Toss Up Simulators

This page features reasonably accurate simulators of the classic Nintendo Game & Watch game Toss Up (aka Ball).

The easiest way to see this in action is to play the HTML 5 version that works with most modern browsers. Alternatively look at the downloads section for other versions.

Background

Toss Up came out in 1980 and was the first in the very successful Game & Watch series of games made by Nintendo. Toss Up was in fact distributed by a company called TimeOut. Nintendo also released the game themselves calling it Ball. The game was also distributed in Germany by yet another company using the moniker of Jolly Jongleur. There is also some speculation that the game was originally called Acrobat, since the model code is AC-01. I've stuck to using the name Toss Up because that's how I remember it and is name used on the original game I own. Also, there's already a Ball simulator available for Windows (see the G&W Simulators site), therefore using the name Toss Up avoids potential mix ups.

The Game & Watch format was the brainchild of Gunpei Yokoi. Yokoi later went on to give us the Game Boy. It's easy to see a natural progression from these early handheld games to the hugely successful Game Boy.

Downloads

Four versions of the simulator are available. If you're curious how I went about creating them then take a look here.

• Toss Up for Windows runs on 32 bit versions of Windows (namely Win95, Win98, WinME, NT 4, Win2000 and WinXP - note that NT 3.5x is not supported). It can be downloaded here: tossup_w32.zip (220K).
• Toss Up for HTML5 should be playable inside a modern browser.
• Toss up for Java should run in Java compatible browsers.
• Toss Up v1.0 for Palm runs on a device running PalmOS 3.0 and greater. It can be downloaded here: tossup_palm.zip (8K). A screenshot from the game can be seen here.

Links

Game & Watch site: This is the main site giving information about the Game & Watchseries for collectors.

G&W Simulators: This site contains a comprehensive collection of simulators for other Game & Watch games.

Musuem of Electronic Games & Art created a large screen version of Ball using my timing information.

Contact

Send any questions, feedback or comments to [email protected].