Reconstruction of the Pong machine

In 1972, engineer Allan Alcorn was faced with the need to make a simple video game in which there would be a moving point, two guided racquets and numbers to display the score. In fact, this task was given to help an Atari specialist in electrical engineering, who at that time had no experience working in the emerging sphere of entertainment. It is unclear where the idea came from - either from a tennis simulator on the PDP-1, or stolen from the failed Magnavox Odyssey console, released in the same year, but Pong was historically the first commercially successful computer game.

There was no embedded program, operating systems, RAM, or processors; logical elements provided the functioning of graphics, sound and control. The slot machine consisted of 66 separate microcircuits, and only for the home version it was all assembled on a separate chip. A craftsman from Canada decided to recreate the original Pong according to TTL-based schemes that reached him. This is a schematic diagram of the original Pong slot machine. Individual parts are highlighted. Scan artifacts make some notes difficult to read. Fortunately, Dan Boris from the Atari Age forum drew a diagram in a more understandable way. Many elements of that time were outdated and are no longer produced, so they were replaced by available analogues.











Today, designing a board is much simpler than in the 72nd, when everything had to be done by hand. Previously, the craftsman checked the operation of video synchronization schemes, rackets and the ball on the breadboard. 66 chips thanks to which the game is possible. Here, only the simplest elements of the NAND functions, excluding OR, inverters, triggers, counters, and timers. Due to a later error in two tracks, the ball was repelled only upward.











Update: The author of the remake posted a list of parts and circuit diagrams . He also plans to create a small batch of ready-made DIY kits.