ranger_lennier

Hmmm, those look like they could have been made while the games were still in development. One possible way to tell would be to play the released version and compare. If you don't have an official Artillery Duel cart, you could try emulating it in MESS. There are also dumps for Muncher and Pac-Man. Here's a ROM collection: http://www.ballyalley.com/emulation/bally.zip You can get MESS here, if you haven't already: http://www.mess.org/download.php Or if you have the ability to dump them easily, we could directly compare the ROM contents.

Thanks for the list. The published games we've already got on-line. I'd recommend using those recordings if you want to play them, as they've been cleaned up and tested as working. The others you list sound like programs from the newsletters, except for "11/15/83 Sales Demo." That might be something interesting. As for the unmarked tapes, who knows? If you want to get any of those running, I can help you out.

The FAQ says 1979 for Space Invaders, which as far as I know is correct. http://www.ballyalley.com/faqs/astrocade_cart_and_hardware_faq.txt The tape program were mostly from individuals or small companies, and sold mainly through newsletters. Some of the companies, like WaveMakers and Esoterica, got pretty successful. Esoterica even ended up making some cartridges. fiddlepaddle, would you mind listing the tape games you found? I'm wondering if there's anything we're looking for.

That is a neat story. The Astrocade is a personal favorite of mine. Be sure to try out The Incredible Wizard. Some of the carts mentioned are fairly rare. Pac-man was in fact first sold as Muncher (through the Arcadian newsletter), but later someone hacked it to read Pac-man. I'm particularly curious about Artillery Duel V.2.0, however. I'm only aware of one cartridge versions of this game (it was originally a tape game). Is this a prototype? What are the cassette games? I've archived a bunch of the tapes on www.ballyalley.com. You might want to download some and check them out. Tapes for the newer BASIC cart (with the built-in audio jack) usually won't work now, but we've got a program that can clean up recordings and often get them working again.

Does anyone know how to get in touch with Sean Riddle? I tried an e-mail address I found on his website awhile back and didn't get a response.

Wow, I didn't realize there was such an active Channel F homebrew scene. Pac-man definitely looks impressive! If I may, I'd like to take this opportunity to promote my Channel F and VideoBrain Yahoo group: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/channel_f_and_videobrain/ Anyone interested is free to join. At the moment, I'm particularly interested in getting the VideoBrain (a cartridge-based computer also using the Fairchild F8 CPU) dumped. Maybe someone here would be able to help.