Building Pong For An 8-pin Micro

pong

For playing around with video signals and trying to create a an interesting microcontroller project, you can’t do better than the classic Pong. We’ve seen our share of microcontroller-based pong builds, but rarely have we seen an 8-pin microcontroller recreate every part of the first video game.

[Tim] started his PIC12F1840-based Pong build with just a few buttons for controls and a video output. This in itself is somewhat of an achievement, as [Tim] used all the data memory and every GPIO pin on this small microcontroller.

He had time to optimize his build and ended up adding the bleeps and bloops of the original Pong to his build. He’s got an interesting design on his hands, and also what is probably the smallest Pong clone in existence.

10 thoughts on “Building Pong For An 8-pin Micro

  1. Cool project! Video output on low-power hardware is interesting stuff.

    But Pong isn’t the first video game by pretty much any standard. It’s not even Atari’s first.

      1. Let’s straighten things out here.Determining the first video game is actually a tricky question because it depends on how you define video game(played on a non-purpose built display, analog or digital), but in any case pong is not the first video game by a long shot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_video_game
        Also cool project. I recall seeing pong implemented on a pic16f628 in much the same way, but amazing to see it with a 12f series pic.

  2. Now *this* is some proper work. Never mind using two arduinos to flash an LED or 3 different operating systems to open your garage door, this man is doing it as it should be done and should be hailed as a hero.

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.