pong

102 Articles

Pong Gets The Boot

November 20, 2025 by 5 Comments

You might be surprised to find out that [Akshat Joshi’s] Pong game that fits in a 512-byte boot sector isn’t the first of its kind. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t an accomplishment to shoehorn useful code in that little bitty space.

As you might expect, a game like this uses assembly language. It also can’t use any libraries or operating system functions because there aren’t any at that particular time of the computer startup sequence. Once you remember that the bootloader has to end with two magic bytes (0x55 0xAA), you know you have to get it all done in 510 bytes or less.

This version of Pong uses 80×25 text mode and writes straight into video memory. You can find the code in a single file on GitHub. In the old days, getting something like this working was painful because you had little choice but reboot your computer to test it and hope it went well. Now you can run it in a virtual machine like QEMU and even use that to debug problems in ways that would have made a developer from the 1990s offer up their life savings.

We’ve seen this before, but we still appreciate the challenge. We wonder if you could write Pong in BootBasic?

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Hackaday Links: October 12, 2025

October 12, 2025 by 2 Comments

We’ve probably all seen some old newsreel or documentary from The Before Times where the narrator, using his best Mid-Atlantic accent, described those newfangled computers as “thinking machines,” or better yet, “electronic brains.” It was an apt description, at least considering that the intended audience had no other frame of reference at a time when the most complex machine they were familiar with was a telephone. But what if the whole “brain” thing could be taken more literally? We’ll have to figure that out soon if these computers powered by miniature human brains end up getting any traction.

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Pong Cloned By Neural Network

August 24, 2025 by 9 Comments

Although not the first video game ever produced, Pong was the first to achieve commercial success and has had a tremendous influence on our culture as a whole. In Pong’s time, its popularity ushered in the arcade era that would last for more than two decades. Today, it retains a similar popularity partially for approachability: gameplay is relatively simple, has hardwired logic, and provides insights about the state of computer science at the time. For these reasons, [Nick Bild] has decided to recreate this arcade classic, but not in a traditional way. He’s trained a neural network to become the game instead.

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PCB Business Card Plays Pong, Attracts Employer

August 13, 2025 by 12 Comments

Facing the horrifying realization that he’s going to graduate soon, EE student [Colin Jackson] AKA [Electronics Guy] needed a business card. Not just any business card: a PCB business card. Not just any PCB business card: a PCB business card that can play pong.

[Colin] was heavily inspired by the card [Ben Eater] was handing out at OpenSauce last year, and openly admits to copying the button holder from it. We can’t blame him: the routed-out fingers to hold a lithium button cell were a great idea. The original idea, a 3D persistence-of-vision display, was a little too ambitious to fit on a business card, so [Colin] repurposed the 64 LED matrix and STM32 processor to play Pong. Aside from the LEDs and the microprocessor, it looks like the board has a shift register to handle all those outputs and a pair of surface-mount buttons.

Of course you can’t get two players on a business card, so the microprocessor is serving as the opponent. With only 64 LEDs, there’s no room for score-keeping — but apparently even the first, nonworking prototype was good enough to get [Colin] a job, so not only can we not complain, we offer our congratulations.

The video is a bit short on detail, but [Colin] promises a PCB-business card tutorial at a later date. If you can’t wait for that, or just want to see other hackers take on the same idea, take a gander at some of the entries to last year’s Business Card Challenge. Continue reading “PCB Business Card Plays Pong, Attracts Employer” →

A History Of Pong

July 28, 2025 by 8 Comments

Today, creating a ground-breaking video game is akin to making a movie. You need a story, graphic artists, music, and more. But until the middle of the 20th century, there were no video games. While several games can claim to be the “first” electronic or video game, one is cemented in our collective memory as the first one we’d heard of: Pong.

The truth is, Pong wasn’t the first video game. We suspect that many people might have had the idea, but Ralph Baer is most associated with inventing a practical video game. As a young engineer in 1951, he tried to convince his company to invest in games that you could play on your TV set. They didn’t like the idea, but Ralph would remember the concept and act on it over a decade later.

But was it really the first time anyone had thought of it? Perhaps not. Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent in 1947 for a game that simulated launching missiles at targets with an oscilloscope display. The box took eight tubes and, being an oscilloscope, was a vector graphic device. The targets were physical dots on a screen overlay. These “amusement devices” were very expensive, and they only produced handmade prototypes.

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Pong In Discrete Components

June 24, 2025 by 25 Comments

The choice between hardware and software for electronics projects is generally a straighforward one. For simple tasks we might build dedicated hardware circuits out of discrete components for reliability and low cost, but for more complex tasks it could be easier and cheaper to program a general purpose microcontroller than to build the equivalent circuit in hardware. Every now and then we’ll see a project that blurs the lines between these two choices like this Pong game built entirely out of discrete components.

The project begins with a somewhat low-quality image of the original Pong circuit found online, which [atkelar] used to model the circuit in KiCad. Because the image wasn’t the highest resolution some guesses needed to be made, but it was enough to eventually produce a PCB and bill of material. From there [atkelar] could start piecing the circuit together, starting with the clock and eventually working through all the other components of the game, troubleshooting as he went. There were of course a few bugs to work out, as with any hardware project of this complexity, but in the end the bugs in the first PCB were found and used to create a second PCB with the issues solved.

With a wood, and metal case rounding out the build to showcase the circuit, nothing is left but to plug this in to a monitor and start playing this recreation of the first mass-produced video game ever made. Pong is a fairly popular build since, at least compared to modern games, it’s simple enough to build completely in hardware. This version from a few years ago goes even beyond [atkelar]’s integrated circuit design and instead built a recreation out of transistors and diodes directly.

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Tearing Down A Forgotten Video Game

May 11, 2025 by 5 Comments

Remember Video Volley? No? We don’t either. It looks like it was a very early video game console that could play tennis, hockey, or handball. In this video, [James] tears one apart. If you are like us, we are guessing there will be little more than one of those General Instrument video game chips inside.

These don’t look like they were mass-produced. The case looks like something off the shelf from those days. The whole thing looks more like a nice homebrew project or a pretty good prototype. Not like something you’d buy in a store.

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