Interview with David Ibach (Feb. 27, 2006) By Paul Thacker In September of 2005, I came across an auction of some Astrocade cartridges and cassettes on eBay. The seller, Paula Ibach, mentioned that her brother-in-law was the programmer of Frog Leap. I realized that the relative she mentioned was David Ibach, who also worked for General Video and programmed Sneaky Snake. Through Paula, I was able to get in touch with David. Over the next few months we exchanged a few e-mails, which I've compiled into this interview. Paul: Can you give a little background about yourself? How did you get into the Astrocade and game programming specifically? What are you doing now? David: I've been in the computer business for almost my whole career; And did serious software development since 1985. Worked for KnowledgeWare and helped them become the leading CASE provider (Computer Aided Software Engineering). Along with the Kaypro, the Bally was my first foray into home computing - and the kids loved the games. So, like Steve Walters, it was a good way for dad-son to hook up (in addition to soccer, of course). Since the Bally days, Ben and I did Aldo's Adventure, Aldo Again, and Aldo's Assault - still run into them out on the internet sometimes. And I developed crossword and wordsearch products for Parsons Technology. They sold about 100,000 of them but are now defunct. Paul: Paula mentioned that you belonged to a user group in Detroit, Michigan. What was the group, and what did they do? David: Yes, the group here included George Moses, Brett Bilbray, Don Gladden and others. We played games, went over the latest pubs, and got into the guts as best we could. Paul: I believe you worked with Steve Walters at a company called General Video. Can you tell me a little about the company? David: Best I recall, General Video had an assembler product. Steve's kid did the artwork. It used tape in a 2-pass assembly. Had a keypad overlay that let you type in machine instructions much the same as Basic did. I thought it was very cool. And there was enough interest to put together a class at Don's place. But glassy eyes told me a lot of the material wasn't sinking in. Besides, some of the other products with the blue ram, etc, gave people a lot more power. We sold maybe a hundred of them, and those users didn't have other expenses to get a taste of assembler coding. And if they had the listings of onboard code, there were a lot of calls that could juice up their programs. Paul: Frog Leap is sometimes mentioned as one of the best BASIC games, and is certainly technically impressive for playing music and drawing the screen at the same time. The authors are given as "B. & David Ibach." Who is B.? David: The B. is for my son Benjamin, who is now in IT professionally (big surprise!). Paul: You were involved in writing a few collaborations with other prolific Astrocade programmers, including George Moses on Buggin' BC. How did these come about, and in what way did you work together? David: George and I worked on several projects. He loved doing the music. I haven't been in touch with him lately, but I certainly hope he's got a MIDI hookup to his 'puter and is doing some good tune sequencing. Paul: As the author of Sneaky Snake, did you need any special equipment for cartridge development? Sneaky Snake was published by Don Gladden's company New Image. How did you end up working with New Image? David: I believe we used the assembler mentioned above for this Centipede knockoff. And Don had an EPROM burner. So cool to be able to manufacture a cartridge that was (for all practical purposes) the equivalent of the commercial ones you got from Bally. Paul: One of my areas of interest is archiving tape software. Because they were rare to start out with, and the tapes degrade with time, many games are in danger of being lost forever. However, it is relatively simple to preserve the games by recording them as .wav files. Do you still have a collection of tape software? If so, would you be willing to help with the archival effort? David: I do have a collection of tapes. Don't know if they are readable. This seems like dead-end stuff to me (vis-a-vis today's technologies, "lost forever" seems appropriate). But if you really are interested I could see if I could record them to .wav. I no longer have a Bally. Paul: Well, I would hate to see the history of video games disappear. Even though modern games are much prettier, the old games are still a lot of fun. So yes, I'm definitely interested in getting your tapes archived. If you let me know what you have, I can tell you if any of them are still needed. [I proceed to explain the archiving process.] David: The tapes I unearthed are not very well documented. So I don't know if they are assembler programs, or basic or what. I'll try to send you the tapes next week. I don't have a cassette player anymore that will do the job. [I received seven tapes, which seem to have a combination of BASIC and Assembler data. I'll report more on their archiving after further testing.] Paul: As part of the archival effort, we've also been contacting copyright owners when possible to secure explicit rights to distribute their games for free on the Bally Alley site. What is the copyright status of the games you worked on? If you personally have copyrights on any of them, would you be willing to release them to the public domain? David: I don't hold any copyrights for them. If they are so marked, I hereby retract them. End of Interview Selected Programs: (Most of these programs can be downloaded from http://www.ballyalley.com) Aldo's Adventure - Ben and David Ibach (PC DOS Game) Aldo Again - Ben and David Ibach (PC DOS Game) Aldo's Assault - Ben and David Ibach (PC DOS Game) Buggin' BC - David Ibach and George Moses (Source Unknown) Flying Witch Demo [Complete with haunted house] - David Ibach and Steve Walters (Source Unknown) Flying Witch Sample - General Video (Included with The General Video Assembler) Frog Leap - Ben and David Ibach (Arcadian 5:138 and 146) Logo Sample - David Ibach (Included with The General Video Assembler) General Video Assembler, The - General Video (Commercial Program) REM Music - David Ibach (Arcadian 1:78) Sneaky Snake - David Ibach (Released on cartridge through New Image) Space War - David Ibach (Arcadian 1:78, Corrections: Arcadian 2:4) Selected Articles: (All of these articles can be read from newsletters available from http://www.ballyalley.com) Rathmell, Al. "General Video Assembler [Review]," ARCADIAN 5, no. 4 (February 1983): 57. Ibach, David. "Ibach Cartridge Conversion," ARCADIAN 4, no. 5, 6 and 8 (March, April and June 1982): 46, 55, 59 and 76. ----. "Tutorial - Taping Memory," ARCADIAN 3, no. 2, (December 1980): 24-25. ----. "Tutorial - Using the Bally BASIC Text Area," ARCADIAN 1, no. 10, (September 1979): 78-79. Selected Advertisements (All of these advertisements can be seen in newsletters available from http://www.ballyalley.com) General Video. "Assembler," ARCADIAN 4, no. 12, (October 1982): 123. ----. "The General Video Assembler," ARCADIAN 5, no. 1, (November 1982): 20.