=== PART 1 ===
Several forum members asked that I post a thread with some historical knowledge I have on PSE. PSE was a small, pioneering company that developed several arcade games at the dawn of the video game industry. This is written in 2025 from my memories of that time in the mid-1970s, so my apologies if there are any inaccuracies in the following narrative.
About me
My name is Kyle and I worked as a game designer for PSE. In 1975 when I was 17 years old and a senior in high school, I signed up for a vocational work program where I could get on a bus at noon and go to NASA / Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Not being a fan of school, I jumped at the chance to leave school while still getting full credit for attending. At NASA I was assigned to a small design team working on a top-secret project to build one of the first unmanned, remotely piloted drone aircraft. After graduating high school in 1976, NASA offered me a job as an associate engineer working on the same project. There was a hiring freeze in place, so I was hired as a contractor. PSE provided contract services to NASA, so NASA asked PSE to put me on their payroll. This was my introduction to PSE.
The NASA project was cancelled a year later and PSE offered me a job working at their office. I had built an early solid-state video camera at NASA and taught myself to program in Fortran, so I had experience in the fledgling field of digital video design. This fit nicely with the work PSE was doing with its video game product line.
PSE background
I believe PSE was founded by John Chaudhry in the early 70s as a contract design and manufacturing company located in Sunnyvale, California. Basically, PSE would design and manufacture electronics as a subcontractor to other companies. This is the reason for their name, "Project Support Engineering". They were located a few miles away from Atari, where Nolan Bushnell's team had released Pong around the same time.
It was a family business run by John, his wife and several grown children. The family dog, a large German Shepard, was also present and patrolled the hallways and offices. The building was perhaps 8,000 square feet with about 25 employees. It was split about one-half conditioned office space with the remainder an unconditioned manufacturing warehouse.
Game history
John was a brilliant digital design engineer out of IBM. He was responsible for the design of Knights in Armor, Maneater and their other early video games. This was before I started in 1977, but I remember one of their first video games was to take Atari Pong games and modify them to use 2-axis joysticks. This upgraded the game so the video paddles could be moved horizontally and vertically, instead of the limited up/down motion found in the original Pong. I did not see this game noted on the Museum of the Game website. I'm wondering if any of them still exist.
Knights in Armor and Maneater used very complex discrete digital circuits to create their video images. They had very large printed circuit boards containing over a hundred chips. This was a time when microprocessors were just being released, but PSE never used one. RAM memory was tiny – nowhere near the size required to produce a bit-mapped game image that's so common today. As with Atari Pong, the electronics in the PSE games creates the video images directly from discrete digital circuitry. There was no "computer", no programming in these early games – just hardware design.
Bazooka
After designing the crazy, complex circuitry for Nights in Armor and Maneater, John came up with the idea of a "programmable" game hardware platform. Keep in mind that computers at that time were large and expensive machines. Small microprocessors were just coming on the scene and Jobs and Wozniack were just starting to design the first Apple computer in their garage a few miles away. It's taken for granted nowadays, but a game you could change by programming was a brilliant idea for its time.
The Bazooka architecture provided a control board (Board 1) that allowed the game play to be programmed using PROMS (Programmable Read Only Memory) chips. Instead of having to design large, complex single-use circuit boards, the Bazooka platform could host a variety of unique games by just changing the program in the PROM chips. John hoped that this flexible architecture would allow the company to quickly release new games, boosting their sales in the fledgling, and often struggling, video game industry.
John tasked me with writing the "code" for the games, which involved creating the program stored in the two PROMs on Board 1. These were one-time programmable chips. If you wanted to change the code, you threw the chips away and burned new ones. I also designed the electronic hardware upgrades found in the later PSE games. The electronic architecture was essentially a simplified microprocessor, made from discrete chips. Programming was a manual process, done on a homemade wooden box with a panel having a row of toggle switches for each bit, and pushbuttons to store entries into a small RAM memory. There was no programming language for this, no keyboard, no display monitor. I had to memorize all of the unique binary numbers (opcodes) representing different software instructions. By hand I would enter each opcode into the box, a bit at a time. With a memory capacity of 512 lines, it was a tedious process. There was no editing or insert function, you could only overwrite previous lines of code. There was no permanent storage, the program could only be copied over to a PROM chip for production. If the power went off, you would lose everything and have to start over. Because of this, I wrote the program opcodes down on sheets of paper before entering them into the RAM box.
There would typically be three circuit boards in a game, plugged into a common motherboard with power supply. Board 1 provided the programmable "brains" of the game, along with the required video synchronization signals. Board 2 contained the unique digital circuitry required to produce the actual video images. Board 3 contained the audio circuitry and interfaces for the coin switches and other game controls.

The Bazooka game play consisted of military vehicles crossing the screen from left to right. A small mock-up of a bazooka gun was mounted on the game console that allowed the player to fire a shot at the vehicles to score points. You lose points if you accidentally hit the stretcher or ambulance.

Digital scoring is displayed at the bottom of the screen, produced by Board 1 circuitry. The text above them is actually made by reversed-out stickers stuck to the face of the display monitor. Computer-generated text was not yet a reality.
The actual bazooka gun was made from PVC pipe parts found at the local hardware store. A potentiometer was attached to the gun's rotating support tube using a rather poor mechanical design. It was a frequent source of trouble for the game.
(continued...)
Several forum members asked that I post a thread with some historical knowledge I have on PSE. PSE was a small, pioneering company that developed several arcade games at the dawn of the video game industry. This is written in 2025 from my memories of that time in the mid-1970s, so my apologies if there are any inaccuracies in the following narrative.
About me
My name is Kyle and I worked as a game designer for PSE. In 1975 when I was 17 years old and a senior in high school, I signed up for a vocational work program where I could get on a bus at noon and go to NASA / Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Not being a fan of school, I jumped at the chance to leave school while still getting full credit for attending. At NASA I was assigned to a small design team working on a top-secret project to build one of the first unmanned, remotely piloted drone aircraft. After graduating high school in 1976, NASA offered me a job as an associate engineer working on the same project. There was a hiring freeze in place, so I was hired as a contractor. PSE provided contract services to NASA, so NASA asked PSE to put me on their payroll. This was my introduction to PSE.
The NASA project was cancelled a year later and PSE offered me a job working at their office. I had built an early solid-state video camera at NASA and taught myself to program in Fortran, so I had experience in the fledgling field of digital video design. This fit nicely with the work PSE was doing with its video game product line.
PSE background
I believe PSE was founded by John Chaudhry in the early 70s as a contract design and manufacturing company located in Sunnyvale, California. Basically, PSE would design and manufacture electronics as a subcontractor to other companies. This is the reason for their name, "Project Support Engineering". They were located a few miles away from Atari, where Nolan Bushnell's team had released Pong around the same time.
It was a family business run by John, his wife and several grown children. The family dog, a large German Shepard, was also present and patrolled the hallways and offices. The building was perhaps 8,000 square feet with about 25 employees. It was split about one-half conditioned office space with the remainder an unconditioned manufacturing warehouse.
Game history
John was a brilliant digital design engineer out of IBM. He was responsible for the design of Knights in Armor, Maneater and their other early video games. This was before I started in 1977, but I remember one of their first video games was to take Atari Pong games and modify them to use 2-axis joysticks. This upgraded the game so the video paddles could be moved horizontally and vertically, instead of the limited up/down motion found in the original Pong. I did not see this game noted on the Museum of the Game website. I'm wondering if any of them still exist.
Knights in Armor and Maneater used very complex discrete digital circuits to create their video images. They had very large printed circuit boards containing over a hundred chips. This was a time when microprocessors were just being released, but PSE never used one. RAM memory was tiny – nowhere near the size required to produce a bit-mapped game image that's so common today. As with Atari Pong, the electronics in the PSE games creates the video images directly from discrete digital circuitry. There was no "computer", no programming in these early games – just hardware design.
Bazooka
After designing the crazy, complex circuitry for Nights in Armor and Maneater, John came up with the idea of a "programmable" game hardware platform. Keep in mind that computers at that time were large and expensive machines. Small microprocessors were just coming on the scene and Jobs and Wozniack were just starting to design the first Apple computer in their garage a few miles away. It's taken for granted nowadays, but a game you could change by programming was a brilliant idea for its time.
The Bazooka architecture provided a control board (Board 1) that allowed the game play to be programmed using PROMS (Programmable Read Only Memory) chips. Instead of having to design large, complex single-use circuit boards, the Bazooka platform could host a variety of unique games by just changing the program in the PROM chips. John hoped that this flexible architecture would allow the company to quickly release new games, boosting their sales in the fledgling, and often struggling, video game industry.
John tasked me with writing the "code" for the games, which involved creating the program stored in the two PROMs on Board 1. These were one-time programmable chips. If you wanted to change the code, you threw the chips away and burned new ones. I also designed the electronic hardware upgrades found in the later PSE games. The electronic architecture was essentially a simplified microprocessor, made from discrete chips. Programming was a manual process, done on a homemade wooden box with a panel having a row of toggle switches for each bit, and pushbuttons to store entries into a small RAM memory. There was no programming language for this, no keyboard, no display monitor. I had to memorize all of the unique binary numbers (opcodes) representing different software instructions. By hand I would enter each opcode into the box, a bit at a time. With a memory capacity of 512 lines, it was a tedious process. There was no editing or insert function, you could only overwrite previous lines of code. There was no permanent storage, the program could only be copied over to a PROM chip for production. If the power went off, you would lose everything and have to start over. Because of this, I wrote the program opcodes down on sheets of paper before entering them into the RAM box.
There would typically be three circuit boards in a game, plugged into a common motherboard with power supply. Board 1 provided the programmable "brains" of the game, along with the required video synchronization signals. Board 2 contained the unique digital circuitry required to produce the actual video images. Board 3 contained the audio circuitry and interfaces for the coin switches and other game controls.

The Bazooka game play consisted of military vehicles crossing the screen from left to right. A small mock-up of a bazooka gun was mounted on the game console that allowed the player to fire a shot at the vehicles to score points. You lose points if you accidentally hit the stretcher or ambulance.

Digital scoring is displayed at the bottom of the screen, produced by Board 1 circuitry. The text above them is actually made by reversed-out stickers stuck to the face of the display monitor. Computer-generated text was not yet a reality.
The actual bazooka gun was made from PVC pipe parts found at the local hardware store. A potentiometer was attached to the gun's rotating support tube using a rather poor mechanical design. It was a frequent source of trouble for the game.
(continued...)













