[Simon] wrote in to let us know about DingPong, his handheld portable Pong console. There’s a bit more to it than meets the eye, however. Consider for a moment that back in the 1970s playing Pong required a considerable amount of equipment, not least of which was dedicated electronics and a CRT monitor. What was huge (in more than one way) in the 70s has been shrunk down to handheld, and implemented almost entirely on modern e-waste in the process.
DingPong is housed in an old video doorbell unit (hence the name) and the screen is a Sony Video Watchman, a portable TV from 1982 with an amazing 4-inch CRT whose guts [Simon] embeds into the enclosure. Nearly everything in the build is either salvaged, or scrounged from the junk bin. Components are in close-enough values, and power comes from nameless lithium-ion batteries that are past their prime but still good enough to provide about an hour of runtime. The paddle controllers? Two pots (again, of not-quite-the-right values) sticking out the sides of the unit, one for each player.
At the heart of DingPong one will not find any flavor of Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or ESP32. Rather, it’s built around an AY-3-8500 “Ball & paddle” (aka ‘Pong’) integrated circuit from 1977, which means DingPong plays the real thing!
We have seen Pong played on a Sony Watchman before, and we’ve also seen a vintage Pong console brought back to life, but we’re pretty sure this is the first time we’ve seen a Sony Watchman running Pong off a chip straight from the 70s. Watch it in action in the video (in German), embedded below.
The age of dedicated ICs seems so foreign now. One chip plays happy birthday, another one is a calculator, a third one is pong. Nowadays we just have a microcontroller for everything.
You can still buy chips for custom functions like melody generators, clocks etc, they’re just harder to find at 1 of or even 1000 of quantity packaged in a form that’s useable on the average hobbyist bench (they tend to be aimed at COB assembly) but there’s still a huge market for parts that are almost literally 10 a penny.
I do love that we have 10c parts which are more powerful than the first home computers but, perhaps like you, miss the days when it was possible to delve in and see the data being transferred between micro and peripherals with a simple logic probe
I second this, the vintage chips are still there but go under in the masses of cheap, low-quality microcontrollers.
We’ve reached a point in history in which technology has less worth than food and water.
Not sure if we should be proud of this or not, though.
“Rather, it’s built around an AY-3-8500 “Ball & paddle” (aka ‘Pong’) integrated circuit from 1977, which means DingPong plays the real thing!”
But is it though? The real Pong was built from discrete 74xx logic. Is the AY-3-8500 a 1-1 integration of Atari Pong’s circuits, or is it maybe the first emulation of Atari Pong?
Right. It does not play the Atari original. The paddles were much smaller, there were more ball angles and the ball got faster during gameplay and yes of course it was made out of discrete logic. So yes, the AY-3-8500 is NOT a 1-1 integration of Atari’s circuits. But that also means it has added features like the ability to switch between different games (all of which are PONG… oh and two lightgun games). At least you can change game modes like ball speed and paddle size.
But.
The AY-3-8500 IC was in almost every one of the slightly over 1000 home PONG console variations (a few also used discrete ICs, others used PONG-on-a-chip chips from different manufacturers, even MOS/Commodore had one which in a nutshell was a calculator chip with a graphics subsystem)
Its nice to see a build that isnt based on a computer. Microcontroller/pi projects are fun, but I am not amazed when a cpu does cpu things.
Aww I love it Love a fun trash project :)
Kinda stinks I’m an ocean away, this guy is the kind of friend I want to have when the world turns to a Fallout-style wasteland. Rad-x and Ding pong what else do you need?