Slashdot Mirror
Mechanical Pong
RotJ writes "Some crafty Germans have created an electromechanical conversion of the game Pong: "Pongmechanik is an absolutely physical game. The game is realized electromechanically, and essentially consists of four elements:
A relay computer, the mechanical movement with collision detection, the display and the acoustic components." Talk about analog retro chic."
saccade.com adds "This amazing device faithfully
re-creates the classic original video game with pulleys, wires,
motors and a (pre-chip, pre-transistor, pre-tube) relay based
computer. They were partly inspired by Konrad
Zuse, who created some of the first electromechanical and
electronic computers."
If they make a non-computer-based version of Carnival, it might look like what it is supposed to replace IRL :)
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Zee joystik daws nahsing!
High quality mirror of the movie in case of the likely slashdotting
It's very cool. The video is in German with English subtitles.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
machine about 10ft^2 with a platform driven by motors in xy
space, and having read this article I added:
int xdir=1; sDriveX(xdir);
int ydir=1; sDriveY(ydir);
while (true){
if (stopSwX()){xdir*=-1;sDriveX(xdir);}
if (stopSwY()){ydir*=-1;sDriveY(ydir);}
}
I fired it up, chuckled, then felt a bit nerdy, chuckled some more,
then got on with my work.
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Anyone ever played real life Pong before?
I think it's called Tennis or something.
Doom3
This one might require lots of black velvet courtains.
Incase of a slashdotting, here's a link to the movie of Mechanical Pong in action!
This guy definitely took retro gaming to a new level :).
if your prior art is rendered in prior art, do you have a case?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's really cool, but how much heat do all those relays produce over time? Unless I'm mistaken, it sounds like the perfect game to play on a cold day.
This has been there since 1977
fifteen jugglers, five believers
dude, this thing is more retro than the original game - phone relays?!
-Q
Charles Babbage would be proud.
Remain calm! All is well!
Why are there control sticks?, why not control it manually like air hocky.
since 1975... A completely mechanical version of the arcade version of Pong, in which the "ball" is an illuminated flashlight bulb connected by long rubber springs to the player's control knobs.
fifteen jugglers, five believers
ping pong?
or maybe air hockey?
...I got nothing.
And in germany people are complaining that we lost our edge when it comes to technology.
Face it, Germany once again is a technology leader (at least in the field of geeky true life retro gaming)
That is all I have to say about the mechanical Pong.
BTW, does anyone else see Michael Jackson in the Half Life 2 ad on this page?
i just dont see what's so phenomenol about this device. this, to me, is just another version of pong. version #3221.
I'm probably making myself look very old, but I used to have a handheld mechanical pong game in the early 80's. It wasn't as dynamic as the pong game here, but it was wind up, and used a then-new LED as the ball.
It was called Blip and made by Tomy.
Here's a pic.
Nostalgia is fun
Contrary to popular belief, life is not a bitch. It is far far worse.
THEN we could use some small ball thing and have the wetware units keep the ball bouncing from side to side.
the speed of the ball moving from one side to the other would be the ping time ...
Yeah - that'd work. We could call it Ping Pong (but some boring fart would probably name it table tennis)
I wonder how to register a patent
that is all.
-
But with a few more pullys and strings, perhaps they could create 3D pong, which i'm sure is much more playable IN 3D as opposed to simulated.
Neil is that you? Yeah yeah, it's me... Neil...
Wow, I really thought with your domain it was going to be some sick fetish site.
A little disappointed?
Nah, just relieved I don't have to go to the trouble of erasing something form my history ;).
Here I am, using my Atari like a sucker! Hey, I can't wait for the complete first season of Smurfs on DVD, then HeMan...
"We are the consumer whores, selling ourselves to purchase this generations technology, and attempting to revisit the electronic devices that raised us during childhood while our parents were selling themselves for their generations technology, and an inexpensive babysitter. Through nostalgic mediums we discover our true mother and father; television and video games."
-JW Malkin
it was even better to see all the slashdot users take all the invites in real time..
It looks like the Gmail spooler is on the way to being Slashdotted. The number of invites has shrunk to zero, and the load time for the page is increasing.
Will a D.O.S attack ever be named a Slashdot attack?
De Paciencia
Yeah, I noticed the number dropping like crazy too. Neat stuff.
...for pong is arcanoid. I'd love to see that mechanized:-)
Three people with laser pointers can play Pong. (The middle person, who plays the ball, also has to do the sound effects and keep score.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Seems pretty cool, but maybe not that much fun. From seeing the video, the ball seems to start off at an angle and then just decides to go straight. Maybe I couldn't build this, but if I did I wouldn't want that to happen.
What could we build now with electronics from 1958? Given the evils of silicon creep, it would be an interesting question whether the components would last 46 years.
Lastly, the power consumption is just a respectable 230w, about the same as a PC. Not bad!
See my journal, I write things there
Deutschland, dummkopf!
https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount?service =mail&t=c3f39bcd-416ccc6d-80829b1629f0c1fa5748&con tinue=http%3A%2F%2Fgmail.google.com%2Fgmail%2Fc-b9 75ef98a5-f0c1fa5748-baff4756f9
They have so much geeky stuff there you could spend three or four days there and still not appreciate it all. There's captions to most things in English, so you don't have to speak German to get a lot out of the place.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
When I was a little kid, I had a motorized Pong that my father found at a Salvation Army shop. It was roughly the size and form factor of one of those "streamlined" one-piece VT100s with the integral keyboard. It had little lights representing paddle and ball, in an attempt to try to seem like a "video game," but in fact they were driven by motorized arms-- you could hear them grinding, and the grinding got louder and louder until finally a gear broke or something and it no longer worked.
I wish I hadn't thrown it away, I could probably trade it for a Testarossa now or something.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
A while ago I was wondering how hard it would be to rig up a totally mechanical pac-man. Of course, the ghost AI would be near-impossible (unless you want to create a mechanical computer) but I was thinking you could have the pac-man be a hold in the board, and when you moved it, pellets would fall through...
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Agent Kujon: Do you believe in him, Verbal?
Verbal Kint: Keaton always said, "I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of him." Well, I believe in God -- and the only thing that scares me is Konrad Zuse.
If you were fascinated by this electromechanical version of Pong, check out their links to the work of Konrad Zuse. This guy designed and built the first programmable digital computer in 1936 in his parent's basement! Really amazing.
Sleep is futile.
http://www.steverd.com/whatpong/tvtennis.jpg
I actually own a similar model. Green, somewhat simpler styling but the same mechanicals. It's still somewhere in my old bedroom at my parents place. If I were the stereotypical nerd still living at home, I would have a photo of it by now.
Truly cool, but the "retro" feel of the design is marred by the joysticks. i would prefer something like a double-contact knife switch or some such...
Now all we need is a real-life version of Battlefield 1942, and we'll be all set! Of course, it needs a really catchy name. Something short, yet easy to remember. Hmm...
How about, "War!"?
Heck, soon we might even be able to make real-life versions of the Desert Combat mod for BF1942!
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
In a thrift store in Idaho a few years back, I also found a mechanical game called "TV Tennis" (there are many pong-like games called by the same name)
This one had a boom with a weight on the rear end and a little incandescent bulb at the front end, and it swung around against a frosted plastic screen. A totally weak motor in the back moved it from side to side, and physical paddles would bump it up and down as it went.
When you scored against your opponent, it would ding a bell -- and advance your score, if you were lucky.
NO! donate them insted to our soliders in irak.
Nolan Bushnell may be a hugely cool dude who I respect a lot, but he did not invent Pong. That honor goes to Ralph Baer
And the statement "Konrad Zuse, inventor of the computer" isn't exactly accurate either.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
I love electro mechanical stuff. Once, when I was
a mere 8-9 year old kid, I got to be teached "how to
play" music on a *real* hammond organ. No No. You think you know what I'm saying but you don't.
It had *TWO* switches to switch it on.
I still remember why.
It's great fun to drop this gorgeous stuff on the the
newbies out there.
Hey even a few old timers will scratch their heads, but there really was a good technical reason for the *two* switches.
Enjoy and be puzzled.
This project makes me remember of some kind of thing we did in Ubiquitous Computing classes last year in Sweden - a semi-mechanical, semi-computerized version of "Whack the Mole". With only servoengines and a bit of imagination, it's really impressive what one can do !
http://thieumsweb.free.fr/english/mole/
Sadly I can't locate it (on sciam.com), but back in the 80's or early 90's there was an article about some chaps who built a tic-tac-toe computer out of Meccano.
You could "set" a nought or a cross in a given square, turn a handle a number of turns, and the meccano robot/computer would sense the setting and figure out a response. It was rather good at it too, I think.
The thing was upright and was about 1,5x2 meters. I remember a lot of pictures detailing its rather Babbage-like innards.
"Good news, everyone!"
Diese is zee time on Sprockets venn vee PLAY PONG!
Imagine playing the mechanical pong game on yor TV, where you can actually see that it is not quite an electronic game!
)9TSS
"If the Roman Empire had never fallen, we wouldn't have the special effects that we have today, because there would be no need for fake blood or any such nonsense"
We've moved on. There's another empire in the ascendent and they're playing Counter-Strike.
T&K.
Political language
Mechanical Pong
from the pronounced-the-same dept.
Err... so the Mechanical is silent?
-Colin
The video says the paddle only has 3 zones, the center bounces flat, the two sides bounce at an angle. The real Pong game has the paddle broken into about 8 zones, each zone bounces the ball at an increasing angle depending on how far it is from the center.
If you see the video, you might also notice they manage to return the ball even when it is way beyond the side of the paddle, which really should be a complete miss.
I bought the game around 1976 at a yard sale for about $0.25. It consisted of a cheap plastic casing shaped like a tv. The "screen" was translucent plastic. The "ball" was an arm with a light at one end (almost touching the screen) and a counterweight at the other end so that the arm was essentially ambivalent if it swung up or down. An electric motor moved the arm so that the arm always wanted to swing left or right. (Sorry about all these anthropomorphisms, it's the only way I can think to describe it.)
Each player had a handle that turned a mechnical bouncer up and down. If the arm swung past your bouncer, a buzzer buzzed.
It didn't keep score and it was never as fast as pong or as... um, exciting (if you can use that word with pong). But by golly I got it for a quarter and played the heck out of it. Then I took it apart and figured out how it worked. Then at some point I donated it to the landfill.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
You must work for the Department of Redundancy Department.. you just took redundant message subject/body combination to a new level. Well done that chap.
Heck, soon we might even be able to make real-life versions of the Desert Combat mod for BF1942!
Just join the US military, that's about as real as it's going to get.
>
The thing I'd like to see would be a physical incarnation of the SpaceCadet pinball game that MS distributes with Windows. Not that it's such a fantastic game (it isn't), but because it features some errm... interesting challenges from a physics point of view...
Linux user since early January 1992.
What's amazing is how cleanly everything is put together. Had this been an MIT project you would have seen wires all over the place, lots of tape keeping things together and no casing at all...just the absolute bare minimum!
Vould you like to touch my relay?
"I thought they were the dominant species..."
I think you mean One of these. Heck, I'd give you two testarossa's for it!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
What's next, a steam driven train? Hah.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
The game is interesting and fun, but the video has to be one of the best geek-umentaries I have ever seen. There should be an award for this.
5 points off, however, for the bit of misogyny with poor Almut misrepresenting the function of a relay.
Already been done in the 1970's.
When I was a kid back then, video pong came out and I wanted one but it was too expensive for my parents, so they bought me a mechanical pong game.
It was enclosed in a green case that looked sort of like a TV. It was about the size of a 13-inch TV. There was a "screen" in the front and knobs for controlling the paddles that were behind the translucent screen.
Inside the unit, there was an arm pivoted at the rear with a bulb at the end near the screen. The arm was vertically spring loaded and driven side to side by a motor. When you turned it on, the arm went back and forth and you used the paddles control knobs to hit the "ball" which was at the lighted end of the arm.
Worked well enough, but to me it couldn't take the place of actual video.
Self awareness - try it!
This gives me an idea of the next version of Tetris. Bring out your hard hats people.
Is that Toby McGuire on the index page?
I've been playing the physical version of pong for years. It's called ping pong. Or table tennis for all your pros out there.
I had one, too. Sold it at a yard sale for, ummm... more than a quarter. 'Course it was broken by that point, too, but hey, even marked 'broken, $1', someone bought it. Wonder if it's on eBay now.
:)
It was pretty lame, especially as you could buy, like, an electronic Pong for your TV. So it's not like someone made mechanical pong, then someone else said "hey, let's computerize it!". No, someone actually said "look at this electronic TV game, I bet we could make a mechanical version that still requires batteries!"
I think I had fun
A.
!!!OUCH I'd hate to see my electric bill for playing this game 24/7.... On the plus side, I could probably use it as a space heater in the winter... -AD
--AD
This is not pong.
Pong was a game played with two "paddle" controllers, another word for variable resistors. The speed your paddle moved was controlled by the speed you moved the paddle. It was fundamentally an analog input.
This thing uses joysticks for controllers, as digital inputs. The speed the paddle moves is not controllable by the player.
This "Pongmechanik" thing is another game altogether, and not Pong at all. Nonetheless, a beowulf cluster of them would be intriguing.
Hunh, that's odd, I always assumed all German games were required to have some sort of pain element.
Is there a simulation of this machine I can download somewhere?
lazy bastards should just play ping pong or so.
Look at the other stuff this guy has on his website. This is really cool!
Pong is exciting. If you play for $10/point, that is.
What ads?
Anybody seen Bill and Ted's Bogus Adventure? They beat Death at Pong.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Although I am not old enough to write about it, I just imagine how interesting it would be to be able to look into a panel and track the movement of a single byte through the system, as described in an old Wired article on old computer systems.
I also imagine that, once my amazement wears off, looking into a panel full of flashing lights must have been very, very boring. Go figure.
Thanks you guys! When I was in 5th grade (1978), I spent a week in the hospital. They had this game there. Ever since I've had only foggy memories of it, and always wondered what it was. I thought of it as soon as I saw this story.
Sweet! I had this back in the day.
You must be new here. :-)
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Kudos to the Selbstauslöser who came up with this one.
Cool game, but DAMN does the movie look and feel like it's about to turn into German porn at any time. You've got the cheesy lighting, the guy and the girl facing up, the German narrator who sounds like he's narrating god knows what kind of clothing-optional meetup.
And THEN the Atari guy, naked, shows up on screen. WTF???
Maybe it's just me?
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I've been to the Deutsches Museum. It's an engineer's dream museum. They have exhibits on all sorts science and engineering subjects.
The place is absolutely huge: you'd probably need a week to go through it all if you looked at everything. I just saw the Computer Science section (very cool) and it took at least half a day to go through.
I strongly recommend paying it a visit if you're ever in Munich, even if you don't spend much time there.
Wow, I visited their website and just now and I found a list of all the exhibits they have there. There are far more than I realized.
Damn dude!! Whats wrong with those Germans?
Those Germans know their stuff when it comes to making expensive, beautifully created pieces of art. Take Audi for another example. I'd pay good money for this pong machine. Even just as a display device.
If your parents are anything like mine, it was tossed into the trash a month after you moved out. Quick run home and get it now, before all your childhood memorabilia is tossed and your old room is turned into a sewing room!
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
As a 'lectical engineer, I pure-dee admire it for the craftsmanship... Need totighten up the score wheels, though...
When I was in high school, we didn't have computers. So I build built one out of surplus telephone relays.
From an engineering stand point this is pretty cool. They must have had a blast designing it to.
I still have mine, along with the digital diamond game, and an unlisted car racing game.
In the Spring of 2002, in Columbia, SC, the IEEE held their SoutheastCon conference and the competition challenge was to design a robot capable of playing tabletop pong, just like this. The robots' only input was a single CCD camera mounted directly above the playing surface. The surface was sloped up in the middle to prevent the ping pong ball from stopping completely. There were some pretty impressive entries and it was a lot of fun to watch. I was with the Virginia Tech delegation and seeing the competition inspired me to create our own hardware competition team to compete starting in 2003.
I was thinking of making an electro mechanical clock. The display would be "blades" like segments in a 7-segment display and would be turned by a rotary solenoid or stepper motor and controlled by a micro (probably a pic). anyone was know of a good source for rotary solenoids?
Heehee. Hyperball. What with all the discussion of 2D vs 3D in this story, when I read "hyperball" the first thing I thought of was a 4D version of pong, played inside a hypercube, using spherical paddles.
Perhaps someone with a quicker mind and more math training could elucidate upon that thought?
Nah, I would posit that most gamers are 'seduced' by the graphics of a game and not the playability of the game. That is why I'd rather play the classic videogames from the 'golden era' of gaming (~1978 - ~1985). The graphics were crude by the games were really fun!
Street Fighter II (1991) is probably the pardigm shift away from game playability and more to 'digital eye candy'. This game was both fun to play and had great graphics (for its time). Once it became a rousing success, it opened the floodgates to fighting game sequels and clones. As a result, all the 'classic' games were left by the wayside in favor of 'fighting games, shooting games, driving games, and DDR-style games' with fabulous graphics but with nearly brain-dead game play.... =/
Anyway, to get back on topic I remember years and years and years ago playing a mechanical PONG game made as a self-contained tabletop toy. It was about the size of a 'standard' computer monitor and I think TOMY made it. Does anybody remeber playing this particular 'PONG game'?
I remember owning a pong game when I was a child circa late 70s. It was a big green box that looked like old style computer monitor. It had dail on the corners and the lines were painted on the screen. Opening it up you would find a flashlight pendulum rod that would bounce back and forth with the help of small motor to keep the motion going as hit hit the rubber pads you moved with the dials. So this guy is about 20 years to late to be the pong uBerGeek
The most fun video game I ever played was like that - very simple game leading to very good gameplay. It was on one of those mail-delivery discs that came with a subscription to the Commodore Gazette magazine. The game was "Space shove" or something like that. It was a simple spacewar derivative - two players, each controlling one ship, maneuver like in "asteroids" - there are four asteroids on the screen. But the neat twist was that your bullets were not particularly fast, and when they hit things they didn't break them up or kill them - they just gave them a little shove, using appropriate inelastic collision rules (bullet has small mass so it only results in a small shove) You could use the bullet to hit either a ship or an asteroid. The asteroids didn't break up into smaller bits - they just started moving.
The object was to get the other player's ship to crash into an asteroid first. So you either shot the other ship to push it toward an asteroid, or shot asteroids to push them toward the other ship. To make an asteroid start moving at a respectable rate, you had to shoot it several times in the same direction, imparting a little more velocity each timem. To make it stop you had to shoot it several times once it was moving along at a good pace. And of course the whole time you have to maneouver because the opponent will occasionally hit you (and thus you can't take the optimal strategy of Asteroids, of just staying put and not moving while you rotate and shoot. You *had* to learn how to manuever well.
I usually won the game, not by being a good shot, but by being really good at the maneuvering so I was hard to kill. I'd get shoved toward narrow gap between two tumbling asteroids, and while tumbling around and thrusting I'd describe a wacky curve that just manages to miss them, by the seat of my pants. Man that game was fun.
The best games are like that - where the rules are simple but they lead to complex consequences that take thought to deal with.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
But not quite. It's a sine wave scratched on that
tonewheel . Oh Yes. Additive synthesis. When I got
to meet a serious Hammond organ (not one of the newer
ones I also got to meet a blind guy who was blind
from birth and spent his life trying to teach
despite his blindness. Ouch. I *want* that instrument. It was *beautiful*. But you need a seriously reinforced floor before you consider wheeling one in, and worse... One year after my
parents inflicted this on me Neil was making that first step on the moon. Sometimes I like being older than most of the folks here...
Got to enjoy being old sometimes.
Defender and it's later release versions
rule as the most all out brain frying games of all time.
Look out for the mutants!
I know that Keith Emerson used to take an axe to
these things, but uh. hacking hammonds. Oh boy.
*tell me more* . I'm really intrigued. (Sigh) I like
theatre aka cinema organs too but only our worst
enemy in Seattle can afford that stuff....
How can you do things quickly with this stuff? The
amp took a *LONG* time to warm up. (valves and stuff)
and the main organ was a real bitch. Albeit a very
pretty one. I still love all those drawbars and
that *delicious* piece of ergonomics the "reversed
colour keys to preset instruments". No serious
keyboard player (even with 10kg of skag in his veins) could *miss* hitting B flat to flip the
instrument. Many newer designs miss this piece
of exquisite engineering...
Are Hammond still alive and well? I hope so.
Its Funny not a Troll. Yeesh
"Does anybody remeber playing this particular 'PONG game'? "
Yes I do. I owned one. But in my case it was probably licensed to a Spanish toy company, maybe Congost o Payás.
Mechanical Doom 3!
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
The next step in video game simulation is to create a real life version of Madden. Hell, they could even call it something crazy, like "football."
I used to fix elcetromechanical pinball machines and GUESS WHAT THE HEART OF THE DEVICE WAS???? A relay driven computer. It had a 'cpu' that would rotate each time the ball stuck something on the playing field. The proper points were opened and closed to count the correct score for the player. It supported outboard North. South, (East & West) functional sub-processing units as well as buses for lights and relays. The scoring mechanisms had a 'carrying pawl' that activated the next scoring stepping relay on the 10th rotation of the previous digit. Remarkable! When the score got high enough, to a hard wired programmed level, the number of available games would step once and a solonoid would strike the wooden case, prouducing a 'knock' noise to alert the player. As the score incremented, different toned bar chimes would be struck by solonoids to produce a ringing noise in sequence to the amount of the score's vaue. Amazing, huh. Then there were the telephone switches that used stepping relays and seeking relay paths so you could dial your local repairman to come fix the broken pin ball machine. Ah, but one day, along came CROMs and RALUs, PIO devices and then the Motorola 6800 and Z80 families of silicon substrated families of controling and processing devices to replace all those myrids of point contacts, switches and solonoids. But don't despair, I'm working on a BFEMP machine that will fry junctions world wide. I've still got an old toolbox around here with my point tools and white business card strips with contact cleaner. I'd give out my SKYPE number, but I guess no one will be able to call..or on the normal phone system either. Well, there goes another plan for world domination...........