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."
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.
Incase of a slashdotting, here's a link to the movie of Mechanical Pong in action!
This has been there since 1977
fifteen jugglers, five believers
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
It was keen dreams (keen 4) I believe.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Keen Dreams was a spinoff that came out after 6. Keen 4 was the one where you had to recover those oraclesor sages or whattheywerecalled. Keen 4 was also the only one with the infamous dopefish.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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?)
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.
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!
Both of these have been done - too lazy/not enough time to find links, but there was some kind of pacman board game which used marbles for the dots, and pacman kinda rolled around on it on wheels, as did the ghosts - hence they always moved in his general direction, chasing him (clever solution to the AI) you played by tilting the board with a joystick
As for real life pacman.. this was covered on Slashdot a while back.. a bunch of people dressed as pacman and ghosts went running around New York or somewhere.. I think they got GPS gear into it and all sorts
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
The Hammond uses tonewheels to create the different pitches. These are wheels with different bumps on them that produce a different inductance as they spin to make different pitches. Anyway, the hammond has a "start" and a "run" switch: the "start" switch is held on to run a starter motor, just like in a car; the starter motor gets the larger motors up to speed. Then, once they were at the correct speed (which you can tell by the sound), you push the "Run" switch to the on position and that engages the main motors so that the tonewheels can be spun at a constant speed. Once everything is running, you let go of both switches and wait for the tubes to warm up. Then it can finally be played.
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.
The pong minigame was in Keen 4 thru 6. Six was published by a company called 'Formgen', and is thus unavailable for sale. Last I knew, you could buy Keen 1 thru 5 on cd from Apogee.
Keen Dreams was made by id to meet a quota for a number of games, and was then dumped into being freeware or somesuch. It had a completly different interface to it, that included a mouse cursor and buttons. The plot was rather humorous, but you didn't have your neural blaster with you. So, you had to collect little flashing objects and throw them at enemies to temporarily disable them. I'm not aware of any minigames within Keen Dreams.