Ancient Web: Grant Searle Rebuilt a 1974 Pong Machine Without a Microprocessor

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Before a home videogame could be a small computer, it could also be a pile of logic chips whose entire job was to make two paddles, one ball, and a score appear on a television. Grant Searle's Tele-Tennis page documents his reconstruction of exactly that sort of machine: a 1974 Practical Wireless project built without a microprocessor and without a line of software.

Visit Grant Searle's Tele-Tennis page

The original design was published as a series by M. J. Hughes in Practical Wireless from July through November 1974. It belonged to the first wave of Pong-like home television games, when duplicating the basic idea meant constructing the video system itself. The magazine supplied circuit diagrams, component information, board layouts, and enough explanation for a sufficiently determined reader to build one at home.

Searle finally did that decades later.

The interesting part is what is not inside. There is no CPU running a game loop and no ROM containing game code. The machine builds its behavior directly from electronics: 7400-series logic, 555 timers, op-amps, diodes, counters, and separate circuits responsible for pieces of the picture. The paddles and ball are not sprites in memory. Their positions exist because the circuit generates the correct signals at the correct moments while the television image is being formed.

That makes the project useful far beyond nostalgia. A modern emulator can show what an early videogame looked like. This shows what one was at the electrical level.

Searle's reconstruction also preserves the practical messiness that gets erased from neat histories of videogames. The original project occupied multiple boards. The 1970s design expected a UHF television connection. Searle adapted the output for a more convenient composite-video setup and put his build in an appropriately period-looking case. It is less a replica of a commercial Pong console than a reconstruction of the era when electronics magazines expected readers to manufacture their own entertainment.

For a webmaster, there is another preservation lesson here. The page is valuable because one person documented a completed build, not because somebody later summarized that such projects existed. Photographs, construction notes, scans, and firsthand decisions turn an old circuit into something another person can understand and reproduce.

Tele-Tennis is especially good evidence. The software layer is gone because there never was one.

Explore the Tele-Tennis reconstruction and original project material

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.