I joined this forum to make this post, but I've lurked on here for years. One of my best friends Jeremy had an uncle that passed away this year that worked for Bally Midway. Richard Degler was his name and he primarily worked on the Astrocade. If you poke around, you can easily find his name on several Astrocade related projects.
Rick (as I knew him) was a super cool dude, always pretty quiet, never married and heavily encouraged us to get into classic rock like the Beatles and Pink Floyd.
The first Astrocade pictured is how I remember playing this console as a kid. It's modified to bypass the security chip inside the console and you can load roms into the zip socket cassette. I had no idea then that this was a test console for a guy that was tasked with porting arcade games to the system. Under the hood is the entire library of games. Rick also had a slew of homebrew games, music and software and it looks like he was active in that community up until he passed. Also pictured is a set of ROMs that appear to be Beatles songs for the Astrocade.
I currently have all of his old Astrocade stuff and am putting a bunch of research into what all this stuff is. He held onto a TON of hand drawn schematics, code, sprite layouts on grid paper, original employee packets from Bally, and just seriously a bunch of data.
I'm working on this for a few reasons. First off, I just want people to know who the guy was and have a forum thread about him. I also want to help raise some money for his family by selling most of this stuff and last, I'm hoping to find info on an elusive custom IC. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the 0066-117XX currently doesn't have a replacement and there isn't much info on it. Well, there's a very good chance I've got info on that sitting in this giant pile of notes somewhere. It's used in the following games:
Gorf, Wizard of Wor, Robby Roto, Rotation VIII, Extra Bases, Sea Wolf II, Space Zap, Professor Pac-Man, 10 Pin Deluxe and of course, the Bally Astrocade home console.
I'd like to see if people here can help me with information about how much this stuff might be worth and also help me preserve these games. Rick worked on this stuff for a long time and I'm sure he'd be happy to know his work is going to live on and help future generations enjoy these great games.
There's 4 consoles, I haven't opened them up yet, but at least 2 of them have been modified, one is missing the entire top. I also haven't tested them yet. I figured I'd get information first before I go breaking things. I run an arcade so I'm pretty confident in my abilities, but it's always better to be safe than sorry.
There's also quite a few boxed and mostly sealed games, an original box and tons of developer notes and stuff like that. Pretty sure there's at least enough here to put together a boxed complete console including the stryofoam, bags, receipts, and manuals. I can add pictures of all this stuff as we discuss, but I figured I'd sell two main lots. One would be a boxed console and a sealed copy of the following cassettes: Basic, Artillery Duel, Pirates Chase, Incredible Wizard, 280 Zzzap / Dodgem. The other lot would be all this development stuff including the notes, chip sets and consoles.
Rick also worked on a port of the computer game 'Life' for the Astrocade, as well as a brick breaker game called Walz for the Atari ST (as well as a Walz level builder called Mason).
If anyone here is knowledgeable about this, I'd love to get help. I know the 0066-117XX has 40 pins, and I think it's a custom speech chip and that's about all I know. I'm not a programmer, most of this stuff looks like a foreign language to me. I'd greatly appreciate any help in determining what a good price to list this stuff would be and also help in hopefully shedding light on this IC chip.
I'll also add a picture of Rick once I get one from his family, so he can be remembered. Thank you in advance for any help!