On the Bally BASIC Demo Cartridge By Adam Trionfo This article was originally two postings (258 and 266) on the Astrocade discussion group. (Sept. 29, 2001) It is an 8K ROM and the program is written in BASIC. Yes, we've heard that BASIC program can be included on cartridge. This was "discovered" in about 1985. The demo cartridge is an official Bally cart and was released in about 1978. I now have the printout of the BASIC program that Michael White pulled from the ROM; it is about three and a half pages long. I am surprised at this. Michael is AMAZED. "Someone at Bally always knew how to do this," he says. Yes, SEVEN years before home-brewers discovered how. Here are the first five lines: 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 .BALLY BASIC ROM DEMO 5 .IPI Some observations on this: 1) Michael figures "IPI" is the author. I agree. Anyone else have another idea? Who might this person be (presuming it IS the author)? 2) Notice anything strange about the first three lines? If you've programmed in Bally BASIC you might remember cutting back on the REM statements ('.' is the equivalent), or not using comments at all. Those first three lines are "wasted space." You just can't afford those bytes. Hmm. Michael is disassembling the ROM for other clues (he has suggested some already, but it would be premature to mention them). More as I hear it. Using all 4K of RAM for BASIC Carts (October 6, 2001) Lance emailed me to ask what I thought about Astrocade BASIC cartridges using all 4K of RAM available. I think it deserves public attention, and therefore I am replying to the message board. Once it was learned in the mid-eighties how to take a 1.8 K BASIC program and put it on a cartridge, hackers (like Michael White) did talk about allowing BASIC to use all 4K of RAM from a cartridge. BASIC would have needed to be modified, of course. Examination of the Bally BASIC Demo cart by Michael White has already revealed that it is actually a BASIC game. What I have not said publicly is that the BASIC Demo is just eight bytes short of 4K. I've not said this because I am not sure how this works or any other details. I have asked Michael to write all that he knows about the BASIC Demo. From phone conversations I gather that BASIC was heavily modified, so much so that it is hampered to the degree that it would almost certainly work only with this BASIC Demo application. From previous conversations with Michael I know that he feels it is possible to add four colors. This would be at the expense of losing some BASIC functions (like cassette controls, which would no longer be needed), and even adding some others (Snap and Show). The effort to do this steered people away from this modification, and so it was never done. This modification of BASIC is a neat idea but I would rather see effort on a true ML cartridge. What would be the gain of this BASIC modification now? Ease of use (over ML) and four colors. I don't see anyone standing in line to program the 1.8k version of BASIC right now, and it has been available since 1978, plus more colors are available via machine language, the additional two colors for BASIC isn't worth the time. Anyone see this differently or have anything to add? END OF ARTICLE