On impulse, I bought a solder-up electronic game kit to try my skill at soldering an 8-pin IC. It worked, and I even figured out how to beat the game. Like all toys, it lost interest after a short time. Then I noticed the IC itself is not soldered to the board, but fits in a DIP socket -which is soldered to the board. So, the chip can be removed and re-purposed? By search I found the chip, or what appears to be a close match. My question is, can anybody suggest an interesting modification by either re-programming the game as assembled, or swapping the chip to a new application? I have a couple of Attiny85 chips on my parts list. I want to try some simple boot-loading experiments before hacking an existing device. I was able to find one tutorial using the chip -but it's far beyond my understanding and doesn't really fire my imagination. I bookmarked it anyway, and created a folder for future projects. Does anyone have experience with this chip, the game, or can offer interesting ideas? The chip is printed 12F615 e3 I/P HEU 1504, and is offered by microchip.com, with complete documentation on its web page. The game kit is by Radio Shack, "Brain Game Kit" Catalog #: 2770356.
That is a PIC programmable microprocessor and you could program it to do other things. However, you will need development software and a PIC programmer to do that. Expect to pay $50 or more for a programmer.
PICs in that range have rather severe memory limitations compared to similar sized chips from Atmel, which you can program using the Arduino environment.