[HN Gopher] How were 70s versions of games like Pong built witho...
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How were 70s versions of games like Pong built without a
programmable computer?
Author : SeenNotHeard
Score : 38 points
Date : 2024-10-04 19:57 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (retrocomputing.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (retrocomputing.stackexchange.com)
| coding123 wrote:
| A friend's Dad has Wozniak's old VCR. We used to watch movies on
| that all the time as kids. Interestingly this person was also
| working on Pong, specifically on the ball device that used to
| move the paddle around.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| some early video games were from Commodore; they had a box that
| generated a TV signal.. the box had knobs or perhaps a
| joystick. The games played by assigning a TV channel on the
| box, then changing the TV channel (with a knob on the TV) to
| that channel. The video game is now playing.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| If you still have access to an analog tuner, you can do this
| trick with the ESP8266!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41740978
| crtasm wrote:
| Even in the days of Super Nintendo we had the option of
| hooking it up the TV like this.
| foobarchu wrote:
| This was common on every console through the 2000s,
| composite cables were not the norm in my experience.
|
| While the PlayStation 2 shipped with composite cables, even
| it had a coaxial adapter available for tuning to channel 2
| or 3.
| pvg wrote:
| A big similar discussion two years ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31511719
| rand0mfacts wrote:
| This site has a simulation of the hardware logic used to build
| Pong: https://www.falstad.com/pong/ball.html
| holoduke wrote:
| On paper. I remember my cousin who is 50 now writing me letters,
| handwritten with entire programs in it. All i had to do was
| writing it and compile it. It often worked out of the box and was
| never longer than a few pages. I dont know how he did it.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| That's not the question. There was essentially no computer at
| all in those videogames
| chongli wrote:
| You still use paper. Instead of writing the game in a general
| purpose programming language you write it using logic gates.
| You get abstraction and modularity by designing larger
| components (adders, flip-flops, timers, shift registers) on
| separate pieces of paper and then including them as named
| black boxes in a higher-level diagram.
|
| The good news for the Pong developers is that most of those
| larger components were already available off-the-shelf.
| Common families of these chips, such as the venerable
| 4000-series and 7400-series logic families, began to appear
| on the market in the mid-1960's.
| hggigg wrote:
| That was a miracle. I used to type in programs from magazines
| and books and nothing ever worked. That did however teach me
| how to fix things and was very productive in the long run!
| illwrks wrote:
| I watched this video on Youtube a few months ago that's very
| insightful!
|
| It's about an arcade game from the 70's called Sega JET ROCKET:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0qlfEuzj6U
| hggigg wrote:
| Pong isn't that complicated. If you go even further back it gets
| even simpler. There's a good example here:
| https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/oscilloscope-pong-for...
|
| It _looks_ complicated but it's really not if you break it down
| into small bits and think of it like you would with a piece of
| software I.e. abstractions.
| yarg wrote:
| Did you RTFA?
|
| It covers some things that are rather counterintuitive,
| especially if you come from a modern programming background.
|
| Now is it complicated? No not really, I read the answer and
| immediately understood what was going on.
|
| But no modern programmer would ever come up with the solution
| of addressing x and y positions by setting timers to wake at
| the times when the point in the scan-line or the scan-line in
| the frame was reached (although sleep-sort does exist).
|
| If anything, the point of the post is the fact that it's very
| easy to understand, despite how counterintuitive it may be.
| Dwedit wrote:
| NTSC composite video isn't all that hard, you have voltages for
| VSync, HSync, VBlank, HBlank, Black and White. Generate the
| correct voltages at the correct times and you have a TV picture.
|
| But TVs then didn't have composite video inputs, so you also
| needed an RF modulator.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| There's a scene in "That 70's Show" where Kelso and Red bond over
| Pong and decide to mod the game to make it harder. And a few
| hours later with a soldering iron, smaller paddles!
|
| The first time I saw that episode was at a friend's house. I felt
| so smart telling him that was impossible because you can't mod
| software with a soldering iron. Then his dad poked his head out
| from the kitchen and told me Pong didn't have software.
|
| Turns out the only impossible part of that episode is the idea of
| it taking a few hours. Changing the paddle size was a mod already
| supported by the hardware and the manual gave details on how to
| do it. Though it wasn't necessarily intended as a difficulty
| setting, it was intended to support different sizes of TVs. iirc,
| all you need to do is solder 1 jumper.
| chrismcb wrote:
| What do you mean by "programmable computer?"
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Blip is a digital game, because you use your fingers to play it,
| and it used that cool BYTE Magazine computer font.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPA7SQbwDOQ
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBoe3yM9IKs
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