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."

Comments

Faithful reproduction? Hardly.

[sakusha]

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.