+-----------------+
                                      | .'           '. |
       ----------------------         ||      (0) o    ||
      /----------------------\    __  ||   o  o-o T    ||
      /         BALLY arcade \ __|  | ||   T      ^    ||
     /________________________\      \||   ^           ||
    /       ####   _____       \      | '.___________.' |
   /       #####  [_____]       \     |-----------------|
  /__ __ _###### __==_===__ __ __\    | (I)         (I) |
 /________________________________\   |_________________|
 

Some time in the 80's my father came home with a new video game
system. At the time the family had an Atrai 2600 which we were 
allowed to play on special occasions, but the Bally was different. 
It had a controller with a pistol grip and both joystick and paddle
functions. (In case you forgot, the paddle was the knob used for 
pong-like games).

Turned out that the Bally was also more than a video game system.
It was basically a full computer complete with a BASIC interpreter.
It could use both cassette and cartridges for media as long as you
had a cassette recorder and the BASIC cartridge. The cartridge had
a built-in 2000 baud inteface that connected to the recorder with a
headphone jack..

The "Keyboard" was a 24-key push-button pad remenicent of an old
calculator. The buttons were terrible. hard plastic with an unsatis-
fying squishy feel. Now, I can hear you saying "But Beau, There are
27 letters in the alphabet. How is that supposed to work?" Overlay's,
my friend. Overlays.
 
There were a handfull of different overlays for different functions. 
These were basically thin sheets of plastic with holes cut out for 
the buttons to poke through. The only one I remember was for typing 
and it used 3 colored shift keys corresponding to one of 3 colored 
letters on the other buttons. Each letter took 2 button pushes. First
the shift key, then the letter. Pushing a key without shift first 
would type out numbers 0-9. Remeniscent of texting from a keypad in
days of yore.

One of my favoirite features of this machine was the custom "Bally
Sound Chip" which was used for pretty much everything. Each keypress
was associated with a beep or a boop different tones. If a key was 
pressed that typed out a whole word there would be a beep or a boop 
for each letter as they were displayed on the screen. The cacophony
of tones that would flow out of the speaker while typing was abso-
lutely magical (or very annoying depending on who you ask).

There was a Bally Newsletter we recieved a few times that had prog-
rams you could type in using the god-awful keypad. There were many
nights I stayed up late painstakingly transcribing the programs on
that terrible keypad until my fingers would go numb. Half the time
the resulting program was underwhelming, or riddled with errors and
typeos. Sometimes they would work and get recorded to cassette tape.

This was all well and good except for the fact that reading from the
cassette tape was problematic. Some code would not be read properly 
and letters would come through as question marks which would need to
be corrected by hand. And this would happened every single time.

Overall, the Bally Astrocade gets high marks. For its time it was
plenty powerfull and in my opinion had better graphics and sound than
the Atari 2600. There wasn't as many games but they were very good.