It's very hard to describe the significance of this game. It was one of the first truly electronic games that used a microcontroller, and latterly a custom chip in an era when such things were radically new. (And I really mean NEW. The very first electronic games just before the video game era.)
The development of the game and subsequent cost optimisation due to its immense success must have been really exciting work.
The original software for this game would have been created on a very expensive emulator and then sent to the factory for programming onto chips. It would have been a very intense time with no room for software errors.
Keep in mind that this was at the start of the electronic revolution. I would have been 13 when this game was released and it was utterly epic at the time.
Here are some links to lead you into the promised rabbit hole:-
The deepest exploration of all. Decapping of chips and ROM dumping with Sean Riddle:-
https://seanriddle.com/simon.html
The Wikipedia entry for the game:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_(game)
A blip in the way URLs are displayed means you may have to add the closing bracket to the above URL manually.
The very first commercial microcontroller which found its way into many other games:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS1000
(Games always seem to be at the forefront of technology.)
If you enjoy these videos you can help support the channel with a dollar for coffee, cookies and random gadgets for disassembly at:-
http://www.bigclive.com/coffee.htm
This also keeps the channel independent of YouTube's advertising algorithms allowing it to be a bit more dangerous and naughty.
The development of the game and subsequent cost optimisation due to its immense success must have been really exciting work.
The original software for this game would have been created on a very expensive emulator and then sent to the factory for programming onto chips. It would have been a very intense time with no room for software errors.
Keep in mind that this was at the start of the electronic revolution. I would have been 13 when this game was released and it was utterly epic at the time.
Here are some links to lead you into the promised rabbit hole:-
The deepest exploration of all. Decapping of chips and ROM dumping with Sean Riddle:-
https://seanriddle.com/simon.html
The Wikipedia entry for the game:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_(game)
A blip in the way URLs are displayed means you may have to add the closing bracket to the above URL manually.
The very first commercial microcontroller which found its way into many other games:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS1000
(Games always seem to be at the forefront of technology.)
If you enjoy these videos you can help support the channel with a dollar for coffee, cookies and random gadgets for disassembly at:-
http://www.bigclive.com/coffee.htm
This also keeps the channel independent of YouTube's advertising algorithms allowing it to be a bit more dangerous and naughty.
Wow! I found the Autism Central Channel and The Alki Channel Combined here Jude
no schematics?
We lived near the coast in Florida so every toy and game I had as a kid ended up with corrosion or the batteries just splooged all over, none had a very long life but I really enjoyed Simon while it lasted.
Isn't that the rounded windows 95 logo?
i have the pocket 2002 simon it's very interesting how there are battery for the light
"In 1974 …" I can beat that by 6 years!
In 1968, I worked as a research engineer at a facility that had a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP8 minicomputer – a device about the size of a wardrobe. This had a row of 12 lights (pre-LED) to show the content of the accumulator in binary. Underneath was a row of 12 paddle switches to enter information, again in binary.
I wrote a small program to "play tennis" for 2 players on the computer. The idea was that one bulb was lit at a time and this moved along the row of 12. By flicking the end paddle switch up briefly as the light approached that end, the player at that end was able to "hit the ball back" – in other words reverse the direction of travel of the moving light. Furthermore, the later one left the return stroke, the faster the ball was "hit" and the more difficult it was for the other player to return the ball. So the skill was to refrain from hitting the ball until the last possible moment, but of course, if you didn't hit it in time, the ball "fell off the end of the accumulator" and you lost that point.
A great time was had by all and some people became very animated whilst playing. One such person, clearly overexcited, managed to rip the paddle switch completely off the front panel of the computer, so a D.E.C. service engineer had to be called out to fix it.
Service engineer: "I've never seen a fault like this before, how did it happen?"
Us: "Erm, er, well, we're not sure, it just sort of fell off."
the link to simon game, is missing a parenthesis, so it appears broken.
I remember when my parents bought this game home for my sister and I in 1978. I was 8 years old. I drove them crazy with it! 🙂
Before that I was playing the small hand held football game. It used the 7 segment display & from what I remember, it was a lot of fun.
Not long after that, they bought me a handheld Pac-Man game.
I wasn't very impressed with the handheld Pac-Man game. It was nothing like the arcade version.
There was a mail order company here in the USA called polypacks that sold surplus electronics. I purchased a package of around 3 boards. They had the screw in lamp holders, probably a early version of what you have. I have no idea what I paid for them, it would have been about forty years ago. Probably didn't pay much because money was pretty tight, could probably sell them each for more than I paid for the bunch. I probably threw them out years ago in a cleaning spree.
Simon says 'Stop unscrewing my case you bearded b*stard'
for the first time in over 25 years I coincidentally saw it yesterday under the table at a friend's house. couldn't resist (alá rubik's syndrome). 2 hours I was visiting we swapped 5 sentences. lool he was playing Sony PS. definitely the worse choice. 🙂
choose your weapon! and I chose the epic one!!! :)) (with much more fun)
Got one boxed in the loft. No idea If it still works…👍 plus the one I have takes the huge 1.5 volt cells…?
I used to be awesome at Simon in the early'/mid 1980s, though mine had the screw-in flashlight bulbs. It even had a spare in the compartment over the 9V logic battery. I am surprised to see one that uses bulbs with a wedge base–especially since we didn't have many wedge base bulbs until the mid/late 1990s here in USA.
The place that I was born and grew up”Lubbock Texas” had 2 big Texas Instrument facilities. Mum worked there in the time period “1974” that you mentioned. She mentioned that they had there own games. Maybe you can find some of those and do a video. Thanks.
I have a boxed, immaculate 1978 edition of this game happily stored away in the loft with all it's manuals etc……. I'm now hoping there are no batteries in it.
Simon was a big enough hit that Milton Bradley invested most of their money in electronic games. They bought General Consumer Electronics (GCE makers of the Vectrex system) They were planning on coming out with a video game system in the US and had spent millions on it when the "Great Video Game Crash of '83" happened.
They never brought their system to market.
In '84 they were bought by Hasbro.
They still sell Simon for a reasonable cost, a mod is inevitable, on a cheap new one that is.
Interesting how they did a simple “random” number generator using the physical timing of the user pressing a button: “In order to provide a seemingly endless and random number of sequences for the game the software counts from 1 to 4 every time the main processing loop is polled. When a button is pressed (to start the game for example) the current value of the counter is used to select the colour and so on as the game is played (this information is hinted at in US Patent 4,207,087). This provides a simple random sequence generator for the game.”