Rare and/or Unusual Astrocade Links

[ballyalley]

Every once in a while I'll just type in the word "Astrocade" (and remove my BallyAlley.com website) in Google and see what I find in the deep links, you know, the ones that no one ever clicks because they're dozens of pages from the top of the searches. The recent links that I've been posting are coming from these not-at-the-top search pages. It's fun to find "hidden" Astrocade links!

Bally Astrocade RGB Schematic

I came across this Bally Astrocade RGB schematic by someone named "hotdog6394."

https://easyeda.com/hotdog6394/Bally_Astrocade_RGB-4W86GgdNn

Can anyone vouch for this hardware? Does anyone know if this is an original design?

 

 

The Bally Astrocade, A True Hidden Gem

Here is a blog post about the Astrocade called "A closer look at the Bally Astrocade, a true hidden gem among game consoles." This was posted by zadoc on April 11, 2018. The "article" is quite general, but I like the pictures:

https://imgur.com/gallery/tQJJI

Not too bad, right?


Revived Astrocade by drunknretro!

On June 24, 2016, a blog post was written by "drunknretro." He fixed his Astrocade that had bad video and he shows pictures of the steps that he followed to do it.

https://drunknretro.blogspot.com/2016/06/up-from-crypt-bally-professional-arcade.html

It's always nice to see an Astrocade live again!

Twitter has Astrocade Hashtag?!?

I'm not a Twitter user, but maybe I should join the "fun." There are several people that use #astrocade. I didn't expect it to be about the Bally Arcade/Astrocade, but the "tweets" (I hate that word) all seem to belong to the little console that could(n't).

https://twitter.com/hashtag/astrocade

Does anyone here use this tag on Twitter?


3D Moveable Model of Astroade

Here is a link to a 3D moveable model of an Astrocade:

https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/model/ue9c95c6f-746c-4cc9-9eae-882e23ac2289/Bally-Astrocade

This is kind of cool. You can move the Astrocade console around in 3D!

"Meet me in the Astrocade" Lecture (June 2018)

Rachel Weil gave a lecture at the Joy of Coding 2018 conference on June 8, 2018 called "Meet me in the Astrocade: peace, love, and 8-bit hardware hacking." You can read about it here:

http://joyofcoding.org/2018/rachel-weil.html

I met Rachel a few weeks ago when she was passing through town. We had a three player game of the homebew game "War" together. Great fun!

If anyone else has weird or unusual Astrocade links, then please post them here.

 

Adam

[pacman000]

Good topic. I like to go past page one, & I like to use search engines which aren't Google.

 

From a few pages into a Gigablast image search:

 

https://www.pcmag.com/feature/291559/10-classic-game-console-mods

 

An article on PC expansions for game consoles, including the Astrocade.

[ballyalley]

From a few pages into a Gigablast image search:

 

https://www.pcmag.com/feature/291559/10-classic-game-console-mods

 

An article on PC expansions for game consoles, including the Astrocade.

 

The article says:

 

"The ZGrasss-32 never saw mass production or a general release; instead, some believe it may have been sold in limited numbers by mail-order in the early 1980s. Only seven units are known to exist, so it is a very rare peripheral indeed."

 

I wonder what is the source for the quote "seven units are known to exist." I don't know of any units that are known to exist, except for the unit that was created by Alternative Engineering. The ZGRASS language was included in the UV-1 computer, but that system is not an add-on for the Astrocade. Rather, the UV-1 includes the Astrocade custom chips inside of it and uses the hi-res mode, which the add-under was not going to support at all.

 

Adam