It works but my polish PAL tv doesn’t seem to like it very much, it took a lot of tuning to get this wonderful image.
Was it meant to run on an NTSC TV?
Unlikely. It is spelled “Colour” on the box, implying this would be for the UK market.
Was not expecting to see my city here.
Honestly, I envy you, Edinburgh is incredible.
Btw, there’s a second pong console for a similar price in that charity shop, if you’re interested and if nobody’s got it yet :)
Thank you, Edinburgh is a beautiful and lovely little city, i reslly hope you enjoyed it. Which charity shop was it may I ask?
I sure did! It really is beatiful, one of my favorite cities of Europe! Also the thrifting possibilities are incredible.
Here’s the address: https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/details.html?osmtype=N&osmid=5600831836&class=shop
That might have Pong but it isn’t Pong.
Obviously but it is a Pong Console, it’s the category started by the original Pong.
This one has a bunch of additional games too.
According to the box, it is noticeably missing Pong.
I wonder about the “Colour”. Did they actually use the different video outputs of the AY-3-8500 chip for controlling different colour signals instead just joining them as a luminance signal?
For those too young to know: The AY-3-8500 (or AY-3-8500-1 fo NTSC) chip is at the heart of almost all of those pong-type consoles. It has a number of different (but synchronized) video outputs for left player, right player, ball, numbers, and playing field, and most consoles just or’ed them together into luminance (Y) to make a simple B&W image. You could route some signals to the R-Y and/or the B-Y signal to give them some basic color, e.g. if you sent the “ball” signal both to the luminance and the red (R-Y) channel, you would get a red ball. All this needs are a handful of simple logic gates.
If it’s any indication, the manual says:
It basically tells you that you can basically tone the “colourness” (i.e. the brightness of the colours) up and down, which was a normal control (like brightness and contrast) back then. This is not about being able to make a red playing field green by some setting on the TV. You just had some potentiometers to play with the pre-amplification of the luminance and colour signals.
What could be in the instructions would an explanation of the games telling you that e.g. the playing field is green and the ball is red or somesuch, then they actually did a (rare) “colour implementation” of the circuit.
If you are interested, there is a number of interesting documentations on this pong chip on the net.
Thanks for the explanation!
You’re welcome!