About a year and a half ago, I joined this forum looking for a Syzygy PONG PCB. Finally found one, and have started the project I had in mind back then. I thought I'd post an occasional update on this work in progress here.
The circuit of this early game has fascinated me since I first learnt about it. As many of the forum members here will be aware, PONG does not have a CPU at all, but uses sixty-some TTL chips to generate the game logic and the video signal directly. I wanted to own and play one of these original boards, but also enjoy looking at the unusual board design.
So I decided to take my half-scale Asteroids idea (www.e-basteln.de/asteroids) a step further, and build a playable game showing off the PCB in a picture frame. The attached illustration shows the planned layout. The frame will be 6 cm deep (a good 2"), will show the PCB through a perspex pane, and include a flat screen display and, of course, the two pots and knobs to control the paddles.
I'm posting this in the tech section of the forum since a fair bit of work has gone into a homebrew video upscaler. I had bought an 8" TFT display (with the correct 4:3 aspect ratio), but soon learnt that its composite video input did not work well with PONG's slightly non-standard video signal. Also, the digitized black-and-white video signal just looked too sharp and flat -- I might as well have played an emulation on my Windows machine.
So I got a small, low cost FPGA board (Numato Mimas, $35) and developed a retro video upscaler for it. It simulates scanlines, horizontal blur and some phosphor after-glow, and makes the image look "right" to my eyes. This actually works nicely in a prototype version. I will post screenshots as soon as I get a chance to take photos.
I hope this is of interest to some of you, although I realize that it's rather a niche project... Will update this post occasionally as I (hopefully) make further progress.
The circuit of this early game has fascinated me since I first learnt about it. As many of the forum members here will be aware, PONG does not have a CPU at all, but uses sixty-some TTL chips to generate the game logic and the video signal directly. I wanted to own and play one of these original boards, but also enjoy looking at the unusual board design.
So I decided to take my half-scale Asteroids idea (www.e-basteln.de/asteroids) a step further, and build a playable game showing off the PCB in a picture frame. The attached illustration shows the planned layout. The frame will be 6 cm deep (a good 2"), will show the PCB through a perspex pane, and include a flat screen display and, of course, the two pots and knobs to control the paddles.
I'm posting this in the tech section of the forum since a fair bit of work has gone into a homebrew video upscaler. I had bought an 8" TFT display (with the correct 4:3 aspect ratio), but soon learnt that its composite video input did not work well with PONG's slightly non-standard video signal. Also, the digitized black-and-white video signal just looked too sharp and flat -- I might as well have played an emulation on my Windows machine.
So I got a small, low cost FPGA board (Numato Mimas, $35) and developed a retro video upscaler for it. It simulates scanlines, horizontal blur and some phosphor after-glow, and makes the image look "right" to my eyes. This actually works nicely in a prototype version. I will post screenshots as soon as I get a chance to take photos.
I hope this is of interest to some of you, although I realize that it's rather a niche project... Will update this post occasionally as I (hopefully) make further progress.
