The first console I ever worked on!

My friend Tiago Franco and I made this weird thing in about 3 days, using an Arduino and Processing, for a school project.

PONG44 is a Pong clone where you can only play with 4 players. Each player moves the paddle with a special controller that uses a light sensor. More light moves a paddle in one direction, while less light moves it in the opposite one. It’s possible to stop the paddle by having just the right amount of light hitting the sensor.

Since light wasn’t a stable factor, each controller had to be calibrated on the spot, by finding the minimum and maximum light values. The rest is calculated automatically.

This whole rig was put together for the Finalists Expo back in July of 2009 at the Escola Superior de Artes e Design das Caldas da Rainha.

“Atario” was a bad wordplay between “Atari” and “otário”, which means “sucker” in Portuguese. And Caldas da Rainha is all about the ceramic dongs, so we added some testis to the Atari logo just for giggles.