Thanks for the coverage of the Bally Arcade/Astrocade. It has some really stellar games, with impressive graphics and especially sounds. I had one as a youth in the early 80s but it succumbed to the dreaded overheating issue. Fairly recently I acquired one and am now reliving my youth and immensely enjoying my Bally once again!🎉

Wow, that was impressive! The best aspect comes from the games: they're not just miserable clones, but re-invented games with really nice concepts behind the gameplay, the most crucial aspect when it comes to videogames.

I remember seeing this system in Crazy Eddie in Wayne NJ. The Wizard of War Demo running was enticing.

It would seem that Super Slope and the (in)famous Windows game SkiFree have a common ancestor in the 1980s Atari 2600 game Skiing.

I will probably never own this console, so it's great to see its games covered. Your videos are always very informative, thank you!

Interesting. I remember the Astrocade when I was kid but always thought it was some cheap competitor to Atari. I had no idea it was the superior console. Most of those games look like a lot of fun; even the ski game.

The Astrocade is *theoretically* super interesting hardware for the time, because it had a framebuffer but no hardware sprites. But without sprites, you couldn't do things like per-sprite palettes, so it was really hard to do particularly colorful visuals. And if you used the full resolution mode, the framebuffer took up all but 16 bytes of RAM, leaving almost none for the actual program. (Even the Atari 2600 had at least 256 bytes of RAM!) The 256 colors mostly went to waste. Across the whole library, I doubt you could find all 256 colors having ever been used in actual art, outside of a rainbow cycling effect.

@IsaacKuo

Жыл бұрын

I think many early arcade games used framebuffers, which were easy to design and program but expensive due to all the RAM chips. So the Astrocade is particularly interesting in that its hardware was more similar to arcade hardware of the time than other consoles.

It's odd to say that Bally secured the rights to Mrs. Pac-man instead of Pac-Man, and not just because it's the second game. The did secure the rights to Pac-man, but Mrs. Pac-Man isn't a Japanese game, it's was an unlicensed conversion kit from GCC. Bally Midway started working with GCC to make it into Mrs. Pac-Man without Namco's permission. Namco eventually agreed to allow the game to ship under the original Pac-Man deal and to help with designing the cabinet. While Namco holds the rights to the game, there are still unresolved issues around Mrs. Pac-Man and the GCC team that cause problems to this day. For that reason it's not even entirely correct to say that Bally secured the rights to Mrs. Pac-Man.

@TheLairdsLair

Жыл бұрын

I believe the issue was resolved recently and Namco paid to secure all the rights to Ms. Pac-Man from GCC.

Solar conqueror appears to have reused the sounds from incredible wizard.

If the skiing and diving games genres originated on the Bally Astrocade, they did get clones on other systems.

Wow never saw this back in day it would have been amazing. Games are head and shoulders above VCS.

Thanks for the video I was on the fence about getting an Astrocade but after watching your video I really want one with the gameplay, a lot of gems here.

The music and graphics remind me a lot of the TI994A I had as a kid.

@TheLairdsLair

Жыл бұрын

They came out around the same time.

Never seen this console before, look pretty cool for something so early.

What I really enjoyed about the Astrocade were the controllers. Excellent design, although a bit fragile.

Awesome thanks

Seeing those astrocade commercials in this video as well,I never understand why it was back then just allowed that competitors could use the name from it’s competitors in their commercials,because i consider that as unfair competition,especially if you do cause financial damage to that competitor,look how every other company like mattel,coleco,midway among others just tried to bash atari in the face saying atari’s name,compare atari’s system with their supirior one and in some cases even came up with a adaptor to even play atari 2600 games on their system,it consider this absolute unfair and false competition,such practice from those companies should,ve be never allowed,because why ever knows how much unfair financial damage it caused to atari,not mention just think about how nintendo did used an unfair competition strategy by signing a 2 year contract with game developers to only make games for their system and how they even intimidated retailors to not taking consoles from it’s competitors but only from nintendo itself sothat they would otherwise refuse to ship their nes systems to those retailors, Thing is if there wasn’tvsuch false unfair competition allowed back then,then atari would,ve suffered sooo much from it’s financial disaster, Yes atari eventually did the same thing by mentioning it’s competitor’s names in their commercials as well,but it didn’t help that much anymore.

@bleirdo_dude

Жыл бұрын

Sorry Atari!

Love the video and the coverage of the astrocade. What emulator were you using to run these games? I need to try that out

@TheLairdsLair

Жыл бұрын

MAME - it runs Astrocade natively and flawlessly too with loads of different ways to configure the controllers and suchlike.

Great video, Laird.

@HeroJournalism

Жыл бұрын

Do you have the ability to strafe in Solar Conquerer? I assume not since I didn't see any in the gameplay

@TheLairdsLair

Жыл бұрын

I don't believe so, not that I could work out anyway. Glad you enjoyed it!

@kidguzzi_chrisgalardi

Жыл бұрын

@@HeroJournalism I wish there was the ability to shoot diagonally. Unless I am mistaken only vertical and horizontal firing is possible.

Were those two giant glitchy blocks in the skiing game supposed to be there or was that a recording issue?

@TheLairdsLair

6 ай бұрын

Supposed to be there. One person told me it's supposed to be a crowd, but another person told me its something to do with the screen display - so who knows.

Super slope reminds me of Ski Free.

That skiing game is horrific

@TheLairdsLair

Жыл бұрын

Nah, it plays great.

@TheodoreWard

Ай бұрын

The football game was really good. I agree this skiing game may play great but looks boring as heck.

256 colors and they use 5 at most that I see.

@TheLairdsLair

Жыл бұрын

It can only display a maximum of 8 on screen.

What is all the colored mess to the sides of the ski game?

@TheLairdsLair

Жыл бұрын

No idea, probably because they are using some kind of display trick or something.

@kidguzzi_chrisgalardi

Жыл бұрын

That mess on the sides of the screen is actually a representation of the machine language code for the game. Very odd.

@xxnoxx-xp5bl

Жыл бұрын

​@@kidguzzi_chrisgalardi So we're saying emulation error?

@kidguzzi_chrisgalardi

Жыл бұрын

​@@xxnoxx-xp5bl no it's the same on my Astrocade hardware. Who knows why the programmer left it to be displayed. Maybe felt it looked like a crowd of people or some such?

Ahh the game crash of the 80s, where hundreds of games were released that all played like shitty tech demos. Finally Nintendo came along and took them to the next level which caused people to be interested again. Took the Japanese to change the market enough to go mainstream, had they not, I wonder if games would still be a niche for nerds only.

@TheLairdsLair

Жыл бұрын

I think you forget that the video game crash only affected North America, the market was still booming in Europe and Japan, so I don't think things would have turned out differently at all.