Hercules WorkshopVintage Electronics and Technology Repair Featured Vintage Electronic Game: Head to Head Hockey  © 2010 Hercules Workshop, All Rights Reserved NAME : Head to Head Hockey 
INTRODUCTION This electronic hockey game was part of a trio of two player electronic sports games released by Coleco between 1979 and 1980, the other two being basketball and soccer. The three games are almost identical, including display layout, keyboards and game play. The main differences coming from the colours of the games themselves and the type of figures printed on the display, basketball players, hockey players or soccer players respectively. Coleco branded the trio of games as "Head to Head" and would add baseball, boxing and football models to this popular series between 1981 and 1982. Below are photos we took of the three initial models of the Head to Head series, you can see the displays and keyboards are the same. You might notice something really interesting about the basketball keyboard, it's doesn't have the two middle keys because there's no goalie.
GAME PLAY This is a two player game. A human player always controls the offense while the defense can either be controlled by another human player or by the computer. Game play is very simple. The offense passes the puck between five players looking for an opportunity to shoot the puck at the net and score a goal. The defense controls a player that tries to stay between the puck and the net, they also control the goalie they can move left and right (facing the five offensive positions). You can view or download a copy of the original instructions we've included below. .  Figure 4: Original Game Instructions Downloadable (PDF) INSIDE HEAD TO HEAD HOCKEY The game is controlled by a Texas Instruments TMS1000 4-bit microcontroller unit (MCU). It had 2x 4-bit general registers, 43 instructions, 1-level deep stack, shift-register program counter and no interrupts. For storage it had 1 KB of masked ROM and 64 x 4 bits of RAM built in to the microcontroller. The MCU is the larger IC visible at the top left of the circuit board in the interesting photo below. The two smaller IC's to it's right are 6-digit LED Display Drivers to control the games display. Click Photo for Larger View  Figure 5: Head to Head Hockey Printed Circuit Board (PCB) The photo we took below is poor quality but you can clearly see the LED Display, it's the large black rectangle in the center and also the Keypad Contacts at the edges of the circuit board. You can also see the Piezo Electric Buzzer and Battery Terminals in the photo. Click Photo for Larger View  Figure 6: Head to Head Hockey Display and Keypads A very interesting photo of the underside of the game's top case. You can see the Display Overlay is mounted to a number of posts, it actually looks as if the overlay is held in place by melting the tops of the posts to secure it. Another interesting feature is the Keypad Buttons, they are simply mounted on rockers. All the spring / tension on the keys is provided by the switch contacts themselves. Click Photo for Larger View  Figure 7: Head to Head Hockey Display Overlay and Keypad Buttons SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? Click below to listen to a neat little audio clip. If you'd like to play this game but don't own one then you're in luck. I'm not trying to get you to buy one from us but I wouldn't discourage it either. You can find a lot of them on eBay or other online Buy and Sell sites and they tend to be cheaper than ours, because ours are all reconditioned and tested. However if your interested we carry two versions of this game : Reconditioned - Vintage (1980) Coleco Head to Head Hockey - Version A English If you're into vintage electronic gaming then we have a lot of other used and reconditioned games in our online store. We have a lot of other Coleco games but also games from Mattel Electronics, Entex and some really nice mechanical games from Tomy. Have a great day, [Hercules Workshop Home Page] |
