Star Wars games on Bally Astrocade: 300 baud cassetee emulating

[Sightsaber]

Hi everyone!

 

My friend and I decided to play through every Star Wars video game we could, including the unofficial ones. Today we have about 150 unofficial SW games (and several dozen more await us ahead).

 

We were able to find only 6 Star Wars games for Astrocade platform. 5 of them (except Star Battle) are 300 baud .wav files taken from ballyalley.com :
Star Wars (19xx)(unknown author)(300 baud)(proto).wav

Star Wars (198x)(Doug Shaeffer)(300 baud).wav

Down The Trench (1979)(Sebree's Computing)(300 baud).wav

Space Battle (1979)(J. A. Johnson)(300 baud).wav

Star Wars (1979)(Scott Waldinger)(300 baud).wav

I tried to run them using MAME (0.268b, cartridge: AstroBASIC) via 300 Baud to 2000 Baud Tape Conversion Program (Jay Fenton), but after successfully downloading the conversion program and pressing GO the main 300-baud program does not start loading.

 

Can anyone help us learn how to load these programs into MAME? And is it possible to load listings from text files into MAME?

 

P.S. And if anyone knows of any other Star Wars games besides those listed, we would appreciate it if you let us know.

 

 

[ballyalley]

2 hours ago, Sightsaber said:

My friend and I decided to play through every Star Wars video game we could, including the unofficial ones. Today we have about 150 unofficial SW games (and several dozen more await us ahead).

 

I tried to run them using MAME (0.268b, cartridge: AstroBASIC) via 300 Baud to 2000 Baud Tape Conversion Program (Jay Fenton), but after successfully downloading the conversion program and pressing GO the main 300-baud program does not start loading.

 

Can anyone help us learn how to load these programs into MAME? And is it possible to load listings from text files into MAME?

 

For some reason, I had to approve your message, which I did now.

 

Playing every Star Wars game?!?  That sounds impossible, but fun.  I can hardly believe you even found the Astrocade Star Wars-inspired games.

 

You may have better luck posting this message to the Bally Alley discussion forum, here:

 

https://groups.io/g/ballyalley

 

The BASIC conversion program doesn't work in MAME.  However, MAME does natively support loading 300-Baud programs-- but it isn't self-explanatory.  Post this message to the above group and someone can probably walk you through it.

 

Adam

[Sightsaber]

Thanks for the advice! I'll try to write there.

[ballyalley]

On 9/2/2024 at 9:18 AM, Sightsaber said:

Can anyone help us learn how to load these [300-BAID Bally BASIC] programs into MAME? And is it possible to load listings from text files into MAME?

 

This post on the BallyAlley discussion group should help you figure out how to load a 300-BAUD Bally BASIC game in MAME:

 

https://groups.io/g/ballyalley/message/21602

 

You may get more helpful hints in the above thread if you read it from the beginning.  If you're still having trouble, then ask us about it there.

 

Good luck... and have fun!

 

Adam

[Sightsaber]

Thank you very much, the instructions in the link helped!

The main problem was that the "tape recorder" had to be added to the slot ctrl3.

[ballyalley]

3 hours ago, Sightsaber said:

Thank you very much, the instructions in the link helped!

The main problem was that the "tape recorder" had to be added to the slot ctrl3.

 

So, you got the 300-Baud interface in MAME to work?  Great!  Keep in mind that the colors in MAME are not accurate, although I'm not sure if this will affect these Bally BASIC games.

 

When you review the Astrocade Star Wars-inspired games, then please post a link to them here.

 

Adam

[Sightsaber]

18 hours ago, ballyalley said:

When you review the Astrocade Star Wars-inspired games, then please post a link to them here.

 

We will definitely do it! In fact, there have already been questions about two games.

1) Star Wars (197X) from cassette  Star Wars (19xx)(unknown author)(300 baud)(proto).wav

The game starts, but the sprites of ships and shots are clearly displayed incorrectly and are not erased when moving. Is this an emulation error or a software flaw? At the very least, I'd like to understand the shape of the spaceships to see if we should add the game to our Star Wars review.

2) Star Fire (1980) by Sebree's Computing from cassette Star Fire (Sebree's Computinging)(raw, 300 baud).wav

This is, as far as I understand, a port of the game for an arcade machine. During loading, some characters are replaced with question marks, as if the computer cannot read these characters, and from time to time a line "WHAT?" appears.

Adam, It would be great if you could clarify the situation. Over the past year, we had to get acquainted with more than 30 emulators of different platforms, but because of this, we are not able to study each of them too deeply.

Edited September 12 by Sightsaber

[ballyalley]

4 hours ago, Sightsaber said:

Adam, It would be great if you could clarify the situation. Over the past year, we had to get acquainted with more than 30 emulators of different platforms, but because of this, we are not able to study each of them too deeply.

 

You're emulating 30 different systems?  Wow!  I bet that there are a lot of ZX Spectrum games on that list.

 

I can see what I can answer about the errors in questions.  For one, I'm surprised that the program with the name "raw" in its title loaded at all.  It is an unprocessed file, so it is likely difficult to archive properly and therefore has errors while loading, even on real hardware.  As for the other problem, I'll point Paul Thacker, the person who archived these programs, to this thread and the specific post with the questions.  He knows about this subject MUCH better than me.

 

Adam

[ranger_lennier]

I'm not sure where the raw recording came from, as the link only has processed files. Maybe this was downloaded years ago before the program was digitally processed?

 

Star Wars (19xx)(unknown author)(300 baud)(proto).wav - I don't know a lot about this, but I labeled it as a prototype because it was obviously unfinished. I think that's just all there is to it. It came from Brett Bilbrey's tape collection. He's best known for programming ICBM Attack and Treasure Cove. He wasn't sure who wrote the program, though.

 

https://groups.io/g/ballyalley/message/12321

[ballyalley]

12 hours ago, ranger_lennier said:

I'm not sure where the raw recording came from, as the link only has processed files. [...]

 

Star Wars (19xx)(unknown author)(300 baud)(proto).wav - I don't know a lot about this, but I labeled it as a prototype because it was obviously unfinished.

 

Thanks for answering these questions, Paul.

 

Adam

[Prosystemsearch]

Truly an interesting find for sure. If Star Wars games could be in development on the Bally Arcade, so could they have been on the Amstrad CPC, Mattel Intellivision,

Spoiler

MSX, Kaypro, and the TRS-80 Models 1 and II as well as the TRS COCO 1.

 

[Sightsaber]

On 9/12/2024 at 7:53 PM, ballyalley said:

You're emulating 30 different systems?  Wow!  I bet that there are a lot of ZX Spectrum games on that list.

Surprisingly, there were relatively few games for the Spectrum. Most games are for Commodore (64, Pet, Vic), TRS-80 (+CoCo), Apple II, TI-99, MSX. Here is a link to the working list (some comments are not translated into English). We are planning to create a full archive of files on MEGA soon.

 

On 9/13/2024 at 6:55 AM, ranger_lennier said:

I'm not sure where the raw recording came from, as the link only has processed files. Maybe this was downloaded years ago before the program was digitally processed?

I'll try to find the processed version.

 

15 hours ago, Prosystemsearch said:

Truly an interesting find for sure. If Star Wars games could be in development on the Bally Arcade, so could they have been on the Amstrad CPC, Mattel Intellivision,

  Reveal hidden contents

MSX, Kaypro, and the TRS-80 Models 1 and II as well as the TRS COCO 1.

 

For each of the platforms you listed, we found at least one game; for TRS-80 there are more than 20, for CoCo there are more than 15.

Thanks for the answers!

Edited 50 minutes ago by Sightsaber