Pong in Your Palm
The world’s smallest playable Pong machine is powered by an Arduino and looks like it was just plucked out of a 1970s arcade.
They say that everything is bigger in Texas, but now Ontario may develop a reputation of its own as being a place where everything is smaller. Well, maybe not everything, but arcade games definitely are, anyway. An engineering student there named Victoria Korhonen has just built what she calls the world’s smallest playable Pong cabinet. While Guinness will take some time to officially validate that claim, the new machine does have smaller dimensions than the present record holder, so it looks like a good bet that it will eventually happen.
The tiny machine measures just 64 mm tall, 26 mm wide, and 30 mm deep. A miniature LCD screen and push buttons found in any electronics hobbyist’s parts bin make up the user interface. Internally, the game is powered by an Arduino-compatible development board. Korhonen programmed the game from scratch, and also included a simple artificial intelligence to handle moving player two’s paddle, because, well, it would be a bit too cozy for two people to use this machine at the same time, even if there were room for enough buttons.
The case is 3D-printed to match the style of the original Pong arcade machine. What appear to be stickers are affixed to the print to complete the look with a woodgrain and yellow style that looks like it just stepped out of the 1970s.
Very little information about the build has been released to date, but the hardware appears to be composed largely of commercial development boards. There also seems to be just a bit of free space left inside the case. It looks like there is an opportunity to use a more minimal, custom PCB design to shave a few more millimeters off of the case without too much difficulty. Anyone interested in holding a Guinness world record? We certainly would be honored to be the first to know about it!
Got games on the mind? Maybe you would rather control a robot with an arcade machine? Or play Pong with hand gestures? Perhaps playing the Atari 2600 with a light gun is more your speed? How about building AI into Combat? There is always an endless variety of projects to explore at Hackster.