Designing a handheld electronic pinball game in 1979 #VintageComputing @kitchengarry
Garry Kitchen documents making handheld electronic gamed circa 1979, specifically the handheld pinball game Wildfire.
Mattel had had great market success with the Mattel Football handheld electronic game (1977), motivating our engineering consulting company to try to break into the electronic toy business. Parker Brothers had a problem and they badly needed a solution. They were sitting on the concept of their next hit electronic toy, but they didn’t have an engineering firm to design the production unit. They said “sure, we’ll do it.”
The team had to go from a $3,000 prototype to a manufacturing cost of about $10 per unit.
From a hardware standpoint, the microprocessor that we chose to use for Wildfire was the AMI S2150, made by American Microsystems Inc. (AMI). It was a 4-bit microcontroller, with 1.5 KB of ROM for the program, and a robust 40 bytes of RAM (costing about $4).
For the “display,” the game used a circuit board with about 70 red LEDs (light emitting diodes) mounted on it, positioned to define all of the potential paths of the pinball as it moved around the playfield.
And the programmer they hired didn’t come up with a working code base:
We had a program, but we no longer had a programmer. We had no idea what was right, or wrong, with the possibly random list of words that I had typed in.
Sprinting down the hallway and almost out of sight, I heard an echo of “great Garry, why don’t you take a crack at it and see what you can do?” The die had been cast. The savior had been chosen, and it was I.
As I sat there stunned, I was reminded of that age old poker adage — If you’re sitting at a poker table, and you can’t identify which one of the players is the sucker, you’re the sucker.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: The latest on Raspberry Pi RP2350-E9, Bluetooth 6, 4,000 Stars and more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
