It was originally announced as the "Bally Home Library Computer" in October 1977 and initially made available for mail order in December 1977.

But due to production delays, the units were first released to stores in April 1978 and its branding changed to "Bally Professional Arcade".

The system Nutting delivered was used in most of Midway's classic arcade games of the era, including Gorf and Wizard of Wor.

Delays in the production meant none of the units actually shipped until 1978, and by this time the machine had been renamed the Bally Professional Arcade.

[2] A corporate buyer from Montgomery Ward who was in charge of the Bally system put the two groups in contact, and a deal was eventually arranged.

In 1981 they re-released the unit with the BASIC cartridge included for free, this time known as the Bally Computer System, with the name changing again, in 1982, to Astrocade.

The system was being developed by a group of computer artists at the University of Illinois at Chicago known as the 'Circle Graphics Habitat', along with programmers at Nutting.

Aimed at the home computer market while being designed, the machine was now re-targeted as a system for outputting high-quality graphics to videotape.

The system used page mode addressing allowing them to read one "line" at a time at very high speed into a buffer inside the display chip.

An additional set of four color registers could be "swapped in" at any point along the line, allowing the creation of two screen "halves", split vertically.

Originally intended to allow creation of a score area on the side of the screen, programmers also used this feature to emulate 8 color modes.

If a program wrote to the ROM space (normally impossible, it is "read only" after all) the video chip would take the data, apply a function to it, and then copy the result into the corresponding location in the RAM.

This allowed the Astrocade to support any number of sprite-like objects independent of hardware, with the downside that it was up to the software to re-draw them when they moved.

The Astrocade was one of the early cartridge-based systems, using cartridges known as Videocades that were designed to be as close in size and shape as possible to a cassette tape.

The unit also included two games built into the ROM, Gunfight and Checkmate, along with the simple but useful Calculator and a "doodle" program called Scribbling.

John Perkins wrote the game first and submitted it to The Arcadian fanzine, from which it was adapted for the Astro BASIC manual.

The language lacked a DIM statement for dimensioning the arrays, the size of which was determined by available memory (SZ) not used by the program listing (2 bytes per item).

The ZGRASS unit sat under the Astrocade and turned it into a "real" computer, including a full keyboard, a math co-processor (FPU), 32k of RAM, and a new 32k ROM containing the GRASS programming language (sometimes referred to as GRAFIX on this machine).