Developer Márk Polák has constructed a clone of Atari’s Pong with one main distinction: it is electromechanical, swapping a video show for an X-Y gantry system.
“I fell in love with Atari’s model [of Pong] within the arcade and I needed to have my very own,” Polák explains of his creation, “so the journey begun, and now I’ve a working prototype. It is a two participant sport, every participant controls a paddle, the paddles are passing a ball between one another. If a participant misses to catch the ball, the opposite participant will get some extent. The sport is playable, there are some edge case bugs.”
The chunky Pong reinterpretation makes use of an X-Y gantry system utilizing CoreXY kinematics, an strategy extra usually related to 3D printers and CNC mills than arcade video games. The paddles and “ball” are pushed utilizing NEMA 23 stepper motors linked to an Arduino DUE microcontroller board, which makes use of a {hardware} timer and an implementation of Bressenham’s line-drawing algorithm to deal with the ball’s motion. Rotary encoders, in the meantime, give the gamers management — and AlfaZeta mechanical seven-segment shows maintain rating.
“I’ll in all probability abandon the CoreXY gantry and can introduce yet one more motor to have separate management for the axes, additionally will skip the rasterization and as a substitute I’ll time sync the X and Y actions,” Polák says of his future plans for bettering the prototype. “This may trigger rounded corners when the ball bounces however the gameplay will likely be rather more fluid (that is how the Atari Pong desk handles it.) I may get the identical outcome however planning the motion in software program introduces an excessive amount of complexity, and I have to rewrite my paddle management code, as at present I’m instantly sending the rotary encoder pulses to the stepper motor, which works in gradual velocity however causes step loss in increased sensitivity settings.”
Polák has launched supply code for the venture, which requires a beefy 120W energy provide to run, on GitHub underneath an unspecified license; “the readme is a bit outdated,” he warns. Extra particulars can be found within the maker’s Reddit put up.