Yannick Richter Brings Higinbotham's Tennis for Two Back in Glorious 4k Resolution

Computer engineering student and maker Yannick Richter has brought back a true classic of video game history, in glorious 4k resolution: William Higinbotham's Tennis for Two.

"Tennis for Two HD is a recreation of the 'first' (or second) video game ever created," Richter explains of the project, which digs truly deep into the history of video games. "The original game was a fully analog circuit made from transistors and relays for 1958 and 1959 exhibitions at the Brookhaven National Laboratory as a demo. It featured basic tennis rules, a simulation of gravity and air resistance, and a smash function accelerating the ball hard at low angles."

Physicist William Higinbotham designed the circuit in 1958, building the actual hardware over a three-week period with technician Robert Dvorak. Unlike the far later and better-known Pong, Atari's first major commercial success, the game isn't played from a top-down perspective but side-on: player characters at either side of the flat court hit a ball over a central net in a parabolic trajectory, all displayed in glowing phosphor on the circular screen of an oscilloscope.

Richter's recreation is more homage than clone: the all-analog circuit has been ditched for a modern STMicroelectronics STM32L151 microcontroller, using its 12-bit digital to analog converter (ADC) inputs and buffered direct memory access to ensure smooth gameplay as close to the original as possible — while building the playfield at a 4,096×4,096 resolution, output as with the original via analog signals to an oscilloscope.

More information on the project is available on Hackaday.io, while source code has been published to GitHub under an unspecified license.