Of the consoles that launched in the US during the 70s, the Atari 2600 undoubtedly became the most famous, with the games still able to be re-packaged for sale in modern times; the Intellivision (1979) makes second place in overall historic sales. The Odyssey 2 (1978) falls in third.
There were more US launches during this time, but they have less recognition: the RCA Studio II, Fairchild Channel F, APF MP1000, and the Bally Professional Arcade, the last one being sometimes dubbed the Astrocade. As a child during the early 80s I hadn’t heard of any of them.
The most ill-fated of these might be the RCA Studio II, which launched in January 1977 only to be followed by a discontinuation announcement in February 1978, but today’s topic is the Astrocade, which had one element that made it unique of all the systems: the combination of Bally BASIC and a tape drive.
The ad above from 1982 touts how “you can even create your own games in Astrocade BASIC” and ends with:
Astrocade, the home entertainment sensation that’s a personal computer too.
Bally BASIC was published in 1978. The system did not have a keyboard but you could use its keypad to enter in arbitrary text with enough patience, using a template to tell you what the keys meant. The fact you could not only write games but save them to tape meant the Astrocade attained a “home brew” fanbase contemporary with the console that none of the other second-generation consoles had at the time. This was a console that had “bedroom coders” we’d normally associate with computers, and these coders created tapes that were sold in newsletters. So Astrocade’s “official” catalog is only a small subset of the games (and art demos) made available in the late 70s and early 80s. Here you can watch a computer art tape published in 1980 by W&W Software Sales:
The author of today’s game, John Collins of Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, has work in the Arcadian dating back to 1979.
He also had interest in adventure games, marking Bally’s Alley as “the first in a series of adventure programs I hope to write” and also claimed it “may take days or even weeks to complete”. It first appeared in the classified ads for the Arcadian, May 19, 1980.
While a tape hasn’t survived to us of the game, the original typed copy has (complete with handwritten notes for the variables) and in November 2022 it was typed in by Paul Thacker. He considered it a “work in progress” but it’s sat since 2022 with no changes so I’m assuming it’s in the ballpark of what Collins intended.
Bally’s Alley – An adventure game; one player. Game can last for days or weeks; can save at any point for restart; can go in nine directions; find the ten treasures and return to house; can only carry four treasures at one time. Each move subtracts a point. A magic word-sound-color will be helpful.
— Description from the Bally / Astro Professional Arcade Software and Hardware Sourcebook, Summer 1982
Now we get to the most complicated part of the whole proceedings: running the thing. First off, this has to be done with MAME, which officially got tape support in 2019. There’s a video here of the process. That’s fussy enough as it is, but the more painful part is the keypad.
To type a “red character” you press the button 0, which switches you to the reds, then press the button with the letter in red you want. So the letter Q, for example is 0 and then 8. On top of all that there’s no one-to-one mapping on modern keyboard. Adam Trionfo suggests keyboard stickers:
However, this is not the default mapping in MAME! Here are the keys for the “bottom four” of the pad, which let you change between “green mode”, “red mode”, “blue mode”, and “yellow mode” (or WORDS).
E = green
0 = red
. = blue
enter (number pad) = yellow
The last three seem like they’re trying to do something with the real number pad, except the number pad versions of the keys don’t work! (That’s is, 0 on the number pad does not get read by MAME as the red key — you have to use the regular key 0.) On top of that, the colors are a lie; while the “green” button turns the screen green to indicate your setting, and the “yellow” button turns the screen yellow, red goes to orange and blue turns the screen pink, and I’m not kidding:
What you see when you press “blue”.
If this was part of a Myst-style-game puzzle using cryptic old equipment, I’d ding it marks for being too unrealistic.
There was some more cryptic mess behind the scenes (hot tip: of the four slots the cassette is required to be plugged into port 3) but I’m going to save any more technical discussion for the comments and move on here with the game itself.
The game unfortunately does not give you a starting location, but I worked out later the player begins at Bally’s Alley. Just to the north is the player’s home where the treasure goes:
The book description earlier mentions ten treasures. Poking in the source code, there’s only five listed, but maybe there’s some weird way they’re doubling, kind of like Pokémon vs. Shiny Pokémon.
1 lets you pick a direction, 1 through 9, or from the format here, N, S, E, W, UP, DOWN, SW, NE, NW. No southeast! The author ran out of buttons.
(In MAME, 1 through 9 are 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, R, S, and H respectively.)
Command lets you type an arbitrary word or abbreviation. G stands for GET and DR stands for drop. (In MAME, E H for the “G”, and “E S . 8” for the “DR”.)
When you DROP you specify by item number which thing you want to drop, so 67 would be the ROPE as shown being carried above.
Paul Thacker tested the game and this is the only part of the map he managed to make:
He concluded perhaps there’s something still broken in the source code (part of it was messy and handwritten), and I think he’s right, but not in this exact spot. I realized some of the random connections were because rooms were getting duplicated. In the Garden, it appeared sometimes I could go north to Bally’s Alley, and sometimes I could go south to the Garage. Instead, these are both two entirely different rooms with the same name! I confirmed this by dropping an item, which was only present in one of the variations.
The “duplicate name” trick continues through the early areas but it isn’t utterly nonsense, at least:
I’m unclear if the “rope”, “knife” or “keys” serve any practical purpose. If they do it seems to be commandless (that is, you can go through a particular exit if you are carrying the right thing, but the game doesn’t ask you to CUT something, which would be hard to figure out how to type anyway). They did help with the early mapping but once I got the hang of the author’s tendencies I didn’t need them.
If the keys are needed anywhere they’d be at the Well With Locked Cover, but I dropped them and tested both exits and I wasn’t stopped by a lack of keys.
Past the well was the final section I was able to get to, a “color maze”. The rooms are varying colors using the Astrocade’s curious choices for a main palette.
I was able to find a lamp (see above) and some coins (the only treasure I saw) but then I hit an unfortunate room that was “blank”, that is, there was no room description.
I could still try to move around; going NE leads back to one of the pink rooms, and going down just loops in the same room, but I suspect the down-exit is broken and not intended to be the game’s real destination.
This was an astonishing technical feat on a platform clearly not designed to have a text adventure, and it was delightful to enter territory likely nobody but the author had ever seen. If nothing else, it was wild to see a game with the southeast exit (and only the southeast exit) missing. Still, this boils down to mostly exploration and mapping (there’s a magic word mentioned in the source and two other possible words, but I still don’t see any effects other than movement). I’m still willing to take another swing if the source gets a fix (the file is marked “WIP” because of the uncertainty on the handwriting).
However, we aren’t done with Collins yet: he called this the first in a series, and he did manage to make a second adventure! His second is also for the Astrocade, this time with graphics, and seems to be more than just an exploration journey. Stay tuned!
Special thanks to Kevin Bunch whose book Atari Archive I used as a reference (it’s one of the best books out there about second-generation consoles) and who helped me get over the technical difficulties with MAME.
Renga in Blue 