Brett Bilbrey Interview By Adam Trionfo This email "interview" (from July 11, 2001) is with Brett Bilbrey, from Spectre Systems (programmer of ICBM Attack and Treasure Cove cartridges). I'm not sure why this was never posted. This is the kind of stuff I'm finding on my hard drive when I look through the files... ADAM - I was hoping to get in touch with Mike and Marion [of Spectre]. I would like to ask them about releasing BLAST DROIDS into the public domain as well as your two programs. I think that would be the last of the three (?) Esoterica, Inc cartridges. BRETT - Blast Droids was not a Spectre Systems creation. (At least I don't remember doing it... (sigh, getting old sucks). Esoterica was only the distributor of our cartridges. They distributed other peoples products as well. I don't remember Blast Droids, so I'm pretty sure it was someone else's. (I wrote a lot of programs around that time, and if Esoterica took one and made a cartridge out of it - giving it a new name - then they did it without our permission.) ADAM - Not only do I want to ask them that, but I would like to hear about how they set up the company and more. Let me know if I can contact them (email preferred). BRETT - I can give you a little background on that. Originally there was four of us. The fourth was Dana Adams, a GREAT artist. But Dana joined the Air Force and left our group... Brett - engineer/programmer (Bally/TRS-80/etc...) Dana - artist/programmer (TRS-80) Marion - musician/programmer (TRS-80) Mike - manager We started writing programs for the TRS-80. Crunch Bug, Black Box, etc... But they were all black and white and bored the crap out of me... :-) Since the Bally shared the same processor (Z-80), it was an easy jump for me to take a Bally apart, reverse engineer it, disassemble the ROM and map out the software calls, and then reverse engineer Bally's custom BASIC's. We used the TRS-80 as our assembler for the games. And once we started generating object code, we realized that if we mapped the Bally slot space into the TRS-80 Expansion memory map (and wired it up as such), we would have a 'real-time' development environment for the Bally Arcade. All we had to do was target the TRS-80 Expansion RAM space for the object code, hit reset on the Bally, and it would then 'execute' the code from the TRS-80 as if it were a cartridge. At the same time, the TRS-80 was still able to examine and change memory locations, so we could 'tweak' the parameters of the game on the fly. Ah, life was fun then... ADAM - As for other Astrocade stuff... The Bally Alley site is coming along well... Lance Squire, creator of the original Astrocade FAQ recently contacted me (after me searching for him for years)... Don Gladden contacted me... and I'm still looking for others. BRETT - You should also contact George Moses, one of the 'old gang' of the Bally Bugs... George helped rewrite the Bally Basic manual, and when I wrote the three-voice music program, George wrote music for it... END OF ARTICLE