Bally Astrocade

The Bally Astrocade has a convoluted history as it flopped between names, intended purposes and even availability over its relatively short production run. Developed by Bally's Midway division, originally the hope was to leverage the same video chip used in arcade titles like Gorf and Wizard of Wor into a cartridge based home console..

Bally began taking orders in 1977 for the Bally Home Library Computer, although by the time orders shipped the next year, it had been renamed the Bally Home Library Computer. While some retail establishments did carry the machine, it was mostly computer stores and not the wider distribution enjoyed by the Atari VCS or Intellivision. Poor sales and disinterest in the gaming market, led Bally to stop production of the machine in 1979. The same hardware would emerge again in 1981 after a group of investors purchased the rights to the design. To emphasize the use of the machine as a general computer it shipped with a version of BASIC and was renamed the Bally Computer System. and finally the next year it was given its most familiar name, the Bally Astrocade.

Internally the Astrocade was based on the Zilog Z80, and while the video chip was capable of resolutions up to 320x204, the machine shipped with only 4K of RAM which limited the system to 160x102 in most games, although memory expansions could theoretically enable the higher resolution mode. The chip supported a 4 color display but allowed for programming tricks to allow different palettes on each side of the screen. The Astrocade also supported three channel mono sound. While occasionally marketed as a home computer, the small amount of memory meant that the BASIC cartridge used an even lower resolution 2 color mode, and programming had to be done through a 24 key multifunction keypad.

The Astrocade came with two games built-in, Gunfight and Checkmate as well as calculator and drawing programs. Unfortunately, Bally frequently sold exclusive licenses to other console manufacturers and even first party games often had to use different names to present their own titles. so Wizard of Wor became The Incredible Wizard on the Astrocade. It was relatively common for Astrocade cartridges to include two games on the cartridge that would appear as menu choices along side the internal applications.

Ultimately the Astrocade started to fade with the home video crash in North America of 1983 and by 1985 it had completely disappeared from the marketplace. Portions of the technology in the Astrocade along with a proposed upgrade was also leveraged into the Datamax UV-1, an industrial graphics system for videotape and cable television production.