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The Astrocade is an early video game console and simple computer system designed by a team at Midway, the videogame division of Bally. Originally referred to as the Bally Home Library Computer, it was released in 1977 but available only through mail order. Delays in the production meant none of the units actually shipped until 1978, and by this time the machine had been renamed the Bally Professional Arcade. In this form it sold mostly at computer stores and had little retail exposure (unlike the Atari VCS). Image File history File links Bally_Professional_Arcade. ...
Image File history File links Bally_Professional_Arcade. ...
Midway Games (NYSE: MWY) is a video game publisher known for such game series as Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, and Spy Hunter. ...
A computer game is a game composed of a computer-controlled virtual universe that players interact with in order to achieve a defined goal or set of goals. ...
Bally (with its distinctive Rolling Ball logo) Bally (originally the Bally Manufacturing Corporation) is an American corporation. ...
For the album by Ash, see 1977 (album). ...
1978 (MCMLXXVIII) was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1978 calendar). ...
The Atari 2600, released in 1977, is the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges instead of having one or more games built in. ...
In 1979 Bally grew less interested in the arcade market and decided to sell off their Consumer Products Division, including development and production of the game console. This page refers to the year 1979. ...
By this point the unit had gathered a following of dedicated users who had learned of the power of the machine through its BASIC cartridge. A group of them arranged to buy the rights to the system from Bally, and set up in business as Astrovision. In 1981 they re-released the unit with the BASIC cartridge included for free, this time known as the Bally Computer System, and then changed the name again in 1982 to Astrocade. It sold under this name until the video game crash of 1983, and then disappeared around 1985. BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of high-level programming languages. ...
1981 (MCMLXXXI) is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
1982 (MCMLXXXII) is a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Screenshot of E.T. (Atari 2600 version) The video game crash of 1983 was the sudden crash of the video game business and the bankruptcy of a number of companies producing home computers and video game consoles in North America in late 1983 and early 1984. ...
This article is about the year. ...
Midway had long been planned to release an expansion system for the unit, known as the ZGRASS-100. The system was being developed by a group of computer artists at the University of Illinois known as the Circle Graphics Habitat, along with programmers at Nutting. Midway felt that such a system, in an external box, would make the Astrocade more interesting to the market. However it was still not ready for release when Bally sold off the division in 1980. A small handful may have been produced as the ZGRASS-32 after the machine was re-released by Astrovision. The University of Illinois is the set of three public universities in Illinois. ...
The system, combined into a single box, would eventually be released as the Datamax UV-1. Aimed at the home computer market while being designed, the machine was now re-targeted as a system for outputting high-quality graphics to video tape. These were offered for sale some time between 1980 and 1982, but it is unknown how many were built. The Datamax UV-1 was a pioneering computer designed by a group of computer graphics artists working at the University of Illinois, known as the Circle Graphics Habitat. ...
Description In the late 1970s Midway contracted Dave Nutting Associates to design a video display chip that could be used in all of their videogame systems, from standup arcade games, to a home computer system. The system Nutting delivered remains perhaps the most powerful graphics system of the 8-bit generation, and was used in most of Midway's classic arcade games of the era, including Gorf and Wizard of Wor. Centipede by Atari is a typical example of a 1980s era arcade game. ...
The home computer is a consumer-friendly word for the second generation of microcomputers (the technical term that was previously used), entering the market in 1977 and becoming common during the 1980s. ...
Gorf is an arcade game, released in 1981 by Midway Games. ...
Wizard Of Wor is an arcade game from the early 1980s, later ported to the Commodore 64. ...
The basic systems were powered by a Zilog Z80 driving the display chip with a RAM buffer in between the two. The display chip had two modes, a low-resolution mode at 160x102, and a high-resolution mode at 320x204, both with 2-bits per pixel for four colors. This sort of color/resolution was normally beyond the capabilities of RAM of the era, but a clever trick, technically "holding the RAS high", allowed them to read one "line" at a time at very high speed into a buffer inside the display chip. The line could then be read out to the screen at a more leisurely rate, while also interfering less with the CPU, which was also trying to use the same memory. The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Zilog from 1976 onwards. ...
This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...
Sadly, on the Astrocade the pins needed to use this "trick" were not connected. Thus the Astrocade system was left with just the lower resolution mode that the hardware supported. In this mode the system used up 160x102 x 2bits = 4080 bytes of memory to hold the screen. Since the machine had only 4k of RAM, this left very little room left over for the program's use, which was used for things like holding the score, or game options.
The Astrocade used color registers, or color indirection as it was often referred to then, so the four colors could be picked from a palette of 256 colors. Color animation was possible by changing the values of the registers, and using a horizontal blank interrupt you could change them from line to line. An additional set of four color registers could be "swapped in" at any point along the line, allowing you to easily create two sections of the screen, split vertically. Clever programmers used this feature to emulate 8 color modes. In computer architecture, a processor register is a small amount of very fast computer memory used to speed the execution of computer programs by providing quick access to commonly used values—typically, the values being in the midst of a calculation at a given point in time. ...
A horizontal blank interrupt is a programming technique used in some systems, notably video games and consoles, to allow program code to be run in the periods when the display hardware is turned off, waiting for the TV to complete its horizontal blank, which takes about 10 uS. The technique...
Unlike the VCS, the Astrocade did not include hardware sprite support. It did, however, include a blitter-like system and software to drive it. Memory above 0x4000 was dedicated to the display, and memory below that to the ROM. If a program wrote to the ROM space (normally impossible, it's "read only" after all) the video chip would take the data, apply a function to it, and then copy the result into the corresponding location in the RAM. Which function to use was stored in a register in the display chip, and included common instructions like XOR and bit-shift. This allowed the Astrocade to support any number of "sprites" independent of hardware, with the downside that it was up to the software to re-draw them when they moved. In computer graphics, a sprite is a two-dimensional image or animation that is integrated into a larger scene. ...
A Blitter (acronym for BLock Image TransferrER) is a chip that specialises in bitmap data-transfer using bit blit methods. ...
Read-only memory (ROM) is used as a storage medium in computers. ...
The Astrocade was one of the early cartridge-based systems, using cartridges known as Videocades that were designed to be as close in size and shape as possible to a cassette tape. The unit also included two games built into the ROM, Gunfight and Checkmate, along with the simple but useful Calculator and a "doodle" program called Scribbling. For the meaning of cassette in genetics, see cassette (genetics). ...
Read-only memory (ROM) is used as a storage medium in computers. ...
The Astrocade also included a BASIC cartridge as well, which presented a problem given that the display alone used up almost all the RAM. The solution to this problem was very complex, yet very clever. The BASIC program was stored in the video RAM by interleaving every bit of the program along with the display itself, BASIC used all the even-numbered bits, and the display got the odd-numbered bits. The BASIC interpreter would read out two bytes, drop all the odd-numbered bits, and assemble the results into a single byte of code. This was rendered invisible by setting two of the colors to be the same as the other two, such that colors 01 and 11 would be the same (white), so the presence, or lack, of a bit for BASIC had no effect on the screen. Additional memory was scavenged by using less lines vertically, only 88 instead of the full 102. The end result of all this was to manage to squeeze out 1760 bytes of RAM for BASIC programs. This article is about the unit of information. ...
An interpreter is a computer program that executes other programs. ...
A byte is commonly used as a unit of storage measurement in computers, regardless of the type of data being stored. ...
On the front of the unit was a 24-key "hex-pad" keyboard used for selecting games and options. Most cartridges included two games, and when they were inserted the machine would reset and display a menu starting with the programs on the cartridge and then listing the four built-in programs. BASIC was programmed, labouriously, though this keyboard by assigning each of the keys a single command, number and several alpha characters. These were selected through a set of 4 colored shift keys. This way you simply typed "WORD"(gold) shift then the "+" key and got GOTO.
On the back were a number of ports, including connectors for power, the controllers, and an expansion port. One oddity was that the top of the unit was empty, and could be opened to store up to 15 cartridges.
The Astrocade featured a relatively complex and versatile input device. The controllers for the system included several types of control mechanisms: the controller was shaped as a pistol-style grip with trigger switch on the front; a small 4-switch/8-way joystick was placed on top of the grip, and the shaft of the joystick connected to a potentiometer, meaning that the stick could be rotated to double as a paddle controller. Used in combination this set of controls allowed for more complex interaction with the games than any other game controller of the era. By most reports the controllers were excellent, but had the downside of breaking frequently. For other uses, see Joystick (disambiguation). ...
schematic symbol for a potentiometer Originally the term potentiometer was used to describe an apparatus used to measure the potential (or voltage) in a circuit by tapping off a portion of a known voltage from a resistive slide wire and comparing it with the unknown voltage by means of a...
The ZGRASS unit sat under the Astrocade and turned it into a "real" computer, including a full keyboard, a math co-processor (FPU), 32k of RAM, and a new 32k ROM containing the GRASS programming language (sometimes referred to as GRAFIX on this machine). The unit also added I/O ports for a cassette and floppy disk, allowing it to be used with CP/M. A co-processor is a secondary processor in a computer that handles tasks that the general-purpose CPU either cannot implement, or does not implement for efficiency reasons. ...
A floating point unit (FPU) is a part of a CPU specially designed to carry out operations on floating point numbers. ...
GRASS (GRAphics Symbiosis System) was a programming language created to script visual animations in 2D. GRASS was similar to the BASIC programming language in syntax, but added numerous instructions for specifying 2D object animation, including scaling, translation, rotation and color changes over time. ...
A floppy disk is a data storage device that is composed of a ring of thin, flexible (i. ...
CP/M is an operating system created for Intel 8080/85 and Zilog Z80 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. ...
Specifications
Circuit Board and Cartridges - CPU: Z80, 3.579 MHz
- RAM: 4k (up to 64k with external modules in the expansion port)
- ROM: 8k
- Cart ROM: 8k
- Expansion: 64K total
- Ports: 4 controller, 1 expansion, 1 light pen
- Sound: 3 voices + noise/vibrato effects (played through the TV)
Video - Resolution: True 160x102 / Basic 160x88 / Expanded RAM 320x204
- Colors: True 8* / Basic 2
- The bitmap structure of the Bally actually only allows for 4 color settings. However, through the use of 2 color palettes and a left/right boundary control byte you could have the left section of screen (lets call this the play field) use 1 set of colors while the right side (Info field) used an entirely different set of colors, thus 8 total colors were possible.
- Graphic type: Bitmap, 2 plane bitpacked
Screenshot gallery Bally's Version of Basic Image File history File links Bally Astrocade Basic File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ...
| Gate Escape Image File history File links Gate Escape for the Bally Astrocade This is a screenshot of a copyrighted computer game or video game. ...
| ICBM Attack Image File history File links ICBM Attack for the Bally Astrocade This is a screenshot of a copyrighted computer game or video game. ...
| Ms. Candyman Image File history File links MS Candyman for the Bally Astrocade This is a screenshot of a copyrighted computer game or video game. ...
| Treasure Cove Image File history File links Screenshot of Treasure Cove for the Bally Astrocade This is a screenshot of a copyrighted computer game or video game. ...
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List of games - 280 Zzzap / Dodgem
- Amazing Maze / Tic Tac Toe
- Artillery Duel
- Astro Battle
- Bally Pin
- Basic (not a game but included for completeness )
- Basketball
- Bingo Math / Speed Math
- Bioryhtm
- Blackjack / Poker / Acey-Deucy
- Blast Droids
- Bowling
- Checkers / Backgammon
- Clowns / Brickyard
- Coloring Book
- Conan The Barbarian
- Cosmic Raiders
- Dog Patch
- Drag Race / Desert Fox
- Football
- Galactic Invasion
- Galaxian
- Grand Prix / Demolition Derby
- ICBM Attack
- Incredible Wizard
- Letter Match / Spell 'N Score / Crosswords
- Machine Language Manager (not a game but included for completeness )
- Mazeman
- Median
- Missile Attack
- Ms. CandyMan
- Muncher
- Music Maker
- Panzer Attack / Red Baron
- Pirates Chase
- Sea Devil
- Seawolf / Missile
- Soccer
- Solar Conqueror
- Space Fortress
- Space Invaders
- Star Battle
- Tornado Baseball / Tennis / Hockey / Handball
- Treasure Cove
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