| The Bally Professional Arcade is a second-generation, cartridge-based home video game console first released via mail-order in late 1977 and widely available in stores from April 1978. Designed by Midway under Bally and later sold by Astrovision, it was renamed the Bally Computer System in 1981 and then the Astrocade in 1982, remaining on the market into the mid-1980s. It is powered by a Zilog Z80 processor clocked around 1.789 MHz and includes 4 KB of RAM (expandable to 64 KB), along with 8 KB of built-in ROM. Graphics capabilities feature a bitmapped display at 160×102 resolution (with a higher 320×204 mode technically available but rarely used), capable of displaying up to eight colours. Audio comprises three oscillator channels plus noise and vibrato effects. The console includes a 24-key hexadecimal keypad and four controller ports. Unique pistol-grip controllers combine an 8-way joystick, a rotating paddle knob, and trigger button, with two controllers supplied standard. Four built-in programs—Gunfight, Checkmate, a calculator, and a sketch tool—come on internal ROM, with additional “Videocade” cartridges (about 49 released) providing more games, often two per cartridge. |
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