Where to find hires pictures of PONG PCB?

[Vigo]

Hello everybody,

 

in the phase of repairing what seems to be an original PONG PCB, I discovered a significant difference in the vertical ball motion circuit between the Atari schematics and the circuit on the PCB, while everything else is exactly connected as described.

 

What I am asking is if someone knows a source of hires scans of an original Pong PCB, where I can clearly make out the traces between the IC's. I am also noticing some subtle differences between the 2 existing hardware emulators (Dice & Discrete Sim) and the real PCB:

 

- Once the ball collides with the horizontal and vertical screen boundaries, it is stretched into the HBLANK and VBLANK area for 1 frame. Actually, that's exactly how I would expect it to behave when looking at the schematics. The simulations don't reflect that.

 

- There is a space of 1 pixel between the right score display and the right paddle, when the paddle is on the same level as the score display. On both simulators, there is no space between the right paddle and score display, which looks kind of odd.

 

Perhaps there is someone having a real Pong machine verifying my findings?

Edited January 23, 2009 by Vigo

[70sgamefan]

I notice you mentioned TWO simulators, DICE and DISCRETE SIM. I have heard of DICE, but am unfamiliar with the second one. Can you post a link for info on the second sim?

 

I don't have a Pong machine, nor do I have photos of the PCB, so I can't help you at all with that.

[Vigo]

I notice you mentioned TWO simulators, DICE and DISCRETE SIM. I have heard of DICE, but am unfamiliar with the second one. Can you post a link for info on the second sim?

 

I don't have a Pong machine, nor do I have photos of the PCB, so I can't help you at all with that.

 

Discrete Sim was written by Atari Age member Dan Boris, and can be found on his webpage:

 

http://atarihq.com/danb/Pong.shtml

 

On his blog, he also does an excellent job at explaining how Pong works.

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;blogid=52&

[70sgamefan]

Thanks for the link. I had actually visited that page in the past but did not realize it until I took a look at it again today. I am glad there are higher level programming languages available today, as I remember feeling lost trying to program in assembly language back in the early/mid 1980s. I suppose the it really required electrical engineers to create the discrete TTL boards used in the 70s machines. When reading about this kind of thing it really seems COMPLEX lol. These guys were like the "Wernher Von Brauns" of video games!