Retrocomputing Enthusiast Repairs Mattel's 48-Year-Old Handheld Videogame

Back in 1976, Mattel Electronics Auto Race became the very first handheld game to use only solid-state electronics, according to Wikipedia. (Its only mechanical elements were its on/off switch and hand-operated controls...) Nearly half a century goes by — until the ancient and broken gizmo reaches long-time Slashdot reader Shayde, who "dove into disassembling the unit and figuring out the problem."

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 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) 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...")

Two things

[93 Escort Wagon]

1) Well done, Shayde!

2) It's nice to see that the "old Slashdot" will still raise its head occasionally.

Re:

[Shayde]

I'm just happy i never forgot my login info. Would hate to give up the low number / short name :)

Re:

[_merlin]

Sorry dude, but we don't have low UIDs or short names. We both got in after the gold rush. I'd actually been reading Slashdot for over a year without commenting before I created an account.

Re: Two things

[Dominic]

Six digit user IDs, eh?

Newbies :)

Re:

[Compuser]

For realz :)
Old fogies represent.

Re:

[msk]

Present.

Re:

[UnknownSoldier]

Yeah, yeah. =P

Kind of makes me wonder who got the 5-digit 65535 ?

Re:

[gdm]

You tell 'im.....

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh, lost me at 'sauter'.

Re:

[AmazingRuss]

I think it adequately described what he did to the first connector.

Re:

[Shayde]

Can't argue with that. In my defense, _I_ didnt' write that copy, that's all EditorDavid (actually I'm sort of happy about what he wrote - it was better than my submission text, cept for the SAULDER part. I'm dyin here)

Meanwhile at Coleco...

[Two99Point80]

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)

[chas.williams]

To fry in a small quantity of fat or oil. It is often used to reflow pesky BGAs.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, the proper word is "solder" and most parts of the world pronounce the "l".

Re:

[AmazingRuss]

I think he meant "to slaughter with a soldering iron".

ROM

[michaelmalak]

The ROM was 512 bytes https://www.seanriddle.com/firstmattelledgames.html [seanriddle.com]

Re: ROM

[Slashythenkilly]

Oddly, the games had more heart and soul.

I never had this one

[rsilvergun]

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 when swap meets didn't have corporate lawyers prowling them for illegal goods.

Re:

[cusco]

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:I never had this one

[Shayde]

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:

[93 Escort Wagon]

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

Re:

[Shayde]

That's definitely Mattel Football - short : https://www.youtube.com/shorts... [youtube.com] - this should bring some nostalgia for ya.

Mattel Electronics Baseball

[kriston]

I had a Mattel Electronics Baseball in the 1970s. I spent many hours on that thing before videogames came out for real.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't that released in like 1978? The 2600 was already out along with numerous arcade machines.

I played Pong in 1977 or 78 and knew what was possible. I never wanted those dinky LED toys.