Handheld Console Plays Original Pong With Modern E-Waste

March 24, 2025 by Donald Papp 7 Comments

[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.

The 1970s would be blown away by a handheld version of Pong, made almost entirely from salvaged components.

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.

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Building A Handheld Pong Game

March 21, 2025 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

Pong was one of the first video games to really enter the public consciousness. While it hasn’t had the staying power of franchises like Zelda or Call of Duty, it nonetheless still resonates with gamers today. That includes [Arnov Sharma], who put together this neat handheld version using modern components.

An ESP32 development board serves as the brains of the operation. Capable of operating at many hundreds of megahertz, it has an excessive amount of power for an application as simple as this. Nonetheless, it’s cheap, and it gets the job done. It’s paired with an SSD1306 OLED screen of 124 x 32 resolution. That might not sound like much, but it’s plenty when you’re just drawing two paddles and a ball bouncing between them. Control is via a pair of SMD push buttons for a nice responsive feel.

What’s really neat, though, is the presentation. [Arnov] wrapped the electronics in a neat bean-shaped housing that vaguely apes game controllers of the 16-bit era. Indeed, [Arnov] explains that it was inspired by the Sega Genesis specifically. It looks great with the black PCBs integrated so nicely with the bright orange 3D printed components, and looks quite comfortable to use, too.

It might be a simple project, but it’s done rather well. Just by thinking about color choices and how to assemble the base components, [Arnov] was able to create an attractive and functional game that’s a lot more eye catching than some random boards thrown in an old project box. Indeed, we’ve featured stories on advanced FR4/PCB construction techniques before, too. Meanwhile, if you’re creating your own projects with similar techniques, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Tiny PONG, Big Ambitions: World’s Smallest Arcade

December 11, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 5 Comments

London, Ontario college student [Victoria Korhonen] has captured the attention of tech enthusiasts and miniaturization lovers with her creation of what might be the world’s smallest arcade machine. Standing just 64 mm tall, 26 mm wide, and 30 mm deep, this machine is a scaled-down marvel playing the classic Atari game PONG. While the record isn’t yet official—it takes about three months for Guinness to certify—it’s clear [Korhonen]’s creation embodies ingenuity and dedication.

[Korhonen], an electromechanical engineering student, took six months to design and build this micro arcade. Inspired by records within reach, she aimed to outdo the previous tiniest arcade machine by shaving off just a few millimeters During the project she faced repeated failures, but viewed each iteration as a step towards success. Her miniature machine isn’t just a gimmick; it’s fully functional, with every component—from paddle mechanics to coding—developed from scratch.

[Korhonen] is already eyeing new projects, including creating the smallest humanoid robot. She also plans to integrate her electromechanical expertise into her family’s escape room business. Her journey aligns with other hobbyist projects pushing the limits of miniaturization, such as this credit card-sized Tetris clone or [Aliaksei Zholner]’s paper micro engines.

Feeling A Pong Of Nostalgia: Does It Hold Up In 2024?

October 20, 2024 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

We have probably all been there: that sudden memory of playing a (video) game and the good memories associated with said memory. Yet how advisable is it to try and re-experience those nostalgic moments? That’s what [Matt] of the Techmoan YouTube channel decided to give a whirl when he ordered the Arcade1Up Pong 2 Player Countercade game system. This comes loaded with multiple variants of the Pong game, including Pong Doubles and Pong Sports, in addition to Warlords, Super Breakout and Tempest. This unit as the name suggests allows for head-to-head two-player gaming.

This kind of ‘countercade’ system is of course much smaller than arcade versions, but you would expect it to give the Pong clones which [Matt] played as a youngster a run for their money at least. Ultimately [Matt] – after some multiplayer games with the Ms. – concluded that this particular nostalgia itch was one that didn’t have to be scratched any more. While the small screen of this countercade system and clumsy interface didn’t help much, maybe Pong just isn’t the kind of game that has a place in 2024?

From our own point of view of having played Pong (and many other ‘old’ games) on a variety of old consoles at retro events & museums, it can still be a blast to play even just Pong against a random stranger at these places. Maybe the issue here is that nostalgia is more about the circumstances of the memory and less of the particular game or product in question. Much like playing Mario Kart 64 on that 20″ CRT TV with three buddies versus an online match in a modern Mario Kart. It’s just not the same vibe.

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Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis

August 11, 2024 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

A team at Google has spent a lot of time recently playing table tennis, purportedly only for science. Their goal was to see whether they could construct a robot which would not only play table tennis, but even keep up with practiced human players. In the paper available on ArXiv, they detail what it took to make it happen. The team also set up a site with a simplified explanation and some videos of the robot in action.

Table tennis robot vs human match outcomes. B is beginner, I is intermediate, A is advanced. (Credit: Google)

In the end, it took twenty motion-capture cameras, a pair of 125 FPS cameras, a 6 DOF robot on two linear rails, a special table tennis paddle, and a very large annotated dataset to train multiple convolutional neural networks (CNN) on to analyze the incoming visual data. This visual data was then combined with details like knowledge of the paddle’s position to churn out a value for use in the look-up table that forms the core of the high-level controller (HLC). This look-up table then decides which low-level controller (LLC) is picked to perform a certain action. In order to prevent the CNNs of the LLCs from ‘forgetting’ the training data, a total of 17 different CNNs were used, one per LLC.

The robot was tested with a range of players from a local table tennis club which made clear that while it could easily defeat beginners, intermediate players pose a serious threat. Advanced players completely demolished the table tennis robot. Clearly we do not have to fear our robotic table tennis playing overlords just yet, but the robot did receive praise for being an interesting practice partner. Continue reading “Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis” →

Mouse Doesn’t Play Pong… It IS Pong!

August 8, 2024 by Al Williams 1 Comment

From the “why didn’t we think of that” department comes [dupontgu’s] pong mouse project. The mouse appears and acts like a normal computer mouse until you click the scroll wheel. When you do, the mouse rapidly moves the cursor on the connected computer to play pong. Obviously, though, the paddles and the ball all look like your cursor, whatever that happens to be. So, how do you tell the score? Well, when a score happens, the cursor shows between the two paddles. In the middle means the game is tied. Otherwise, the player closest to the score indicator is winning. Continue reading “Mouse Doesn’t Play Pong… It IS Pong!” →

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Pi-O-Scope-Pong

August 1, 2024 by Donald Papp 3 Comments

[Aaron Lager]’s Pi-O-Scope-Pong project takes a minimal approach to Pong by drawing on an oscilloscope to generate crisp paddles and ball. A Raspberry Pi takes care of the grunt work of signal generation, and even uses the two joysticks of an Xbox controller (connected to the Pi over Bluetooth) for inputs.

Originally, [Aaron] attempted to generate the necessary signals directly from the Pi’s PWM outputs by doing a little bit of RC filtering on the outputs, but was repulsed by the smeary results. The solution? An old but perfectly serviceable 8-bit MAX506 DAC now handles crisping up the visuals with high-quality analog outputs. Code is available on the project’s GitHub repository.

There isn’t any score-keeping or sound, but one thing that it has over the original Pong is a round ball. The ball in the original Pong game was square, but mainly because cost was a concern during design and generating a round ball would have ballooned the part count.

In many ways, Pong itself is a great inspiration for the Tiny Games Challenge, because the simplicity of its gameplay was likely a big part of its success.

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