IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2015 - 64

Horizontal Line-228 Color Clocks
Horizontal Blank-68 cc

Vertical Frame 262 Lines

Vertical
Blank and Sync:
54 Lines

Horizontal Display-160 Color Clocks

Vertical Blank Processing:
-Process User Inputs
-Detect and Process Collisions
-Compute New Game State, Including Score

Vertical
Display:
208 Lines
Kernel Processing:
-Compute Game
Graphics Pointers,
-Load TIA
Registers
-[Option: Poll
Potentiometer
Inputs]

FIGURE 8. The Combat game TV frame timing.

a two-axis digital joystick with a fire button, bundled
with the VCS
▼ dual potentiometer controllers, each with an on button,
bundled with the VCS
▼ grey-coded 360° rotary controllers, bundled with a driving game
▼ keyboard controllers: 3 x 4 key array, bundled with a basic
cartridge.
The console switches were all soft switches polled by the
game firmware. Starting a game was simple: start the game.
Selecting a game was more complicated: Since each program
supported one or more games to select, in its initial condition,
it had to demonstrate game choices in some way. The user
would start the console with a cartridge installed and toggle
the game select switch until a game was chosen. We considered
another I/O pin for an "Option" button but decided to save the
money. Instead we bundled game choices and options together. Video Olympics [18] had eight types of games, with several
options for each, for 50 total variations of "paddle" games.
To make games playable, it was important to recognize
that for any two opponents, there might be a difference
in skill level. To make it more interesting, we had two soft
switches to handicap one of the players. For example, for
Video Olympics, the difficulty switch would make the paddle
smaller. In Combat [19], the bullets would have a shorter
range and the player could not rotate as quickly.
We added a final soft switch for TV type: color or black
and white. At that time, a substantial minority of customers
▼

FIGURE 9. The original VCS, Flashback 5.0, and controllers.
(Photo courtesy of Deb Freng.)

ParallEl I/o
We also needed other parallel I/O for the console controls and
for the game controllers (see Figure 6). We used:
▼ five 6532 I/O ports for the game console controls: game
start, game select, difficulty (left and right), and color/
black and white (BW); the sixth switch was power
▼ four 6532 I/O ports each for the two controllers
▼ two TIA paddle port inputs for each of the two controllers; we could play four-player pong games
▼ one TIA trigger port for each of the two controllers; they
could also support a light gun.
There were four game controllers designed and shipped
(see Figure 6).

64 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

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july 2015



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