MAKE: Blog: The world's smallest Pong game

The world's smallest Pong game

Pball
Printje
Ronald's tiny pong game, he writes -

When the µSCOPE project was well underway, it was clear to me that my next project just had to be a miniature version of the classic PONG game. The PONG game was invented back in 1966 by Ralph Baer [1,2]. In the seventies the game became very popular and I remember that as a child I was completely fascinated by it. We had a later version at home, and on inspection it appeared that there was only one 40 pen IC in it, how did they do it ? In 1973 the Dutch electronics magazine Elektuur (Elektor for the rest of the world) organized a circuit design contest. Electronics enthusiasts where invited to submit their favorite circuit designs. Via a complicated set of rules, which I have never understood, a calculation of the costs for the components that were used was made. Part of the sum was given to the designer, the rest was given to the charity fund: "Aktion Sorgenkind". The first price was a homebrew version of PONG by the youthful B Lübcke from Kiel, Germany [3]! With nine TTL 74121 type one-shots and a handful of logic gates the clever designer was able to make a real functional tennis game on the TV. I was amazed how simple it all could be!

The µPONG game works essentially the same as the original 1966 design. However, in the PIC version the hardware one-shots have been replaced by software delays. A number of microcontroller based PONG games have been published or posted on the internet [4,5]. This µPONG version is so far the smallest, using only an 8 pin PIC processor, and is the only one to use two potentiometers for the bat controls, just as the original PONG game. In Fig. 1 the circuit diagram of the µPONG is given. Although the circuit is pretty simple, it does contain some special tricks which will be explained in the text below.

microPONG, The world's smallest pong game - Link.

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Comments

Oldest comments listed first.

Posted by: morcheeba on August 24, 2007 at 8:26 AM

Nice job! I like the technical explanation of the interlacing -- it solves a software problem that would otherwise prevent drawing the ball close to the paddle.

Posted by: EllisGL on August 29, 2007 at 9:12 PM

Could be smaller usering SMD's...

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