After a long hiatus, I now have more time on my hands to build some more, so I thought I'd get going on a new build. On a vacation last year to NYC, I went to the Museum of the Moving Image (I highly recommend it), and they had a great selection of important arcade machines in the history of video games. This included an original Pong machine. Most of my arcade experience was in the early to mid 90s, and I had never seen a Pong in real life before. I was really taken by the style and simplicity of the cab. It just screamed "play me!" Unfortunately, the one at the Museum was out of order! Nevertheless, I had a great time playing a ton of other great games from the past. And I was now inspired to build my own Pong.
Pong and Computer Space at the museum of the moving image.
In my basement arcade, space is at a serious premium, so I plan on making this machine roughly half-scale (4 feet tall) and making the most of the space at the bottom of the cab to hide a bar fridge.
Some notes about the plan for the cab:
cab: On close inspection, I noticed the original Pong was made of some sort of plywood with a fake woodgrain veneer. I decided to just use some smooth-on-one-side plywood and stain it to get the nice brown wood colour. Another big difference is that my cab will not have the indented foot space at the bottom - this change is necessary to accommodate the fridge.
Display:
For a display I will use a 13" CRT TV - Gotta have low res and that authentic warm glow! I think the original Pong used the same size screen in a larger cab (5 feet tall). As a result, my final product will have a narrower bezel and larger screen relative to the cab size.
Brain:
I'd like the cab to be able to play a few other non=pong paddle games, including breakout and Kaboom! Originally I planned on running the cab off of an Atari paddle plug and play unit as it would be really easy to set up with the paddle controls already set up - I would just have to decase them and hook them up to the control panel. Unfortunately, the image quality was just terrible, even on a CRT. The menu was practically unreadable, and the interface for selecting game options was clunky.
So, my plan is now to use a Raspberry pi, a pair of original 2600 paddle controllers and a 2600dapter:
http://www.2600-daptor.com/