Retrocomputing Enthusiast Repairs Mattel's 48-Year-Old Handheld Videogame (youtu.be)
- Reference: 0175440567
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/24/11/09/2049218/retrocomputing-enthusiast-repairs-mattels-48-year-old-handheld-videogame
- Source link: https://youtu.be/0cT49Ux8jr0
Ironically, at one point his voltimeter stopped working, because...its batteries were dead. But a tri-wing screwdriver reveals the game's beautiful 1976 circuitboard — before the video fast forwards through "an almost comical attempt by me, a systems software engineer, to sauter the connections back onto this 48-year-old connector." (Instead he ends up replacing the machine's 9-volt battery connector...) On his [4]Patreon page , he writes that filming the video "took a stupidly long time to put together." But their Slashdot submission acknowledges that in the end, "Taking it apart and debugging it was fun. (Slight spoiler: I figured out what was wrong, was an easy fix), and the game plays great now!"
Any Slashdot readers have memories of playing Mattel Electronics Auto Race ? My one experience felt like that time that a gaming magazine had nine children (ages 9 to 12) [5]try to play old 1970s-era videogames like Pong . ("Wow. The score is tied. It's so exhilarating..." "My line is so beating the heck out of your stupid line...")
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattel_Auto_Race
[2] https://www.slashdot.org/~Shayde
[3] https://youtu.be/0cT49Ux8jr0
[4] https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-video-mattel-115315682
[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20050204090105/http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3109674
Meanwhile at Coleco... (Score:2)
I was in o it's Advanced R&D group in 1979-80. I remember COP-420 microcontrollers and as little hardware as possible. Every resistor mattered, when there were pennies to be saved.
to sauter (verb) (Score:5, Funny)
To fry in a small quantity of fat or oil. It is often used to reflow pesky BGAs.
ROM (Score:2)
The ROM was 512 bytes [1]https://www.seanriddle.com/firstmattelledgames.html [seanriddle.com]
[1] https://www.seanriddle.com/firstmattelledgames.html
Re: ROM (Score:2)
Oddly, the games had more heart and soul.
I never had this one (Score:1)
But I had knock offs. And I had the sports themed Mattel electronics ones. Like a lot of kids of that vintage they were bought for road trips or from moving between cities I forget which. This would have been much too early for a game boy.
Thinking about it I'm surprised how long stuff like this was in production. Had to be at least four or eight years. I don't know if Mattel was still making their version but you could get various knockoffs some of which probably came out of the same factory. Back
Re: (Score:2)
We couldn't afford electronic toys like this, which probably would have made riding in the back seat through rural northern Michigan for hours at a time a lot less miserable. Air conditioning probably would have helped even more, but pretty much no one we knew could afford that.
Re: (Score:2)
Take a look at some of the other videos on my channel. I have the basketball one and the football one. They're still a lot of fun. I did a teardown and cleaning of hte football one as well. That was fun!
Re: (Score:2)
We used to do a cross-country trip every summer, driving from Washington to Indiana/Kentucky. One of our great timewasters as kids was this silly little hand-held electronic football game (may have been Mattel but I'm not sure). The "players" were just little red dashes - and the one with the ball was shown as a slightly brighter dash. You could do running plays and passing plays... for sufficiently loose definitions of "plays". You could hand it back and forth for two-player games, although only the offens
Mattel Electronics Baseball (Score:2)
I had a Mattel Electronics Baseball in the 1970s. I spent many hours on that thing before videogames came out for real.
Two things (Score:2)
1) Well done, Shayde!
2) It's nice to see that the "old Slashdot" will still raise its head occasionally.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm just happy i never forgot my login info. Would hate to give up the low number / short name :)