Thanks for this video. I had one of these units back in the early 80s. Sad that it didn't perform better in the marketplace and garner more support.

The 3DO, turns out, wasn't as advanced as I thought... Hang on a minute!

Love your presentation on the Astrocade. I had one when I was a kid. My sister and I got it as the "Big" Christmas gift in 1979. This really brought back memories. Cheers from the USA. :)

Thanks! You did justice to the Bally Astrocade, Laird! I especially enjoyed the manner in which you compared the Astrocade and Atari 2600 games side-by-side. As a gamer who “did it live” back in the 70’s and 80’s, I truly admired the Astrocade’s capabilities. Incredible Wizard was, for all intents and purposes, an arcade-perfect port of Wizard of Wor - except for the voice. Galactic Invasion was also a TRULY amazing port of Galaxian. Not only was Atari’s 2600 port bland, but their 400/800 version was actually WORSE. And Atari 2600 Pac Man vs. Muncher? Absolutely no comparison. I forked over $100 on EBAY for a genuine Muncher cart, and am astounded by the gameplay and graphics. It’s a shame they had to stealth-sell Muncher as “Test Program” in fear of lawsuits! At it’s best, Astrocade could compete on almost equal ground with the Atari 8-bit computers and Colecovision. But I have always felt that Astrocade’s strongest feature - what set it really apart - was that amazing controller. Seawolf can’t be properly duplicated on any other system from the era because of Astrocade’s rotational stick. The built-in Gunfight game likewise benefits from this unique controller, as does Dogpatch and many others. Fortunately, EBAY has yielded me a pair of “working” Astrocades, plus games and controllers, since Y2K. It was one of the first systems I sought to acquire once my desire to retro game progressed beyond the Atari 800 and Colecovision. Gamers of the X-Box/PlayStation era have NOTHING on gamers of the 70’s and 80’s.

Although I spend way more time than I should on KZfaq, your channel remains one of a handful where, when I see a 20 or 30 minute video, I go and make myself a cup of tea and settle-in, rather than looking for more brief distractions. I watched another Astrocade video this week, and while it was quite good, I quickly clicked when I saw yours so that I could learn more. (had no idea it featured a higher resolution available that was not accessible). The side by side was excellent, (much preferred to the 2x2 grid of your comparison videos that challenge my geriatric eyesight). The work that you put into producing a superior product is clear,, as always. I'm a pensioner, and so contributions are difficult, but I hope my repeated engangement in the comments demontrates how much your efforts are appreciated. (and there! I made it through a comment without mentioning the TI-99 !!! Well, almost.)

Great video! I'm a proud owner of my family's original Bally Astrocade console. My Dad worked for Ward's in the late 70s - early 80s in the home improvement dept and bought the Astrocade for XMas in '80 or '81 (Yay employee discount). My first attempts in programming and computer graphics were done with the BASIC cart. The console still works... I just need a TV to view it again. ;-)

Excellent work, once again! You covered a lot of ground within a short space of time. Imagine what you would've achieved with an hour! I'd only heard of the Astrocade and never saw any machines or the games and I'd seen the Z-Grass mentioned in passing by an Atari Games programmer but didn't know anything about it. Thanks to you I'm now informed about both. Somehow I didn't twig that it was a product of Bally Midway the arcade legend. Damn shame that it didn't succeed, it seems that poor marketing, the price and finally the crash scuppered its chances.

I had one back in the day and I LOVED it. Incredible Wizard and Galactic Invasion were particular favorites, never had Muncher but have played it on MESS. Quite an improvement over Atari's infamous Pac-Man port. I've always been baffled at Bally's STUPID lack of foresight or even contemporaneous evaluation of Atari's tactics. Bally had SO many arcade licenses, how they didn't understand how an exclusive home console version of Pac-Man would have affected Astrocade sales is a real head-scratcher. They could have been real contenders, IF... ...they had corrected their QC issues. The Astrocade was NOTORIOUS in its early days for overheating issues, resulting in consumers sometimes getting SEVERAL units as serial replacements, then giving up on them. Marketing exclusively through Montgomery Wards was also a real limiting factor. Ah, what could have been. Looking at something like Incredible Wizard makes one wonder how good an Astrocade Donkey King might have been Also worth noting: for a while there, Astrovision marketed the Astrocade as the console with the most available games due to the active homebrew/Bally Basic market. I had several tape games of that ilk, some were really pretty good.

I had one back in the day, and the main thing that sold me over other game consoles was the future expansion plans. While I never got to see the zgrass expansion, I did get the Basic cartridge and wrote a few games for it. But never had the cassette interface so it was all stored on paper.

This was a neat video to watch. I'm always glad to see new video content that features the Bally Arcade/Astrocade console. It's also great to see scans that I've made used by other people like you did in this video. It's exciting to know that paper material that is only in my personal collection is available for historical research purposes. This, of course, is why it was scanned in the first place. There are a few inaccuracies here, but overall, the general feel of it all is nice... and maybe it will get people to visit my Astrocade website. ;-) Note that no version of Z-GRASS was ever released by Astrocade. The pictures of the Z-GRASS hardware on my site and around the internet are either prototypes or are mock-ups. The only version of Z-GRASS, the language (which has never been archived), was in the UV-1 computer. Muncher was never officially released in any form, the box for it that you show is a modern digital mock-up; it's not real. Finally, where did you get your information on the rights to the game titles? I may be right (it sounds reasonable to me), but people in the Astrocade community have looked for actual evidence of game ownership and have always come up empty-handed. I'm glad that you seem to have used Bally BASIC under emulation. I'm sure it seldom gets used in MAME.

I remember these being sold at a Crazy Eddy’s in Wayne NJ in the late 70’s. The controls reminded me of the horrible Fairchild Channel F (broke down often on me). But the Wizard of Wor port drew me, but I was all Atari. That was the last time I seen it in the wild.

I didn't even know this console existed! Which is quite a surprise when you consider who created it.

There was a lot of cool information here on a 2nd gen system that seems to get forgotten about (easy to do when there are so many) but I'd say I was mostly blown away by the fact that the N64 wasn't the first console to have built-in 4 controller support. Gosh... that's just... hard to comprehend... and amazes me that it took so long for other systems to adopt that (how did it take Sony until the PS3!?) I can certainly see how the controller came to be. They wanted to be able to have a controller capable of as many of the unique controller layouts that the varying arcade machines boasted. The power of the system was evidently clear from the gameplay shown and many of them looked quite a lot of fun to play.

this is one of my most wanted retro systems, second only to the vectrex. I hope to find one of these one day... thanks for making the video!

Nice machine, it has decent graphics. This is something I'll never own it's so obscure but it's fascinating ,thanks for the info and the video

Whenever home consoles gave users the option of making their own games and learn the hardware, I pay attention. I can only think of a few more modern examples like Net Yaroze and the Xbox Indies.

I love the design of the console. Woodgrain is and always will be sexy. Really need to get my hands on one

I say, Jeeves, this video is bally interesting!

The sight of the Bally always gives me a chortle

Very nice video! Thanx :)

An interesting video ; I didn’t know about it until recently. It looked like a funky machine, with the wood panelling.

A console with these specs in the 70s should have sold much better than it did, such a shame.

Awesome thanks 👍

Just so you all know, Bally at the same time was also owned by Williams Electronics, plus Bally was also more famous within the pinball industry.

The Zgrass thing having kind of a second life for a while is kind of a cool random fact I suppose.

It's a very interesting system. I really wonder why Bally didn't do more to promote this as a high end gaming product. Having grown up in the Chicago area where I think they were based, I find it odd that I never once saw this system. Even one of my friends who ' had everything' didn't have this system ( maybe he asked Santa for the Vectrex instead of this one!)

Fun fact: Gorf spelled backwards is frog

"256 colors" "BASIC" Atari 1 year later: *makes basically superior Astrocade* Astrocade was cool, but Atari was just always better for me.

8:44. I notice a rather bad looking pacman clone here compared to the rather nice looking looking one shown ' two play' at the end.

I am very very corious what could be more doneon the astrocade along with it’s computer addon trough extra ram and bankswitching,just imagine kirby’s adventure running on it,that would be mind blowing. BTW the astrocade predates the nes by 8 years by also having a frontloading ZIF system and it also did resambled something else rather then being looking like a game console because it looked more like a frontloading cassette player, And it predates the atari 5200 by 5 years by also containing a storage compartment albeit for storing games instead rather then storing controllers.

Uhm, it wasn't Dave Nutting Associates that released Computer Space! It was just Nutting Associates! And yes, there is a difference between companies

Anybody got video of the Datamax uvr1

Also, fun fact: A trans woman worked on the Bally Astrocade; Jamie Fenton (who wouldn't come out of the closet until 20 years after the Astrocade came out)

An amazing video, the script is good, the voiceover is just as good and the video editing is also really nice, but the audio mixing could be a bit better, the gameplay is a bit louder than it needs to be, making the voiceover a bit hard to hear at times. My big complaint however is with the chapter title sound effect, it's very jarring and extremely loud compared to everything else, it's very unpleasant. Still a really good video nonetheless!