Bally Astrocade

~ the obituary ~

Bally Manufacturing made pinball tables and slot machines, and in october 1977 it announced a home machine called the Bally Home Library Computer. The name was the pitch. Production slipped, the mail order units from december never really moved, and what actually reached stores in april 1978 was renamed the Bally Professional Arcade and cost $299. Inside was a Zilog Z80 at 1.789 MHz with 4K of RAM behind it, driving a custom graphics chip designed by Dave Nutting Associates, the same outfit that had been building Bally's arcade hardware.

The graphics were the reason to want one. It could do 160 by 102 in color out of the box and 320 by 204 with expansion memory, against an Atari VCS that had 128 bytes of RAM and no framebuffer at all. Gunfight and Checkmate were burned into ROM, with a calculator and a drawing program sitting alongside them. A BASIC cartridge written by Jamie Fenton, expanded out of Palo Alto Tiny BASIC, let you type programs on the console's own membrane keypad and save them to cassette, which is a miserable way to enter code and was still more than most consoles offered.

By 1979 Bally had lost interest and put its whole Consumer Products Division up for sale. A group of enthusiasts who had been building their own machine bought the rights in 1980, introduced by a corporate buyer at Montgomery Ward, and brought the console back in 1981 as the Bally Computer System with the BASIC cartridge included free. In 1982 it was renamed once more, to Astrocade. It sold under that name until the crash of 1983 emptied the shelves, and disappeared around 1985.

This was over before I was born and it was a North American product from a pinball company, so it arrives entirely as paper. The part that is not historical is the roadmap. A product that ships with a promise of what it will become in six months is asking you to buy the promise, and I have watched that transaction go the same way on hardware I have worked on. The expansion is real and it is genuinely being built, and half the team believes it lands next quarter. What the customer gets is what is in the box, and the Astrocade spent five years asking people to look past the box at something that was never going to be in it.

~ the case file ~

~ the keyboard that never came ~

The add-under was called ZGRASS, after a graphics language that came out of Tom DeFanti's group of computer graphics artists at the University of Illinois Chicago, and it was supposed to slide beneath the console and turn it into a computer with a real keyboard. It showed up at the january 1981 CES as the ZGRASS-32 with 32K of RAM and 16K of ROM. Over the following months those two numbers swapped places and then climbed to 64K and 32K, which is what a specification does when nobody is actually building against it. The Votrax speech synthesizer came off the sheet, the product was renamed the ZGRASS-100, and it missed again.

A handful were built. The full assets of Alternative Engineering, the firm contracted to finally produce the thing, surfaced later on the collector market, which is how anyone knows how close it got. Astrocade Inc filed for Chapter 11 with the expansion still unreleased. The language itself did better than the hardware, ending up in the Datamax UV-1, a machine sold to video artists rather than to anybody in a living room.

~ how it actually ended ~

The crash of 1983 is the recorded cause and it is not the whole one. The Astrocade cost $299 in 1978 against $199 for a VCS, and it never got the volume to bring that down. By 1982 the ColecoVision could match its graphics for less money, made by a company that could actually fill a shelf with cartridges. The commercial cartridge catalog stayed in the dozens across the machine's whole life, which meant every buyer was making a bet on a library that did not exist yet.

What is left is a small and unusually stubborn community. The BASIC cartridge meant people wrote for the machine at home from 1978 onward and traded programs on cassette, so the Astrocade has homebrew going back to its own lifetime rather than picked up decades later by collectors. Its graphics chip design fed back into Bally's arcade cabinets, which is the one place the hardware made money.

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