RIP Ralph Baer. 🙁

Came very close to meeting him at a videogame convention, but didn't. I did get to see the Brown Box prototype though.

My condolences to Ralph Baer's family and friends.

My uncle spoke with him when he gave a lecture at a local community college in the late 1980's and was very impressed by his intelligence and knowledge. No wonder he was very sad and silent this morning 😐

another great mind to leave us, RIP

keropi wrote:

another great mind to leave us, RIP

ditto. I heard about him, but did not know a lot about him. I read about him and he sounds really cool.

my condolences to his family.

shame he didn't get the attention of other video game pioneers until much later , by which point it was too late.

It's always sad when a pioneer passes on. I have great respect for his work. One thing I did find a little bit lame, though, was how the original Odyssey used "cartridges" but all the cartridges did was depress different combinations of buttons on the console to select one of the built in games. They didn't have a ROM chip that stored the game like later game systems did. It seems like the Pong machines got it right in that regard in that they allowed you to manually select games by flipping the switches or pressing the buttons on the console instead of deceiving you into believing the game was on the cartridge when it wasn't. The Fairchild Channel F finally introduced the ROM cartridge but Fairchild didn't have the marketing muscle or distribution channels to sell enough systems and then Atari came along and made history with the VCS/2600, ending the dominance of the dedicated Pong machines, and the race was officially on. The VCS was so popular that they were still being shipped to retailers as late as 1992. Ralph Baer was the vital link in the chain that made it all possible, though. He brought video games out of the laboratory setting and into the world at large and started an industry.

sliderider wrote:

One thing I did find a little bit lame, though, was how the original Odyssey used "cartridges" but all the cartridges did was depress different combinations of buttons on the console to select one of the built in games. They didn't have a ROM chip that stored the game like later game systems did.

That's because the Odyssey wasn't a computer. It wasn't even digital.

The cartridges electrically reconfigured the gameplay elements (bat, ball and wall). For instance, the player 1 paddle may have its X position tied to the input for one game, but its Y position tied to the input in another.

You could have greater variation this way than simply having a "Game A/B" switch, and it was probably simpler+cheaper than implementing a rotary switch with a GAL or ULA for that purpose.

Actually, it's a fairly common myth that the original Magnavox Odyssey was an analog machine. It didn't have a CPU, but it did use digital circuits implemented in discrete logic. Here's an interview from Ralph Baer himself on the topic: http://web.archive.org/web/20060213141334/htt … cfm?itemID=1049

Can't open that link, apparently archive.org is blocked on work's Internet...??

Anyhow, yeah, it does have some digital elements, such as which direction the ball is travelling, and whether or not the raster should be light or dark at this present moment.

But the motion, and the generation of graphic elements are analogue. The position of the paddles, ball, and wall are determined by capacitors charging and discharging at rates set by variable and fixed resistors. They don't have discrete positions they can occupy, and that is the definition of analogue.

Of course none of this is to diminish his work. In fact I find it incredibly ingenious.

RIP Ralph.

SquallStrife wrote:

Can't open that link, apparently archive.org is blocked on work's Internet...??

Here's the relevant snippet:

Ralph Baer wrote:

The Brown Box and its 1968 predecessor developmental systems were neither built around an analog computer (come on now...this was a consumer product!) nor was a purely analog design. While its circuitry was made up of discrete components, the circuits contained Flip-Flops, AND and OR gates, One-Shots, diode matrices, etc...what are these circuits if they are not digital circuits? People think that discrete component circuitry was strictly analog. This is complete nonsense. Of course we built digital circuits in the forties and fifties before there were IC's. In the sixties, plug-in cards with as little as one or two flip-flops were typical of logic modules of the day. So the notion that the Brown Box and its production version, the Magnavox Odyssey game was comprised of "analog circuits" is a myth...but that myth has a real origin: During the lawsuits, the opposition (Bally-Midway, Seeburg, etc) tried to make the judge believe that our circuits were analog and theirs were digital and hence they didn't fall under the Claims of our patents. The judges ruled otherwise and saw through this ploy in a hurry.

Cheers for that.

And it does match up with the schematics I've seen.

There are digital elements to it, but the pointy end is still simple RC timers. It's a very cool design, don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan.

I'm just worried that there will be a Steve Jobs effect on prices of early Magnavox game consoles now that the word is out about Baer passing.

sliderider wrote:

I'm just worried that there will be a Steve Jobs effect on prices of early Magnavox game consoles now that the word is out about Baer passing.

I wouldn't doubt it. I was worried about this too because I have been looking for an odyssey for a long time now. I think with his death I'm going to be SOL in finding one for a decent price now. I have a pretty big console collection and it would be nice to get an odyssey to make it more complete. Oh well...for me, Baer will be missed more than having an odyssey. RIP Ralph Baer.