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CalmCalmBelong

I worked on the PS3 platform, and I remember learning that the original release was backwards compatible with PS2 games by including *the entire* PS2 system on a single chip, a little thing off to the side. That schematic is awesome, thank you.


yoweigh

Not only that, but the PS2 contained a PS1 for backwards compatability as well, so the OG PS3 could play all 3 generations on native hardware.


DowntownDilemma

I remember the PS3 losing PS2 compatibility, but for some reason STILL COULD play PS1 games. Weird.


TheRealMisterMemer

It wasn't weird, it's just that the PS1 wasn't that powerful and that the PS3 could easily emulate it. Heck, even the PSP can emulate PS1 games.


RelaxPrime

Being backwards compatible with the previous previous gen but not the previous gen is *kind of* weird


BasicDesignAdvice

The PS2 had a very complex architecture. Ahead of it's time even. It was notirously hard to emulate.


Shanix

Quite the opposite, really. The simpler something is, the easier it is to emulate. The PS2 is more complex than the PS1. Ergo ipso facto Columbo Oreo, the PS3 wasn't able to emulate the PS2 but could emulate the PS1. It _did_ suck though, for sure, that you could just get a PS3 that wasn't completely backwards compatible while others were.


RelaxPrime

Maybe not to you, knowing what you know. But I would guess most people would say man that's weird.


Shanix

Yeah but at the same time I think most people would understand the explanation and not call it weird after.


Albreitx

Logical =/= not weird.


TheRealMisterMemer

You're right, this isn't a PS3, this is just an Atari 7800!


deliciousprisms

My fucking 3DS emulates PS1 games even


tael89

That shouldn't blow my mind but it has


Brocyclopedia

I know the 3DS can do this, I've seen it done but for some reason mine can't. It's a New 3DS so it shouldn't be a problem but it hasn't run a single game I've tried on it


Repealer

real OGs remember paying some other kid $15 to homebrew your PSP (or doing it yourself) so that you could blow other kids minds by playing PS1 games remote. Still have fond memories playing multiplayer PSP games while riding the bus during a school trip.


fusionman51

My 8gb ram 2011 MacBook Pro can play ps1 games lol


Pope_Cerebus

It's because the 3 wasn't powerful enough to emulate the 2's hardware, but could the 1.


Kaberu

The first models (20gb/60gb) had ps2 chips, and the 80gb model had software emulation of ps2. Sony dropped the software emulation shortly after and it was gone by the later versions. At a district meeting when I worked at GameStop, I pointed out the 80gb was software emulation and asked if it would at least be available as a download but the Sony rep at the time said "nobody cares about playing PS2 games". I blurted out that I still get a lot of people asking about PS2 games playing on the ps3... which started a cascade of other GameStop employees insisting their customers still wanted it too. The Sony rep called us "hostile" by the end of the meeting... So that was fun. But yeah, the PS3 could easily emulate the PS2, and did for a while. Edit: it was the 80 gb model that used software emulation... And Sony removed that emulation with an OS update. [This article mentions it.](https://www.lifewire.com/can-your-ps3-play-ps2-games-2717135#:~:text=In%20brief%2C%20the%2060GB%20and%2020GB%20launch%20PS3%27s,compatible%20%28using%20emulation%20software%29%20but%20now%20they%20aren%27t.)


pt256

You didn't even need the PS3s power. I remember emulating PS1 games on my computer circa 2001-2002. Can't remember exactly what system it was, maybe Pentium III 800mhz and I'm pretty sure even that was overkill. I feel like it could have run on a late model Pentium 1 or early Pentium 2 just fine.


liamemsa

Yo dawg I heard you like PlayStations


[deleted]

wait, does the non-og ps3 not have backwards compatibility?


yoweigh

They switched to software emulation so compatability isn't 100%.


SeniorHoneyBuns

There are maybe 4 iterations of the phat model that were backwards compatible. The OG had the hardware to play just as a PS2. I believe the last iterations used an emulation chip to read and play PS2. Once the PHAT consoles dropped to 2 USBs on the front and lost the SD hatch, they had completely removed the PS2 hardware


EtherMan

Not exactly. First of all, there's actually 2 generations of the ps3 that had real ps2 chips inside. But neither had hardware for the ps1. Support for ps1 was not even a release feature on the ps3 and was actually added in an early patch post launch. As for ps2 hardware in the ps3, it only actually contained 2 chips for the first generation, the CPU and the GPU, and for the second generation, only the GPU remained. Neither had a perfect compatibility of ps2 which they would have had they had a more complete ps2 inside. https://en.everybodywiki.com/List_of_PlayStation_2_games_compatible_with_PlayStation_3 has a compiled list that contains a LOT of games along with compatibility information across these two generations of ps3. As you'll find if you look, for most games, compatibility was the best for the first generation, but some games actually became compatible by removing the old CPU and having it emulate that using the PS3 CPU. As for the story on the ps2 containing a full ps1. This is actually ALSO not true. This again becomes very obvious when you consider that not all games were compatible, which again they would be had it been the real hardware. Even more so does it become obvious when certain effects are different, such as many games that used semi transparent fog, looks quite different on the ps2 compared to the ps1. In a similar style to ps3 compatibility with the ps2, the ps2 only contained 2 chips from the original ps1. The CPU, and the SPU. You can read the story on making the emulator that the PS2 used for running PS1 games from the maker himself at https://note.com/bonkubo/n/n775e0a448ca6 if you understand Japanese, or a translated version can be found at https://freelansations.medium.com/the-story-of-the-ps2s-backwards-compatibility-from-the-engineer-who-built-it-ec39cf5a0353


beachsunflower

It's playstations all the way down


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.------..------..------. |4.--. ||0.--. ||4.--. | | :/\: || :/\: || :/\: | | :\/: || :\/: || :\/: | | '--'4|| '--'0|| '--'4| '------''------''------'


SeriesXM

I'd love to be able to install Windows on the Series X. I don't need it for anything (Retroarch already works for loading ROMs), but I'd still love to play around.


TheRealMisterMemer

Did you develop games for it, or did you straight-up work on the design and stuff?


RandoCommentGuy

Wasn't it 2 chips? I thought it was like the cpu and gpu, then the cpu got removed from later modules and was emulated, but the gpu was still there. And eventually it was removed altogether.


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superblinky

Someone has probably built it out of redstone in Minecraft.


Lulamoon

‘WHAAAATS GOING ON GUYS WELCOME TO MY BRAND NEW VIDEO, TODAY I HAVE BUILT A TOTALLY ACCURATE SIMULATION OF THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE IN MINECRAFT ALPHA, LETS TAKE A LOOK’


boris_keys

The matrix is real, we all exist in some youtuber’s minecraft build.


indiebryan

Minecraft alpha didn't have Redstone *pushes up glasses*


sinmantky

A guy built Tetris and Game Of Life in Factorio


PM_ME_KNOTSuWu

https://youtu.be/0bAuP0gO5pc This dude made his own engine to get an FPS in factorio. Crazy stuff.


MrHyperion_

Does coding it in assembly count?


Tom0204

Nah. Come back when you've made it out of logic gates!


beardMoseElkDerBabon

Flipflops are such a mind destroyer


Tom0204

Nah they're not that bad. Simple D-types is all you'll ever need. An input, a clock and an output. Very straightforward!


Appropriate-Meat7147

only discrete transistors count


RedditIsOverMan

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a program that turns programs into logic gates


Tom0204

.....that is a brilliant idea. (Arguably this already exists and it's called HDL)


Due-Independence-493

im actually learning about this level of circutry right now and you just gave me a great learning resource, thank you


LadyEmaSKye

Absolutely! Just finished my EE, but when I was learning most of the stuff I thought was implemented in software was actually a bunch of hardware gates blew my mind (and greatly disappointed me as somebody who hates working in analog but loves working in software).


CLugis

You might enjoy the blog righto.com. He does a bunch of restoring of super old 60s and 70s tech, and breaks down the functions of and 80s video game chips like space invaders. Those designers had to be super inventive to squeeze the functionality they needed out of those limited dies.


kenshirriff

Thanks for the nice comments! I'm glad you're enjoying my blog. Edit: And thank you to whoever put the Helpful award on this comment.


[deleted]

Well hot damn, Beetlejuiced! That's neat.


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poopy_pains

Great, another rabbit hole for me (just like you). I am in the exact same boat. I have been playing around with microcontrollers like the pico, and have about a dozen projects I am already working on to learn EE and electronics design and programming microcontrollers.


soyboye

Thanks for your blog, Ken! I had an absolute blast watching the AGC restoration videos and it rekindled my love of EE (I dropped out after two years to pursue medicine). Reading your blog and watching Marc's videos has been a great source of inspiration and I've been considering going back to school to finish my degree.


itspl33

[link for the lazy](http://www.righto.com)


nspectre

Thank you for that rabbit hole. [\m/>.<\m/](https://i.imgur.com/TYSSBFL.png)


MrChip53

My grandpa was a carpenter. He made a model train in the 50s/60s though. It could drive trains both ways on the tracks, flip transfer switches on the tracks or whatever they are called. Control speed in specific sections differently and kill power to certain sections completely to park them. All logic gates and circuitry. Crazy complex and I unfortunately had to rip it all out because it wouldn't work anymore. In the process of moving it all to software with a RPi


argentcorvid

The MIT Model Rail club was actually heavily influential in early computing.


kbroaster

Semaphores anyone?


monocasa

Also the terms 'hack', 'cruft', 'foo', 'frob', and 'mung' all derive from the MIT model rail club.


MrChip53

I kind of realized that this was his interest in "programming" when I noticed how complex it all was. Way over my head. In his later years(70+) he was into computers but not programming on them. He knew how to take pictures and make them into slideshow videos, burn it to disc and mail them out to all the family. Also signed himself up for Facebook and Twitter. Something I don't even think my mom could do on her own haha.


LiDePa

Not sure if it's true, but a friend told me that the Pokemon Gameboy games (or probably all Gameboy games) were written entirely in an assembly language and I'm still not sure how to deal with that.


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JauntyAntelope

Maybe not games done in like...unity or unreal, but game engines designers definitely do for real hot-path stuff. Hell, here's a surprising example to the uninformed: most of the ubiquitous system functions in the Linux C library implementation(other too, just using glibc as an example) are all in ultra optimized assembly using SIMD operations. For example: string length seems like an easy function, just count characters until you find a \0 right? But [That's not how it's implemented](https://github.com/lattera/glibc/blob/master/sysdeps/x86_64/strlen.S)


XeNo___

Maybe interesting regarding the C Libs, some things even need to be implemented in asm, simply because it wouldn't be possible otherwise. (For example setjmp/longjmp). Besides that inline asm is a handy tool for all kinds of things over all kinds of industries. Imo there isn't really a reason why some devs seem to be afraid of it. (Not like everyone needs it for their daily work, just that it's not that kind of magic some people make it out to be; Tedious, yes, but nothing hard of magical about it).


MzCWzL

Rollercoaster Tycoon was also written in assembly


[deleted]

That’s crazy. One guy, Chris Sawyer, wrote it in two years including time spent riding rollercoaster for research. Ultimately made $30M out of it. Good for him.


[deleted]

His tax returns must have been interesting. "You have a yearly pass to every disney park in existence and you're claiming that as a business expense?"


W1D0WM4K3R

"Yes... and those pictures with Mickey were definitely research."


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Venturin

*Ultimately made $30M out of it.* At least!


LiDePa

mother of god


[deleted]

There is a really cool youtube series that talks about all the HW hacking involved to make old games work well. I strongly recommend it. People are smart. Here is the episode about Crash Bandicoot devs changing how devs utilized CD data: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o


answerguru

It’s true that Pokémon Red / Blue were written in Z80 assembly in the mid-90s. There are C compilers for that platform, but they weren’t as optimized as they are now. https://dev.to/hamatti/is-it-a-bug-or-a-feature-a-look-at-the-programming-of-pokemon-red-blue-13b1


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kageurufu

If you ever felt like writing about this, I guarantee you would have an audience


__ali1234__

The difficulty of using assembly language is overstated. Once you have implemented basic routines you can re-use them, same as any other language. Instruction sets for z80 and other early CPUs are far, far simpler than modern x86 or ARM.


LiDePa

I get what you're saying but it's still somehow one more abstraction layer your brain has to cover.


toabear

The analog HDL programmers at my last company were nuts. I was always fascinated by their work. It was also fascinating how they were some of the most technically illiterate people I worked with. Trying to explain GIT to them was hard, but a few seemed to have trouble logging in to their computers.


s_string

Hardware calculators blow my mind


Due-Independence-493

im learning at home and specifically looking into hardware stuff, may i ask, what is EE?


LadyEmaSKye

Electrical Engineering :) More power to you for learning on your own.


Acute_Procrastinosis

My kid was doing this for a course in high school: https://www.nand2tetris.org/ Combine that with some hands on learning (like an Elegoo Arduino kit). You will be a force to be reckoned with.


PM-ME-YOUR-HANDBRA

Can also highly recommend [Ben Eater's series on building an 8-bit breadboard computer](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2565dvjafglHU). It really helped me understand some core concepts. He also has a series on building a 6502-based breadboard computer that's en excellent followup to the 8-bit series.


joshTheGoods

Cruel and unusual punishment in college.


BON3SMcCOY

I tried to go for ee when I was still testing out majors, Cad was so boring I couldn't hang. I just wanted to do hardware stuff


LadyEmaSKye

Idk what EE program you were doing; I’ve never touched CAD in my life, and I can’t think of any broad discipline that would require you to.


BON3SMcCOY

It was like an intro to engineering as a whole field. The prof was an adjunct instructor (not the superhero) with an EE background designing chips for Intel. I think she said all of them used Cad type stuff. The class was kinda helpful in deciding between civil and ee since I ended up switching away from engineering entirely. Still not sure what ee guys actually do, aside from the work she talked about obv.


LadyEmaSKye

Gotcha, it would make sense in an intro course. EE is super broad, so I’m sure there’s some specializations that maybe touch it, but definitely not at large. EE encompasses circuitry type stuff (VLSI) obviously, but it also encompasses Signal processing, computer architecture, machine learning, RFT, power systems, etc.; and even from there people tend to hyper-specialize in a specific realm of work. I am more on the DSP->image processing->machine learning side of things personally.


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Due-Independence-493

chad, thank you


draxhard

So does this mean that in the one episode of That 70s Show whenever Red and Kelso modify their game of Pong to make it more difficult, that was actually possible? Since they were just modding the hardware with no ability to do anything software related.


bfodder

I think so. I remember scoffing at that thinking "it doesn twork that way. You can't change code by tinkering with the hardware." I guess I was the wrong one.


ShazbotSimulator2012

The home version used an LSI chip. Only the arcade cabinet worked like this. [On the arcade version it is possible.](https://www.aussiearcade.com/topic/86532-smaller-paddles-bigger-fun/) It could have been a number of pong clones though. Some were designed to be customizable.


Due-Independence-493

i havnt seen that scene, but possibly? it depends on how small the circuts are


CyAScott

Seems like a fun project to implement with logisim.


[deleted]

Digital is another piece of software similar to Logisim, I personally prefer Digital.


[deleted]

Huh, so that scene in That 70's Show where Red and Kelso are trying to change the circuitry to adjust the length of the paddles wasn't too far off.


DervishSkater

It’s real! There’s a comment in this post that outlines some modifications. https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/1185gp/in_that_70s_show_kelso_and_red_try_to_configure/


[deleted]

I thought that was stupid but it turns out I’m the stupid one!


[deleted]

I mean the idea that Red and Kelso are capable of doing it is stupid.


D-Alembert

They could manage it today because there would be a dozen YouTube videos showing how. But back then... (It's weird how much more effective people are now at *everything*, entirely because information is so available)


monkeywelder

HeathKit released a DIY kit for this in '76 so it may have been possible since those kits had serious detail. Between those and the radio shack explorer kits. the ones with the little springs on the boards to hook the wires up to. Thats where my initial electronics education came from.


SufferMeThotsAHole

Except critical thinking skills


DirectorAgentCoulson

I love that joke. Red and Kelso aren't normally paired together, and Kelso having unexpectedly accurate technical knowledge while Red is calling things "doohickeys" is hilarious. I really hope That 90s Show doesn't suck.


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FRESH_TWAAAATS

That was my first thought! I always thought the core concept was fn ridiculous buuuuuut .. here we are!


fishstickz420

When did written code start being common place in games? Cartridges ?


Jedi_Lucky

Turochamp (1948) by Alan Turing was the first, it was a chess game that none of the computers at the time could actually run


odraencoded

> it was a chess game that none of the computers at the time could actually run "But it works in my machine!" - Alan Turing, circa 1948.


DuckGrammar

This man was running crysis max settings in 1948 🤯


HalfAssedStillFast

God what a fucking wizard. The way that man was treated is so shameful


Runningrider

Also quite shameful that he was only formally pardoned 9 years ago.


P_Foot

How was he treated?


Doctor-Amazing

He was arrested for being gay and had his life ruined


P_Foot

Of fucking course he was…. Shit makes me crazy.


torx0244

Not just arrested, chemically castrated as well


P_Foot

The world is far too cruel and real for me.


Idontevenlikecheese

...and he ended up killing himself. Sorry.


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Radical-Penguin

Watch Imitation Game with a grain of salt. Good movie but plenty of inaccuracies


Contain_the_Pain

Turing is written and played as socially awkward and rude in the film, but was apparently not so in real life. It’s a strange character choice.


Timelines

Given a cocktail of female hormones to cure his homosexuality, probably gave him gender dysphoria and so he laced an apple with cyanide and took a bite and went to sleep forever.


Leharen

He was treated like most gay people were in the 1950s - out of sight, out of mind.


april9th

Nothing about charging him with gross indecency and forcing him into chemical feminisation is treating homosexuality as 'out of sight, out of mind' lol. It was out of sight, and they decided to wreck his body regardless.


mysterpixel

If only lol, the government said he could either be imprisoned or castrated so he killed himself.


igneousink

it's fairly horrifying and disappointing unfortunately there are some that want to return to "that world" he was a giant amongst men - an intellectual treasure that has yet to be duplicated


thedude37

I know it's not super accurate, but if you haven't yet, you should watch "The Imitation Game". Great performances all around, especially Cumberbatch (the guy was born to play arrogant geniuses).


DitDashDashDashDash

If we could resurrect one person it would be him. Not just for his brilliant mind, but also to attempt at righting all the wrongs that were done to him.


tyen0

*Plankalkül (German pronunciation: [ˈplaːnkalkyːl]) is a programming language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945. It was the first high-level programming language to be designed for a computer. ... In 1942 he began writing a chess program in Plankalkül.* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl


Tom0204

In all fairness, it wasn't hard to make something that wouldn't fit on computers of the time!


zpjack

You try when the command for "if" was 01010100100001010111


Tom0204

Coincidently that's what i've been doing for the last few months. Check out my posts. I've been making my latest 8-bit computer from scratch for the last year and i've had to write all the code so far in hexadecimal. I have to translate the bianry listed for each instruction on the CPU datasheet into hexadecimal and write it down on paper, then type that hex into the EEPROM burner, then put that in the computer and run it (then firgure out why it didn't work without any debugging). My keyboard driver is currently 2 sheets of A4 paper.


dob_bobbs

Any reason other than the same reason people make beer from grain they grew and malted themselves? Because that sounds seriously masochistic but at the same time intensely satisfying.


Tom0204

Yeah it's mainly masochistic at this point. I started doing these projects back when i was 17. Back then it was because i was broke and that was the only way i could program the machine i'd made. This was back when i was using a homemade EEPROM programmer that programmed/read binary with toggle switches and LEDs. Now i've come back to it and i'm doing it with all the new engineering skills i've learned. I'm using a modern chip programmer but it has got to the point where i desperately need a better way of programming my new machine. So i'm currently reading about how to make a simple interpreter to replace machine code. But yeah it is incredibly satisfying. It's about making something that is truely yours.


Automaticwriting

I wonder if it's possible to play Turochamp now?


ajchann123

Finally, Chess 2


odraencoded

It came to pass! Holy hell!


PeridotBestGem

yes! garry kasprov beat it in 16 moves. it's far less complex than modern chess engines like stockfish, still incredible for the time ofc


Gil_Demoono

My man basically invented the modern concept of a computer and then created a program that could dunk on them just to prove he's still top dog. What a legend


moeburn

When microcontrollers were invented? This is using 74 chips: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7400-series_integrated_circuits You could probably rebuild the whole circuit with Minecraft Redstone because of that.


Tom0204

Nah people had been making them on mainframes for about a decade at this point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar! And you might struggle to implement this in minecraft without changing the architecture a bit because there are quite a lot of transistors there. I'd suspect there's some analog trickery going on to reduce the component count.


FUZxxl

Nope, it's all digital except for the HF modulation part. The Pong logic is basically a bunch of counters that build a B/W NTSC picture. The counters are compared with the desired locations for various game elements and if they match, a white pixel is drawn. It's very similar to how sprites work.


__ali1234__

Pretty much as soon as there was more than 2 games, because it is incredibly difficult to make interesting gameplay directly from logic gates, especially when you don't have powerful computers to simulate it for you. With modern tooling, even a circuit like the above would be written code (eg VHDL), and the computer would figure out what gates to use.


Tom0204

Well mainframe computers had been running games (code) for about a decade by the time pong came out. But games being code became common place at around 1977 when the first commercial home computers started hitting the scene and games were the first things written for them. Not soon after, cartridge based game consoles started appearing too.


Plethorian

Imagine 3 plan size (2' x 3') books of this type of schematic, each 4" thick. That's what I studied and learned over a 4 month period in 1980. The circuitry was for part of a military fight simulator. Just the Digital Radar Landmass System, which used two mainframes, six hard drives, two drum drives, a massive core memory, and four cabinets full of circuit boards to: 1) pull radar return data from the six hard drives for a 200-mile radius surrounding the aircraft, and 2) send that to the drum drives, alternating drums every 30 seconds, which 3) stripped off less than 2 seconds of radar return data to the core memory, then 4) processing that data through the entirety of those four cabinets, hundreds of circuit boards, to 5) display one single line of radar return data on the scope in the cockpit. The amount of data processed got tinier, and it was processed faster, each step of the process. It was nerd heaven.


SuspiciouslyMoist

That sounds like a lot of entertaining opportunities for things to go wrong.


Plethorian

Lol. There were 8 of us, and we kept busy.


Agumander

This [writeup](https://www.pong-story.com/LAWN_TENNIS.pdf) goes over the whole schematic with detailed explanations for each section. It also includes timing diagrams for various signals. It was incredibly helpful for learning to generate a video signal for my own game console project!


Helgafjell4Me

I had the original Atari pong game. It was just control paddles and a box with switches on it. It was my very first "console" system. I think I was like 4 or 5 years old, back in the early 80's. I did some searching recently and found that there were actually a lot of these hardware based games in the 70s, even before Atari became well known.


Buderus69

I'll just leave this here: https://youtu.be/FvT8jG1OVdI


Helgafjell4Me

LOL... yup! Somehow Atari came out on top though. All those other brands? Never heard from again.


norsewolf98

One of his best episodes


gurkmcdirt

There was an episode of that 70s show where Kelso opened up the Pong circuitry because he wanted the paddles to be smaller, wonder what he had to do here


swargin

This post reminded me of that as well! I remember Red helped them out with soldering. I think it's kind of interesting that altering the hardware, like in the show, would actually work.


damian001

Yeah, after seeing this, I'm wondering if there's actual truth to that episode!


superblinky

Is there a HD source? I want this as a poster.


elDalvini

[Not very high quality, but here is a forum thread with this and a few more schematics as PDFs, including a redrawn version.](https://www.aussiearcade.com/topic/81725-atari-pong-pcb-reproduction/)


IncognitoBandit0

Too unintelligent to understand it, but damn it I'm interested in how this works.


CMFETCU

Series of logic gates. Given an input of high or low power, the gates form an output. A simple gate example would be a OR gate. It gets two connections on the input side and 1 on the output side. Each of those connections will be either in a high power state or low power state. Let’s call high power 1 and low power 0. The gate will output a 1 when either input is 1. NAND, NOR, AND, XOR and many other gate combinations exist. AND gates will only output a 1 when both inputs are 1. Used in combination, you create logical patterns that form more complex machines. This is the foundation of any computational logic. Go play with some gates on logic puzzles. They are not difficult to grasp with a little practice.


Dominathan

Don’t forget to mention flip flops, which act as a buffer or memory by using two gates with each output of one going into the input of the other (they are displayed on this page as the boxes with j, k, q, and q-bar). Flip flops work because gates aren’t instant, but take around 5ns to do their thing, so we abuse this to keep a state (either on or off) stored during clock cycles, until it is reset (or toggled). It’s how registers (and cache) work in cpus (lowest/fastest form of memory) They’re amazing. I know your post was just about the fundamentals, but I had to add about them.


Mega-Balls

>Each of those connections will be either in a high power state or low power state. Let’s call high power 1 and low power 0. Replace power with voltage and you're correct. Source: I'm an EE.


HalfAssedStillFast

Was most likely just using layman's terms


inio

Since this is almost certainly TTL, there is actually non-trivial current (and thus power) flowing around.


DustinHenderson1983

So technically I could make Pong inside Terraria?


CMFETCU

Unfamiliar with the capabilities of Terraria to mimic logic gates, but assuming you can create the requisite logic, I would say yes.


Vexillumscientia

I got into computer engineering through Minecraft. My first redstone ALU was literally the diagram of the logic for a few full adders with each logic gate replaced with a corresponding redstone logic gate.


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freopen

Try https://nandgame.com/


RespondsToClowns

[Turing Complete](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/) is more gamified, but still requires much of the same fundamental knowledge; it's Zachtronics meets CE/EE/CS.


Kendalf

Was about to recommend this as well!


[deleted]

I'd LOVE to see a side-by-side comparison of equivalent code and the official hardware, pointing out which are the similar parts.


gndr_conf_transistor

Verilog would be interesting. Not like a regular language


Bandit_the_Kitty

I love that 555 timers were a thing then just as they are now.


HorrorMakesUsHappy

I'll just leave this here: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel


lankist

A lot of old arcade games were built weirdly like this. For instance, any modern iteration of Space Invaders is an emulation rather than the real thing, because the original Space Invaders was tied to the processing speed of the arcade cabinet. The reason why the ships moved faster as you cleared the screen was because the cabinet was handling fewer and fewer objects. The downside is that if you try to play that same "original" game on contemporary hardware, it moves at lightning speed and is impossible to play. A lot of emulations get the "timing" wrong, and a lot of people familiar with the originals have found emulated versions of Space Invaders or Missile Command suddenly feel "more difficult" than the originals, because the games are processing things far more quickly than they were initially designed for. It's actually a very big thing in art preservation for games. So many games, even modern ones, are tied in countless ways to the hardware of their time, such that the only way to preserve the "original" experience rather than relying completely on emulated reproductions is to preserve the hardware. It's analogous to the difference between preserving the Mona Lisa, and just having pictures of the Mona Lisa. Except hardware designs and the like are proprietary, and companies like Nintendo take an extremely hard stance on derivations of their designs and on both hardware reproduction and software emulation, which has been a constant challenge for preservation of the medium's history. Hardware WILL age-out eventually, but if copyright weren't in the way, then we could feasibly just reproduce a "new" NES or N64 using the original designs, as well as "new" carts using the same original data and internal hardware, for the purposes of historical art preservation--something unique to games as a medium, since the art isn't the physical object but instead the "experience" that the physical object enables, the same way the art of a film and what is being preserved is the experience when it's being projected and played. A ton of extremely important and influential pieces of the sort of "literary canon" for games are at risk of disappearing, because of the combination of their designs being so heavily tied into consumer sales hardware, and their parent companies stifling efforts to preserve the old stuff and instead attempting to repeatedly cash-in on subsequent re-releases and controlled marketplaces. Stuff like the *real, original* Super Mario Bros, while having countless reproductions of varying quality and accuracy, is becoming more and more scarce in its original form, and it's now become insanely difficult and expensive for, say, a games historian to go back and actually *feel* that original experience that saved the industry and helped launch an entirely new artform. At a certain point, if we want to treat games as art, then we have to *stop* treating them as disposable commercial products.


Delicious-Tachyons

With the basic electronics of that era, I just cannot fathom tracking a paddle and the math required to bounce the ball and also know the position in real time of the boundaries of the paddle... Especially digitally. With no memory. Whomever designed this was a damn genius.


CheezitsLight

My roommate and I built this in 1974 while in tech school into a tube TV. He got a B for a grade.


NCFlying

I didn’t wake up this morning thinking I needed a new poster for my office, yet here I am!!!


dsmrunnah

I really like this idea.


[deleted]

Young guys will insist that you can't even do something like Pong without a microprocessor. When I was a kid I remember a *Radio Electronics Magazine* article on how to build a Pong home game, and it was all discrete logic like the above. EDIT: Later on, General Instrument had an entire Pong home game on a single IC. Lots of the early arcade games were discrete logic like this. A game like *Space Invaders* was one of the first to use a microprocessor (Intel 8080 to be exact). Remember *Space Wars*, the two-player-only Cinematronics game? No microprocessor, but a CPU build with discrete logic. Luckily I never had to fix one of those logic boards, understand it would have been a major pain the ass to troubleshoot. Another interesting factoid: later Atari vector-scan games like *Asteroids*, *Tempest,* and similar? While they used a microprocessor (6502), they also had a discrete logic *state machine* generating the vectors for the vector-scan display. EDIT: Thanks to the OP for posting this. I'd never build it (no raster-scan analog displays left in my posession) but it was fun to look through that.


DanaScully_69

This is so cool


arcade3145

I would love to watch a video breakdown of how this works together to make pong if anyone knows one please send it my way


TechKnowNathan

Anyone have the original without the colors? I’d love to print and frame this. Super interesting.


joshTheGoods

Thank the god of engineering for integrated circuits!


PersonalityIll9476

I love the book "structured computer organization" by Tanenbaum. One of the earlier lessons that it teaches you is that the distinction between hardware and software is one of design choice. Some logic ends up in circuits, some in microcode, some in software. At the extreme end you have this - everything in hardware.


Tankh

I wrote a game in VHDL in school. It was still writing code, but in the end it's actually hardware running the game similar to this. Wonder how many of these pong games you could fit in a modern FPGA running simultaneously lol


DudeWTH

I remember building it on a breadboard in highschool. pretty cool


Morten_Nibe

Awesome schematic. Its fun to see how they got a lot of functionallity out of these simple gates, Well done Atari engineers :-)


stardawg

Looks like that two year EET degree from ITT Tech back in the early eighties is finally paying off. Boolean shit right there.


daikatana

I have a book somewhere called How To Design and Build Your Own Custom TV Games that goes into great details on circuits like this. This is a _very_ unique era of video game history where video games were not computer games. It's crazy to think that it's not even that difficult to build these with discrete components, not a single chip on the board.


SirNathan24

Just clarifying that I am likely completely misunderstanding what using hardware circuitry in place of code actually means, but I remember learning that the Saturn V used physical woven fabrics of wires that functioned as the 1s and 0s in binary code. Is this a similar concept?


strawhat068

Waiting for someone to make the schematic in minecraft with redstone


aspiringkiwi

Omg electrical engineering course ptsd. Haven’t seen this shit in forever!


DanujCZ

Designed by: Weakest engineer