) Programmable computing / general purpose computer uses constructive logic (process of construction of mathematical objects aka programming languages) c) "compiling"/"interpreting" b sets up the path through a to generate 'results' vs. a's fixed path/hard wired path transition/state table aka compiler generated type punning![0] ----- [0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_punning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_punning : punning with character : gawk chapter "11.3.11 And Now for Something Completely Different" program : nil-punning : https://ericnormand.me/article/nil-punning