A colleague of mine at one of our other engineering departments turned up at work last week with a fairly original (late 1970s clone) Pong game. Primitive but great fun - and amazing what purely analog circuitry can do.
But of course I'm not going to get outdone here, and neither is our department, so had a quick poll of fellow team members and we quickly came to the conclusion that the best answer to 1970s Pong is 1980s EGA Arkanoid. So I got to it this evening. I have a miniscule 486SLC board in a 5cm high case with just enough room for two ISA slots, one on either side of a riser. Unfortunately no onboard I/O, so one slot gets eaten by that. Oh well, no sound card then. I was intending to stick the EGA card from an Olivetti M240 in the other one, but whatever Olivetti have done in terms of customization, I can't get it to give me any sort of image here, so instead I've used an Ara Tseng ET3000AX card in EGA mode. Not exactly elegant, but gets the job done. Unfortunately I don't have any TTL monitors, so I'm using an IBM 8513 (of PS/2 fame) with my MCE2VGA.
Software is the clever bit. I've only hooked up a Gotek to the system as despite adding a new battery pack to replace the Varta monster that leaked over half the board it keeps losing settings. Ironically I think the battery traces are the only ones damages. Anyway, Gotek... basically I've just made a bunch of bootable floppy images and added games to them: Arkanoid Revenge of Doh (because much better than original on PC), Prince of Persia, Duke Nukum, Lemmings, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. So all you need to do is to select 0-5 on the Gotek at boot and you get the game. Even my manager should be able to manage that 😉
Will take some pics once it's all installed tomorrow. Just getting it there will be fun. I've appropriated my partner's shopping trolley and duct taped the monitor and case to it. That should be good for some odd looks in the metro 😜