For the first holy grail of 2015, I had to travel all the way to the U.S. Of A! Well, I wasn’t travelling there in person, I was merely scouring the superhighway for retro gaming goodies when I stumbled (Ed: more like screeched!) upon a Bally Astrocade!
The Bally has been somewhat of a white whale – the obsession of finding one in a workable state and at a reasonable price was proving quite difficult. But, to my surprise, I found a boxed Bally Astrocade that had just been listed on eBay. The seller was unaware if the unit was in a working state (it does work!), so they priced it accordingly. I had to rub my eyes to ensure I wasn’t seeing things, but there it was, still available. With the heart-rate up at a phenomenal level, I could not press the ‘Buy It Now’ button fast enough! Finally, the white whale had been tamed and had not destroyed me.
They certainly don’t make them like they used to – that gorgeous wood veneer and awesome shape of the system, and those gun-like ‘control handles’, they double up as an 8-way directional joystick and also as a rotary knob (Ed: Gunfight, here we come!).
The Bally has been welcomed with open arms into the ausretrogamer family – it will be well loved, especially playing The Incredible Wizard (aka: Wizard Of Wor), among other classics!
For those of you that want to know what is under the hood of this gaming relic, here are the specs:
Circuit board and cartridges
- CPU: Z80, 1.789 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 160×102 / Basic 160×88 / Expanded RAM 320×204
- 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 (this could be the play field) use 1 set of colors while the right side (this could show information such as lives and score) used an entirely different set of colors, thus 8 total colors were possible. - Graphic type: Bitmap, 2 plane bitpacked
Specification source: Wikipedia
