Vector Pong!!

cwilkson

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So I finally got this thing working and robust enough to transport and demo it. I'm working on borrowing a real video camera so you can actually see the vector shapes. But for now....here's a couple of phone grabs from last Thursday's CCCKC meetup.

training speed:


kick-your-ass speed:


Who knew Pong could still be that much fun? And they were sober too! My 8 year old nephew and 5 year old niece came over and played for 30 minutes straight and loved it. I'm stoked at how it turned out.


The game is living in my Asteroids Deluxe cabaret and uses the stock WG 15V2000 monitor. Score runs to 21 and is displayed using 7-segment LEDs behind the smoked plexi. The control panel consists of a paddle control knob and serve button for each player and a common "start" button. The ball's vertical and horizontal speed are seperately (and smoothly) adjustable via pots on the game board.

The short technical details: An analog computer is doing real time collision detection and drawing vectors (the ball is a true circle, the paddles are pentagrams). Audio and score are 5 volt random logic. There is no CPU....everything is discrete with no software at all (yay!).

Whadya think?
 
Nice. So is it all done on a pcb?

Edit: never mind, I re-read your notes. Cool!
 
I built "vector pong" on a breadboard in a lab during undergrad... played on a scope in X-Y mode, with just dots and lines, no english, and no scoring...

Hell of a lot of fun :)
 
Man, that is totally excellent! I bet it takes some hardcore skills to pull off something like that all with discrete logic.
 
I built "vector pong" on a breadboard in a lab during undergrad... played on a scope in X-Y mode, with just dots and lines, no english, and no scoring...

Hell of a lot of fun :)
What year was that? Was that for 6.101? I saw a couple of attempts over the years.

The idea for this kinda evolved over a few years. It started as a demo for an analog class I created/taught over in the Edgerton Center at MIT. Using the Tek 2445 scopes. It had a round ball and filled in rectangle paddles (crosshatch). Just to show what you could do with some opamps, a 555 or two, and a couple of NAND latches. It evolved into something entirely different (and never finished). Then finally it mutated and landed in my AD cabaret as this thing. It's awesome to see people having fun with it. It's soldered up on three 6"x6" protoboards I had lying around and a 4x6" perfboard for the remote score. Still debating whether I want to spin a custom board(s) for it or leave it as a Frankenstein project. Probably a good idea to consolidate it. The collision detector is a wiring nightmare. The point is to have a good teachable project for the future and chasing a loose wire bug isn't a good use of class time.
 
Man, that is totally excellent! I bet it takes some hardcore skills to pull off something like that all with discrete logic.
Thanks. There's nothing too hard about it (now that it's finished!) The main "skill" was perseverence. Took a couple of years from start to finish working on it an hour here and an hour there. As I said, this is meant to be a teaching demo so everything is pretty basic. The logic is very simple. The analog stuff is where the "interesting" stuff is happening. But even there the worst thing is four amplifiers connected in a feedback loop to generate a sinewave/cosine pair to draw the ball.

I may write a book (PFFT!) or do a web series on how to build one. Sometime. Maybe. :p I'm also considering offering it as a drop-in kit for and Asteroids or Asteroids Deluxe cabinet.
 
Cool to see you finally got that going. :)
Yes. FINALLY!!!!

Of course, it still isn't DONE-done. There are tweaks to make based on gameplay feedback. And there are bugs that I left in as part of the educational aspect. I may eliminate those at some point. Especially if I kit the thing for sale. But it's very gratifying to show it to somebody and have them honestly enjoy playing it. My nephew was going nuts the last couple of days I was putting the power supplies together. "I want to play PONG! (jumping up and down) PONG!!! PONG!!! PONG!!!" And he wasn't disappointed after playing against his little sister. They both liked it. Very gratifying indeed. I just wish I had been able to finish it before CAX. :(
 
Nice. So is it all done on a pcb?

Edit: never mind, I re-read your notes. Cool!
Thanks. Yep. There are four boards total and a custom control panel:
- display generator
- collision detector and +/-15V power supplies
- audio and control logic
- score

It uses the +5v supply and the audio amp from the audio/reg board in the AD cab. Everything else is self contained.
 
I see you have constructed a new Pong. Your skills are complete. Indeed you are powerful as the Emperor has foreseen.
 
What year was that? Was that for 6.101? I saw a couple of attempts over the years.

I didn't go to MIT for undergrad, so it was EE207 @ Ohio State.
555 for a clock, with a 7474 to divide it by 4 and analog muxes to pull X/Y voltages from the paddles and the ball.

Paddles were drawn as saw tooths with a DC offset controlled by the pot, and peak/trough detectors to check for collisions. (I should have had multiple peak/troughs so I could add english to the ball, but I didn't.) Ball was controlled with ramp generators with ramp up/down controlled by a T-flop that was clocked by comparators.

Since it was on an old breadboard, there was a bit of crosstalk and signal integrity was horrible, so sometimes you could "catch" the ball, since there wasn't any hysteresis in the comparators, and the paddles sometimes looked they were on fire. I built it on a 3-strip breadboard, and just about every column was used.

I probbly should have added scoring, but never did... I always though it'd be fun to make up some simple boards to plug into asteroids to play vector pong on the "big screen" :)
 
that's awesome.

I'm newer in to the logic set ups, and I understand most of the jargon that's being used, but not all of it.

I would LOVE to see a site or write up showing this being done. I would love to try this out on my Asteroids Cabaret
 
I see you have constructed a new Pong. Your skills are complete. Indeed you are powerful as the Emperor has foreseen.
he will never join the dark side, he is a jedi like his father before him.
:D:D:D:D

Wait a minute. My father was essentially one-armed and had severe breathing problems. Hmmm...
 
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