Ever wondered what PONG would look like in Colour?

[Clytor]

Definitely cool. I know a guy who did a similar thing with Fire Truck back in the day. I don't think he ever took any pictures of it though.

 

[P-man]

Didn't someone already do this. Its been about 1.5 to 2 years ago, but I recall a friend telling me about a pong kit that was made up. I think you had to assemble it, but it was in color and jamma IIRC. I thought they were selling them on ebay at the time. Course, I could just be full of crap with bad memory. Either way, nice work. Time to get to work colorizing tanks, boot hill, sea wolf.......

I think you're referring to the Lupine systems jamma pong pcb... The Lupine pcb is based around a home console PONG-on-a-chip from General Instruments from the late 70's, and uses a CRTC to overlay instructions etc, as well as using digital joysticks on JAMMA to control the paddles on a completely new pcb...

Home console pong is a whole other nostalgia, but it doens't play like the original pong. Original hardware rules

 

[seanriddle]

Crash is a CPU game, you would have to get VERY trick to colourise that...

Death Race on the other hand could be colourised quite easily.. I have a Death Race pcb, but i don't think i'd dream of hacking it like i have done to this pcb

The next pcb i'm hacking is another pong clone, going to turn it into an official Atari SuperPong as they didn't make a new pcb for it, just patched a regular pong, and i've never seen one...

Andrew-

Nice write-up.

I thought a little about colorizing B&W CPU games. For games that had color overlays for horizontal bands, you could set the color from the horizontal line counter. You could do a straight hardware decode like you did, or use it as address bits to a PROM/fast EPROM. You could store the color as RRRGGGBB and use resistors to mix. Timing shouldn't be too much of an issue as you have horizontal refresh to play around in.

For other games, you could piggy-back a color EPROM to the object ROM address bits. Then as the game read out the graphics, the color EPROM would supply the color for each pixel. Timing might be an issue here since you are changing color every pixel, but I think it could work.

Vector games would be a challenge. You could map intensity to color like Cinematronics did, but you wouldn't have much control. Maybe on a game with a vector ROM you could also piggyback a color EPROM to drive the RGB guns? A latch might be needed to hold the color until the vector was finished.

Sean