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...")

Read more of this story at Slashdot.