Remembering Richard Degler, an Astrocade Programmer

[Remembering Richard Degler, an Astrocade Programmer]

1 hour ago, ballyalley said:

I believe that all of the software and documentation that Richard had in his collection was archived by Richard over the years.  He either scanned it, dumped it or took pictures of it.

You might be right, however if there's a chance of uncovering new information, I'll happily work on it. I'm going to start scanning stuff and uploading it to a dropbox folder, just in case.

 

Out of curiosity, have you seen this? It was a folded up piece of paper that looked like it hadn't ever been opened. There's an overflowing folder full of information just on this game. I figured I'd start by scanning that stuff first.

[Remembering Richard Degler, an Astrocade Programmer]

4 hours ago, ballyalley said:

You'll see how much work he continued to put into helping us all in the Astrocade community understand assembly language programming.

I definitely went through your website first thing! Thank you for keeping so much of that information alive. It was really cool to see the Beatles chips pictured on your site and be holding the actual tin in my hands at the same time. Very cool to trusted with all this stuff from the Degler family. I grew up with them, they were like a second family to me, so I'm pretty honored to be handling this.

 

I should probably learn how to work this forum so I don't have to make a new post every time I quote someone haha

[Remembering Richard Degler, an Astrocade Programmer]

2 hours ago, 128Kgames said:

Conqueror is known, but you never know if this is a final or proto, Pac-Man was rumored at one point but then changed to 'Munchie" in advertising (commercials / catalog) and a handful of protos exist, but none that I know of Pac-Man.  My guess is Bally / Astrovision / Astrocade probably would not have released it as such, and anyway the Atari lawsuit against them had them drop Munchie from release anyway. 

 

Balcheck ROM I "think" is out there, but still cool, I have a Nutting Associates in-house Balcheck tester device myself.

No kiosks or cool peripherals or anything like that, just consoles and the regular paddles, but there are loads of ROM chips. I'll line them all up and take pictures.

 

I've got plenty of arcade friends with ROM dumping/burning equipment, so we can get pretty much everything dumped if there's anything that hasn't hit the internet yet. It'd be really nice to not have to do all of them.

 

I'll definitely PM you about values of things. I actually own an Astrocade of my own, I bought it years ago and it never worked, but it is the super cool white variation of the console. Guess I'll finally be going down the road of getting it fixed haha

 

I'll keep checking this thread and making updates as we go here guys.

 

I'm 100% down to do as much as I can for the community if there's anything that's been in hiding, I'll make sure we get it backed up before I sell anything.

[Remembering Richard Degler, an Astrocade Programmer]

1 hour ago, Allen Schweitzer said:

There is no security chip.  The zif socket just allows you to change games without switching cartridges.

 

As far as I ever knew, he was the father of this game.  It was 100% developed/programmed, and finished by him, and if I'm wrong, someone can correct me!

 

Were there any interviews done with him that may have been recorded?

I'm learning as I go, I just assumed the jumper wire in the console was to bypass a security measure. So, this is good to know! Do all of the consoles have this jumper wire inside?

 

As for the game Life, he has printed microfiche excerpts from the Feb 1971 issue of Scientific American that details the origin of the game and how to play. It was originally a solitaire based game by a mathematician named John Conway. So I guess you could say that Rick was the father of the video game version of Life, but it's based on a real life game, meant to be played on a Go board. I double checked this after you mentioned it. For some reason I thought this was an early computer game.

 

I'll ask about interviews! I'm not aware of any.

 

Thank you guys for the responses! I'm planning on going through and scanning a lot of this stuff, especially technical drawings, which will take some time, but hopefully there's information that is useful. At the very least, it's interesting stuff.

 

Do you guys have any recommendations for testing these consoles? I know I'm supposed to keep it off of carpet!

[Remembering Richard Degler, an Astrocade Programmer]

Ok here's a picture of Rick, I'll try to get more as well

[Remembering Richard Degler, an Astrocade Programmer]

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!