Audio switchbox for use with the AstroBASIC cartridge.

AstroBASIC Homemade I/O Audio Switchbox. Built by Adam Trionfo. Circa 2001. Unlike the original 1978 release of Bally BASIC, which used an external 300-BAUD audio interface, the 1981 re-release of the Bally BASIC cartridge, referred to as "AstroBASIC," had one built-in 1/8" jack to accept an audio cable to save and load programs more quickly at 2000-BAUD. This means that a user has to constantly plug in and unplug cables depending on if a BASIC program is being saved or loaded from a tape. A popular project was to build a manual switch to avoid this cumbersome method of changing the audio cables. The "Arcadian" published an article about it in 1981, here: Steve Walters. "I-O Switch For New Bally BASIC Cartridge." ARCADIAN 4, no. 2 (Dec. 07, 1981): 16. When this switchbox was built by Adam in 2001, twenty years after the project was published in the newsletter, he was still able to take a trip to his nearest Radio Shack store in Liverpool, New York and buy the parts using the same part numbers listed in the article.