"Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist, SIG Bally"
By Mike Maslowski
September 1980


SIG BALLY member Hank Chiuppi will demonstrate his full ASCII add-on Keyboard 
for the Bally at our October meeting (meeting starts at 11:00 a.m.). Everyone 
is invited to attend.

Our initial September meeting was well attended by 13 new members. Several 
people volunteered to assist with SIG BALLY activities and the following 
officers were appointed.

Mike Maslowski, President 654-8937
Manuel Martinez, Vice President 631-6623
Hank Chiuppi, Secretary 537-6079
Bob Stoops, Librarian 885-3164

We will create a software and Bally publication library. The publication 
library will contain reference material for both BALLY BASIC and hardware. The 
two Bally newsletters CURSOR and ARCADIAN will also be available for reference 
starting with the November issues.

For those of you who are not familiar with the Bally, it is a low cost Z80 
based system which can be equipped with TV interface, joysticks, tiny basic, 
and cassette interface for around $400. Plug in game cartridges are available 
and contain the same software and high speed graphic affects as the Commercial 
Bally Arcade games such as Space Invaders, Baseball and Seawolf. The Bally 4K 
ROM version of tiny Basic called Bally
Basic provides powerful graphic capabilities with the addition of LINE, MUSIC 
and BOX commands. There are also commands to control the 3-voice MUSIC 
synthesizer. The main limitations of the Bally are very limited program memory 
(1.8 K), lack of a full keyboard (programs must be entered on a calculator 
style keyboard and lack of high speed cassette or disk interface.

Most of us bought our Bally units as a starter kit with a promise from Bally, 
of an add-on unit which would turn it into a full home computer. Alas, the add-
on unit never arrived, but the built in expander has been a challenge that 
Bally backers have been tackling with some success. Bally owners have been 
successfully interfacing full keyboards and printers to the Bally for sometime 
now. A 4K memory add-on with two serial I/ 0 ports and expandability to 16K has 
recently been announced in kit form for $130.00. A 8K basic ROM to access the 
extended memory should be available by year end. Other types of add-on boards 
are currently being developed to provide high-res graphics and disk
interfaces. Also, Bally's consumer products division has recently been bought 
out by Astro-Vision. Astro-Vision has stated that they plan to revive plans for 
the add-on unit.

The Bally on board ROM's have very powerful graphic capabilities for anyone 
into graphics and video art. There are production reject boards available in 
the Chicago area for about $25.00, as-is, or $70.00 repaired.  These could be 
used by other systems such as TRS 80 or Northstar, as a graphic driver, if 
someone is willing to tackle the interface. (Work is currently being done on a 
TRS 80 interface.)