Bally Alley Presents: Astrocade Conversations with George Moses By Adam Trionfo In July and August of 2001 I exchanged email with George Moses, the man who investigated Astrocade's sound capabilities and released many compilations of music on cassette for BASIC. I've collected and compiled the essentials of these emails into this interview-style article. I've abbreviated my questions, omitted Bally Alley background history, structured this as an interview, and placed questions and answers out of sequence (to give a more 'readable' quality'). I sent this compilation to George to make sure that the sequence of events is correct and to assure that there are no omissions; he found no errors. In my first email to George, as an introduction, I explained about myself and Bally Alley, ending by summarizing with this: "My goal with Bally Alley has been to attract attention in the established classic gaming area. I also am curious to see if any Z-80 programmers come out of the woodwork. Every other classic system (i.e Atari, Colecovision, Intellivision) has programmers writing new carts, why not the Astrocade too? Some of these new games on the other systems are as good (and infrequently better) than original releases." Adam : Were you involved with the Bally Professional Arcade (Astrocade)? If so, then you are the George Moses I am seeking. I have been looking for you, in conjunction with Astrocade information, for about a year. Brett Bilbrey sent me your email address [...] and I am following up on his lead. George: Yep, that's me. Brett and I are old friends and we met because of the old Bally Professional Arcade. I saw a program in The Arcadian that he wrote in Bally Basic that simulated the toy Simon game [ARCADIAN 1, no. 5 (March 1979): 35]. It wouldn't run, but I noticed he was from Dearborn, not too far from me. So, I got out the phone book and looked up Bilbrey and found him. We got together with a bunch of like-minded friends and formed "BUG," (Bally Users Group) and had lots of meetings, shared programs and techniques and really made an impact on the people who made the Arcade. Adam: Thanks for contacting me. I looked up your website. Now I know how come the best looking ads in the "Arcadian" were always yours. You know all about printing. Do you have the Cursor COLOR pages 52 and 53? I have posted all of Cursor on Bally Alley and would like to have readable versions of these pages. Someone on the Astrocade message board said he could make the pages readable in black and white (MUCH smaller file size) if he could use the original color pages (I have only a photocopy). George: I have ALL of the original Cursors. I could email the color version to you. Of course, I could clean it up first to get rid of the color and convert it into a graphic file. Your choice (GIF, JPG, PDF). [later] I found those pages and scanned them in. Using a series of masks, I was able to get rid of everything on the two pages except the text. Then, I touched up some of the type, especially across the middle of the page where the fold was. I Attached two 1-bit tiffs, one for each page at 300 pixels per inch. But Hotmail refused them because they exceeded the file transfer limit (about 900k each). Adam: [Thanks!] Adam: Do you know where I can contact Fred Cornett of Cursor? (I doubt this very much.) I understand he sort of "disappeared" when problems with the newsletter arose. I would like to contact him and let him know that Cursor is online. George: Fred Cornett? I went to AltaVista.com and used their people finder and asked for "Fred Cornett" and the state of California and only two of them popped up. I think he lived in California when he was publishing Cursor. This is all I could find: [listing of two people] Adam: I tried the Fred Cornett contact information that you sent from Altavista. The first number is a FAX line and the second number is not for a Fred, it is for a lady named Floral (or something like that). I'll try writing to the first address. [I followed up on the leads, neither of these people was Fred Cornett] Adam: Do you have any unreleased cartridges, written by yourself or anyone? George: I have a couple of unreleased cartridges given to me by Scott Norris, a former Bally programmer. Adam: Do you remember the titles of some of these unreleased cartridges that you have? If they have not already been archived, would you be willing to lend them out to someone that has the ability to dump the EPROM? George: They don't work very well and it would take someone like Brett Bilbrey to figure them out. I also have one of their demo cartridges that demonstrates the console with a great J.S. Bach musical introduction. Adam: I am seeking the copyright holders of all the non-PD software so that it can be legally available, either as public domain (preferred) or as freely distributable software. This software will then be posted on Bally Alley and possibly a limited release CD-ROM. For instance, Robert Fabris has granted permission for all the software in the Arcadian to be posted in this manner. When the rights of the software are available, a distribution method for the tape software needs to be found. WAV and MP3 work best, but the exact data format of the 2000 baud interface isn't available. These sound files need to be digitally remastered so that current users are not frustrated like past tape users (volume control, hiss, head-alignment, etc). What is the status of your Astrocade software? Are you willing to make it public domain? George: You are free to use any of the programs I have created. I don't know how you would use the many Bally Basic programs with the emulator, but one idea comes to mind. Mike White used to burn ROM's of cartridges all the time, and he figured out a way to make a cartridge out of a Bally Basic program by burning the program data right in with the cartridge data [the Astrocade Multicart does just what George suggests]. I have a great Yahtzee game that was published in the Arcadian [2, no. 8 (June 1980): 74-75,82,88.]. Mike improved the code of the Basic game and then put it on a cartridge and sent it to me. It's a great 4-player game that keeps score and moves very fast! And, Mike Peace designed some of the greatest Bally Basic games in existence, including many for the Blue Ram. Adam: Michael White wants me to make sure that I didn't misunderstand your statement [about releasing your programs to the public domain]. I took it for granted that your "Songs" cartridge is now freely distributable along with your tapes. Am I correct? George: I have never written a cartridge. Adam: Mike White would like to send you a Bally cartridge called "Songs." Someone gave it to him in the nineteen eighties and told him that you made it. The songs are yours, but he also was under the impression that you made the cartridge. Also, I have your song "Yesterday" on cartridge with accompanied music notes. Michael sent this to me; he told me that Richard C. Degler made this. George: All my programs were Bally Basic or Astro Basic. I sold a tape cassette with several songs on it. What the user did was plug in the Basic cartridge, load the self-starting Basic program at the beginning of the tape and leave the tape running in the cassette player. As soon as the program booted, it would start reading the music data from the tape. Once it "poked" all the data in consecutive memory locations, it would start "peeking" at the consecutive locations, loading the three-tone sound processor and start playing the notes. Each chord was accompanied by a "duration" value, so you could, in effect play whole notes, half notes, sixteenth notes, any kind of rhythm you wanted! [See ARCADIAN, 2 no. 7 (May 1980): 62-63. for a tutorial written by George on this technique.] Anyhow, once the entire song was done playing, the program would start looking at the tape again for the next song. Since the Arcade had no facility for turning the cassette player on and off, I put long blank spaces on the tape, perfectly timed, so when one song ended, the next one would start loading. I had about 15 songs on a tape. There was a Scott Joplin ragtime piano tape, a Christmas Carol tape and a Bach tape containing 13 of his Two Part Inventions. I had a lot of others too. Also, the original Bally Basic Cartridge had a very powerful math function (which was kicked out of the cartridge in its later version in favor of the editor and prefetch function). Using this function, I created a Timecard Calculator program that you could use to figure out your employees' timecards with precision to four decimal places [CURSOR, 2, no. 5 (January/February 1981): 85-86.] Another program I wrote was a home budgeting program. It wasn't very exciting, but it showed what you could do with the data arrays to keep track of your expenses in different categories. And, I wrote another program ["Astro Zap 2000," ARCADIAN, 4, no. 9 (July 1982): 88.] that was a game something like Space Fortress. It was very fast, with good sounds and explosions, and a function that kept your score. It was no match for the cartridge version, but it was fun to try. Adam: [Astrocade] games [...] can be found [on the Internet in] ROM image collections [that are] dancing on the edge of legality, which is why I am looking for copyright holders so that a collection like this can be posted without existing in any "gray area." This is why I am so glad that you have released your programs. I'm going to write an announcement about the public release of your software. I have contacted Don Gladden too. He still lives in California. He also has allowed all his programs to become public domain (postcardware, actually). I have to figure out how to post your tape programs on Bally Alley. With most other 2000-baud tapes, the WAV files are short, but yours will be too long to post as compressed WAV or even MP3 files. I need to find a workaround for this. Mike and I were talking about Lister, the program you wrote. I was going to order the cartridge from him for potential future use, but the version he has is modified to print to the parallel port on the Blue RAM. While I do have a 16K Blue Ram, I do not have this interface. George: Speaking of the Blue Ram, I have what is probably the only 32k Blue Ram ever built by Perkins Engineering. I know I have a version of the Blue Ram Utility, along with many other programs on tape by John Perkins. Whether they still work or not, I'll have to find out. Adam: [Mike...] said that Clyde made one other 32K Blue Ram besides yours (that he knows of). [Do] you know how to contact some of the original Astrocade community? Do you know the whereabouts of any of these people: John Perkins, Andy Guevara, Ken Lill, Michael Prosise, or Mike Peace? George: [Gives me Mike's email address] By the way, Mike Peace has a website at: http://members.aol.com/MakePeace1/page11.html There's a link there that will take you to his song library. He is a musician and has produced quite a few CDs. There are lots of funny songs too and he lets you download MP3 files of them free. I wrote the lyrics to one of them, "Thank You Scary Movies." Adam: Thanks for Mike Peace's email address, I sent him an email and I hope to hear back from him soon. [Mike did respond and we exchanged a couple of emails, which I collected in a short article.] Selected Articles and Programs: Bilbrey, Brett. "Simon," ARCADIAN 1, no. 5 (March 1979): 35. Moses, George. "Analog (non-digital) Clock," ARCADIAN, 3, no. 10 (August 1981): 105. ----. "Astro Zap 2000," ARCADIAN, 4, no. 9 (July 1982): 88 ----. "Character Display in Extended BASIC," ARCADIAN, 5, no. 9 (July 1983): 145. ----. "Executive Time Card Calculator," Cursor, 2, no. 5 (January/February 1981): 85-86. ----. "How to Add Sound Effects to Daredevil," ARCADIAN, 3, no.11 (September 1981): 111. ----. "How to Use the Blue Ram BASIC 'Play%()' Command," ARCADIAN, 5, no. 8 (June 1983): 128. ----. "Michigan Bally User's Group gets a look at Zgrass-32 'add-under' for the Arcade!," ARCADIAN, 3, no. 6 (April 1981): 64-65. ----. "Music Input Program, Plays 3-Tone Music in BASIC," ARCADIAN 2, no. 7 (May 1980): 62-63. ----. "Music Processor Command, Part II," ARCADIAN, 5, no. 10 (August 1983): 156. ----. "New 3 Voice Music Assembler Featuring no REM Statements," ARCADIAN 4, no. 1 (November 1981): 10-11. ----. "Sound Port - Sound Variable Conversion," ARCADIAN, 5, no. 4 (February 1983): 58-59. ----. "Tonic for Bitter Music," Cursor, 2, no. 2 (September 1980): 61. ----. "We Three Kings of Orient Are," Cursor, 2, no. 3 (October 1980): 69. Wiseman, Bob. "Yahtzee," Arcadian 2, no. 8 (June 1980): 74-75, 82, 88. Selected Advertisements for Music Tapes: Moses, George. "3-Part Arcade Christmas Music," ARCADIAN, 3, 1 (November 1980): 9. ----. "Make Your Arcade Sing," ARCADIAN, 5, no. 2 (December 1982): 35. ----. "3-Part Harmony Software," ARCADIAN, 6, no. 11/12 (October 1984): 121. -- February 1, 2002