Primitive Coding: 1978 Bally Astrocade BASIC via Calculator Keypad (VC3 Christmas Challenge 2022)

A mostly forgotten relic of home computing and gaming from the 1970s. The Bally Arcade (Astrocade) included a variant of Tiny BASIC that required using a 24 button calculator keypad for all input, with four different shift keys to get the full range of needed characters. I reskinned a modern 24 keypad (Genovation CP24) for use in emulation, wrapping it with some woodgrain vinyl and 3D printing the logo for fun. This was a "wild" entry into the popular VC3 BASIC Christmas Challenge of 2022 and appears at 18:21 in the official challenge vidoe here: • Vintage Computing Chri... - My concept features an endlessly altering snowflake with some interesting effects utilizing Bally's limited capabilities. The organizer of the challenge had never heard of the Astrocade so appreciated this entry and the research that went alongside it! (Unfortunately the blips and beeps did not show up in the recording as I typed, on the real machine nearly every character you type outputs a tone, although this can be disabled with a variable.)

[@logiker]

This is a fantastic release. To be honest, at the beginning, I even didn't know what a Bally Astrocade was. And now seeing how you have to type in the program: just wow! That's nostalgic pure!

[@CaptainCaveman1170]

Magnificent.

[@tonymokonen7729]

It's not a big deal, but this pedant has noticed that you are using the 1981 version of Bally Basic (AstroBASIC), because the 1978 version doesn't have the * array. It is a nicer looking star than the other entries, though, and I like the customized keypad.

[@MattPilz]

Thank you! Yes, I believe my reasoning for using AstroBASIC at the time was for the 2000 baud support to make for quicker demo distribution and testing. My use of both array types available here was more-so for the sake of experimenting with its minimal command set and saving a few bytes, but don't think it'd be difficult to adapt to a 300 baud version. Recently I made another Bally video as I went down the rabbit hole of studying its very powerful sound synthesizer and when manually interfacing with the I/O can be very impressive output for the time. I created a sort of MIDI converter and have enjoyed running different video game music through it and seeing how it sounds on the real device. kzbin.infoV2vkoQyhdi4