First electronic games used calculator chips | Hacker News Reader

First electronic games used calculator chips

seanriddle.com

26 pointsdjmips17 comments

I wrote the code for the Mattel Hockey game prototype, which ran on a single board computer that fit in an attache case. It was a 6800 or a 6502 uP, I can't remember which one. The board was custom designed and wire-wrapped.

https://www.8-bitcentral.com/miscellaneous/electronicHockey....

This work was done at Aph Technological Consulting.

Glenn, the owner, got pulled over by security at the airport a couple times with that attache case. He had to prove it was a game by powering it up and playing it. It attracted a lot of attention, which he loved.

Once the game worked to Mattel's satisfaction, it was handed over to Mattel's engineers to convert it to work on the target 4 bit processor.

AFAIK, nobody ever thought to take a picture of it. I think I got paid something like 3 bucks an hour to write the code for it. My first programming job! The game was based on the earlier Baseball game, just reworked the code.

The code was developed on a PDP-11, as Aph had developed macro assemblers for the uPs that ran on the -11. The resulting object code was downloaded onto the SBC and run. Aph had an enormous advantage with those macro assemblers, as everyone else tried to edit the code on the uP itself with miserable software.

I later went on to program the Intel Intellivision Roulette game.

Your tales of the history of our craft are always appreciated!

Thank you. I wish I could recall more details. I had no idea people were interested in these things. At the time we had no idea we were doing anything significant. For me it was a pleasant job that kept me in pocket money while a student.

I love reading stories like this. I checked your website and see a lot of technical publications, but do you have any history/memoir type books I could dig into?

No. I probably should make an archive of these.

Sean Riddle's linked blog post mentions that the code for the prototype for Mattel Football was included in the patent (wrapper) and it was in 6502.

Here is the source updated by Sean to build today. https://www.seanriddle.com/footballproto.asm

And more info on this: https://www.seanriddle.com/footballproto.html

I did SBCs for both the 6800 and the 6502 for Aph, and couldn't remember which one was this one. I'm also not totally sure whether Hockey was derived from Baseball or Football. It was 40 some years ago!

Other people who worked at Aph at the time were Shal Farley, Will McKown, David Rolfe, and Hal Finney (yes, that Hal).

I'm pretty sure the handhelds were all done on 6502s, but I don't have much else to add about them. I saw them at the time, when APh was still in Glenn's living room, but didn't work on them myself. I did help build and test the "briefcase" style datawidgets that preceded the ones in a formal box.

The briefcases were an off-the-shelf Samsonite model, but deep enough for the two-board stack that was the datawidget, with an open-frame power supply on the side. One of those may have accompanied the attache case you mentioned.

The other person to mention would be Dan O'Dowd. He wrote those PDP-10 / PDP-11 cross-assemblers, and may have had a hand in the earliest handheld games. I think he was Glenn's first employee.

I recall there were a lot more parts in the original. It was at least the size of a sheet of paper. There weren't any PLDs in those days.

The sounds were also created by having an I/O pin connected to a speaker. The pin was turned on and off at high speed to make the sounds.

Something that might not be clear. The calculator chips that the shipped game ran on were just too difficult to program, so the prototypes were done on a 6502 which was easy to program. The completed prototype was then used as a model for the calculator chip programmer.

The 6502 prototype still used the handheld set for the LEDs and buttons, and was connected to the 6502 SBC with a ribbon cable.

Walter - Sean Riddle, who wrote the blog post made a comment, with a new account on this post and it was killed (dead) by the machines for thinking it was spam I guess. I wasn't able to vouch for it but you may be able.

Cool to hear from someone who was there!

If anyone is interested, here's a link to a bunch of dieshots and PCB scans of various Rockwell games and calculators: https://www.seanriddle.com/rockwell/

I owned Auto Race, borrowed Football from a friend to play a few games... Remarkable how something at that time could be entertaining and novel with what amounted to a 3 x 9 "pixel" display and a piezo speaker.

(In fact, that was the first time I had seen a piezo speaker — of course I opened up my Auto Race game — how any sound could be produced from what appeared to be a flat brass disc amazed me.)

This blog post goes into the fascinating but brief details on how early Mattel electronic handheld games were reverse engineered to enable emulation.

Sean Riddle posted but it was killed by machines probably. He wrote.

Cool to hear from someone who was there! (re Walter)

If anyone is interested, here's a link to a bunch of dieshots and PCB scans of various Rockwell games and calculators: https://www.seanriddle.com/rockwell/

The infamous Brick Game used a 4 bit CPU used in calculators too.

https://forums.nesdev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14115

https://www.datasheet.es/PDF/904986/HT1130-pdf.html

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