#i can't even show how the trippy scoreboard even looked like as the chip now completely degraded ;w;

[clairestrogen]

So i was tinkering with the Ameprod TVG-10 pong console i got, and was curious to test out if any of my AY-3-8500 chips are working, as the original one in the console started to malfunction (the score part of the picture lost started going shaking around the screen, like it lost it's synchronisation).

So it turns out that, all other 2 AY-3-8500 chips that i have bought (because of an earlier repair attempt) are all in working condition:33 (which means money was spent unnecessarily).

And i was curious to test out the original AY chip that was in the first Pong console that i bought (Universum TV Multispiel 2010, the one that looks like a tv pilot/phone, and is basically a clone of Radio Shack TV scoreboard without lightgun capability), and OMG it also works!!

And so (for now) i have only 1 faulty AY-3-8500 chip

(I assume produced in 5th week of 1983)

This would have been an expensive repair in Poland at the time, as these could only be bought via foreign currency (idk how to translate dewiza to English).

In 1980, Elwro (which was the company responsible for producing computers/calculators/precision electronics), bought around 10k IC's from General Instruments, and around this many consoles were produced.

After the supply of bought IC's ran out, Elwro reached out to Ameprod (which was a Polish company functioning in the USA, and mainly imported western commodities to Poland), and after some adjusting to Polish laws about trading (both companies had to do work with producing each unit of the console, so for example the case and main board was manufactured in Poland, then was sent to Ameprod which soldered and screwed it all together), the production lasted all the way till end of 1983, with 100k units produced total.

It was the first and only mass produced (as there small test runs of other video game consoles previously, even back in 1977) polish video game console.

It's easy to say that it was many people's first ever encounter with a video game (or even the possibility of being able to control the picture on the screen i suppose), as then almost no one owned a home computer, and that really haven't changed until the mid-to-late 80's (in Poland).