In december of 2023, the original flip dot display from from the tv game show Family Feud was donated to The Strong National Museum of Play, where I was working as an arcade technician. When it was donated, Corey Cooper (the son of the creator of the sign) came to the museum and was able to get it running, but it was running on old and hard to maintain hardware that was not reliable for exhibition purposes. The code he had written could only be compiled on a windows XP laptop that Corey bought, which was running an Apple 2e emulator. I was tasked with reverse engineering this hardware and coming up with a modern system to run the sign.
For those who are not familiar with how these signs operate, the “pixels” are magnetic dots – one side black, one side yellow- that flip depending on the polarization of the magnet behind them.
Image from eldisrl.com
Using this simple concept, complex images can be drawn when arrays of these dots are flipped in sequence.
Image from damow.net
The board from family feud of course operates on this same principal but at a much larger scale. The array above is from an old bus and is arranged in a 14 x 20 dot grid, so it uses 280 individual disks with a magnet behind each one. The FF board used 6 panels, each with 40 displays. Each display was 5 dots wide and 7 dots long. In total there were 1,400 dots per panel meaning, adding up to 8,400 dots, which were each mounted on their own electromagnet.
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