I gots ta know... what makes Astrocade so funky?

[Jess Ragan]

http://video.google.com/url?docid=87395615...i_s1OyUll3E6DgA

 

I've been doing a little research on the Bally Astrocade, and here's what I've discovered:

 

* The system is based on the arcade hardware used in Midway's early arcade games, particularly Wizard of Wor and Space Fortress

* Although the system has a rich color palette, it can only put four of its 256 available colors onscreen at any one time.

* However, the screen can be split into two parts, with four colors available to each half.

* The Astrocade has a high resolution mode, but the pins on the system's motherboard were left unconnected, essentially neutering the console!

* There are no hardware sprite capabilities... everything has to be done with bit-mapped graphics.

* Filling the entire screen with graphics leaves very little memory for the game logic or anything else!

* Any of the four colors can be put on the same line, resulting in the highly detailed characters in The Incredible Wizard.

* The system has 4K of RAM, a massive step up from the 128 bytes in the Atari 2600. That can be pushed up to 64K with expansion.

 

This is some pretty crazy stuff. Why would anyone intentionally lobotomize their own game system? Also, why is it that nearly every classic game system from the late 70's and early 80's excels in one area while being seriously deficient in several others? 4K was an enormous amount of memory for a game system in 1978, yet the Astrocade was limited to four colors and a low, low resolution. The Intellivision was arguably a 16-bit system but its clock speed was miserably slow. The Atari 2600 was capable of displaying up to 128 colors but it had no dedicated graphics controller, forcing designers to draw their visuals on an ever-moving scanline. Was there ever a classic game console with balanced technical specifications?

 

Also, if you're reading this RiffRaff (and I know you are!), how are you able to transcend the limitations of the Astrocade? Inquiring minds want to know!

[+remowilliams]

What's neat about the early consoles is that often each of them excels in specific areas while often failing badly in others. All of them together might have made the super system!

[Jess Ragan]

I've got that! It's called the NES. ^_^

 

All joking aside, here are a couple of mock-ups I made that illustrate the Astrocade's graphics limitations. Gorf is recognizable as a conversion of the arcade game (it helps that Gorf was running on hardware that was essentially a supercharged Astrocade) but Blue Print... well, that one's pretty messed up. I shudder to imagine what Street Fighter II might have looked like on the system!

[ZylonBane]

Why would anyone intentionally lobotomize their own game system?

You already answered your own question. The Astrocade's high-res mode was disabled because there wasn't enough RAM to support it.

 

Also, why is it that nearly every classic game system from the late 70's and early 80's excels in one area while being seriously deficient in several others?

So they would actually be, y'know... affordable? Welcome to the wonderful world of design compromise.

 

Incidentally, the Astrocade is perfectly capable of display its entire palette onscreen at once. It just requires some raster interrupt trickery, which for some reason none of the official games bothered with.

[Jess Ragan]

Oh Zylon, I can't tell you how I've missed your effervescent personality!

 

Seriously, though, I'm well aware of how expensive computer hardware was in the late 1970's. I'm just asking why developers didn't take the time to design a jack of all trades, with balanced technical specifications. Most early consoles aren't balanced at all, with a heavy technological investment made in one area and almost no attention paid to other aspects of their design.

[christianscott27]

If one overlooks the controllers the Colecovison is well balanced. You could also say the RCA Studio II is well balanced in that its sucks in just about every measure. I'd like to say some good things about the Astrocade, I have a nearly complete collection but I'm loathe to play it as it seems to on the edge of a full breakdown. Hardware wise they are awful machines, something is not right about the power supply etc.

[A Sprite]

I shudder to imagine what Street Fighter II might have looked like on the system!

 

 

Free inside every Happy Meal!

 

Not dirty if you connect the dots properly!

Edited November 4, 2007 by A Sprite

[Bill Brasky]

I can't believe how everyone chose the 2600 over the Astrocade back then. It cost more but not that much more and it's so much better than the 2600. I guess it's just one more example of the cheapest hardware winning the war. That would've been awesome if they had left the high-res circuitry connected and offered an optional memory expansion to support it, like they did with the N64. It's still an amazing piece of hardware when you look at how close the Incredible Wizard is running on the simple Astrocade compared to Wizard of Wor running on arcade hardware that required like 6-8 large pcb boards.

 

http://klov.com/images/11/1106136594.jpg

[Zonie]

What's neat about the early consoles is that often each of them excels in specific areas while often failing badly in others. All of them together might have made the super system!

Yeah, True.

 

I had a friend that got a Bally Arcade console as a test market thing back in the day. I thought it rocked. Blew the doors off my VCS. I hated to see it go when the "test" period was up.

 

Problem was back then, there was not a glut of 200mm FABS in South Korea and Taiwan making RAM. It was expensive. We were pretty lucky to have what we did back then.

 

As it was, it was pretty much 2X the price of a VCS and had a very small library.

 

I'd trade my CV for one though.

[riffraff]

Also, if you're reading this RiffRaff (and I know you are!), how are you able to transcend the limitations of the Astrocade? Inquiring minds want to know!

 

I don't think I really did anything to transcend limitations. I wrote some custom display routines to speed up gameplay when 4 fireballs were on the screen at once. The resources at at Bally Alley were invaluable and the Bally yahoo group guys were great at answering questions. But really the Astrocade is very easy to program, that's the bottom line.