Bally Astrocade

Release: 1977–1978

Midway (a division of Bally) produced a home video game system. They initially released the device through mail-order and called it the Bally Home Library Computer. No shipments actually went out until 1978, when the console was renamed as the Bally Professional Arcade.

In 1979, Bally pulled back from its arcade and gaming activites and production of the device ceased. However, a group of users interested in programming for the device in BASIC set up a company called Astrovision and purchased rights for the console from Bally. Astrovision renamed the device to Astrocade in 1982 and continued to sell the device until the 1983 crash of the video game market.

The Bally Astrocade used a 3.5 MHz CPU and 4k of RAM and was able to output eight-color display.

A Bally Astrocade Game

The Astrocade Packaging