Bally Professional Arcade / Astrocade

The Bally Professional Arcade, also known as the Bally Astrocade, is a home video game console developed by Bally Manufacturing Corporation in the late 1970s. It was one of the first home consoles to feature a microprocessor and it was marketed as a computer as well as a gaming system.

The Astrocade featured a Zilog Z80 CPU and it came with 4 KB of RAM, expandable to a maximum of 16 KB. The Astrocade had a built-in keyboard, a composite video output and a cartridge slot for games. The Astrocade had a resolution of 256x192 pixels and could display 4 colors. The Astrocade came with a built-in Basic interpreter and it had a relatively small library of software available, most of it was games. The Astrocade was expandable and users could add memory and a floppy disk drive.

The Astrocade was not a commercial success, it was criticized for its high price, lack of software and poor documentation. Bally Manufacturing Corporation stopped producing the Astrocade in the early 1980s, and it is now considered a collector's item and is highly sought after by enthusiasts and retro computing enthusiasts. Due to the limited release of the computer, the software and games for the Astrocade are relatively scarce and hard to find.

The Bally Professional Arcade, also known as the Bally Astrocade, had a relatively small library of games available. Some examples of games for the Bally Professional Arcade include:

• Gunfight: a western-themed first-person shooter game.
• Checkmate: a chess game.
• Gorf: a space shooter game.
• Space Invaders: a port of the popular arcade game.
• Sea Devil: a submarine simulation game.
• Wizard of Wor: a dungeon-crawler game.
• Demolition Derby: a racing game where the objective is to destroy other cars.
• Great Escape: a action-adventure game where the player must escape from a prison.

These games were primarily focused on arcade-style gameplay and were designed to provide a fun and entertaining experience for the players. Due to the limited release of the console, the games and software for the Bally Professional Arcade are relatively scarce and hard to find.