There was recently an upload of 2,000 arcade manuals to the Internet Archive (as reported by Jason Scott on his Bluesky account, although he’s also on Mastodon, twice apparently), and that’s where I found the manual for Wizard of Wor.

Some quotes (italics are mine):

“When you have reached dungeons eight and above, you have become a Worlord. Now you have the honor of testing your skill in the Worlord dungeons. These dungeons are much tougher, there are fewer walls and more open spaces. If even one shot misses, and travels the long distance down to the opposite wall, a monster wiii very likely come up and gobble you down. Finding and establishing yourself in solid strategic positions is very difficult. It is easy to have several worriors chomped up in a row. Sometimes the monsters will line up along one edge of the maze — a lovely parade. However, if just one monster starts approaching from the top, watch out!” (page 11)

“The Wizard of Wor loves to hear the patter of little feet running through his dungeons. So he created some lovely beasties, known as Worlings. Burwor is beautiful, bouncing blue. Six of them exist on each dungeon level. They always remain visible. This is because the Wizards favorite color is blue. As each Burwor is shot, a Garwor may come to take his place. Garwor is kind of overfed, and waddles a bit, but he has yellow scales that are just delicate. As Garwors are shot, Thorwors are teleported in to take their place. Thorwor is sleek and dangerous red.” (page 11)

“The Wizard of Wor: Even at a young age, the Wizard showed promise in the mystic arts. But it took many dangerous encounters and many years of research and study to sharpen his skills to his current high level. Over the centuries, the Wizard has retained his chaotic sense of humor, much to the chagrin of worriors entering his dungeons (see the list of phrases).” (page 12)

And some of the phrases spoken by the Wizard during the game, spoken by the synth:

• “Hey! Insert Coin!”
• “Another coin for my treasure chest.”
• “Ah good! My pets were getting hungry. Ha ha ha ha!”
• “You’re off to see the Wizard, the magical Wizard of Wor.”
• “Remember, I’m the wizard, not you.”
• “If you can’t beat the rest, then you’ll never get the best! Ha ha ha ha!” (The Wizard laughs a lot.)
• “If you destroy my babies, l’ll pop you in the oven! На һа һа һа!”
• “Wasn’t that lightning bolt delicious? Ha ha ha ha!”
• “Hey! Your space boot’s untied! Ha ha ha ha!”
• “The Wizard of Wor thanks you.” (aww)

rodneylives

The Bally Professional Arcade, a.k.a. the Bally Computer System, then the Astrovision, eventually settling on the Astrocade, was in its hardware a cut-down version of their early arcade hardware. While not a big seller, mostly an also-run alongside the Atari VCS, Intellivision, ColecoVision, or even the Odyssey², it could, like several of those systems, run a version of BASIC with an add-on cartridge. (The VCS had its Basic Programming cartrige, the Intellivision had the Entertainment Computer System, and the ColecoVision had ADAM.)

The Astrocade (to settle upon one name for it) had some interesting advantages. It uses the same graphics chip as Gorf, Wizard of Wor, and Robby Roto, but due to having less memory to work with doesn’t support as good a resolution as the arcade units. If the chip is used in multi-color graphics mode, it would use all but 16 bytes of memory! The Atari VCS, by contrast, only had 128 bytes of RAM, but didn’t have a bitmapped display taking up so much of it. These were the kinds of tradeoffs console designers had to make at the time. While it didn’t have hardware sprites, it did have “blitter” circuitry for rapidly moving data around in memory.

8-Bit Show and Tell’s video also describes the culture around the machine, which saw production for a surprisingly long time, and had several independent programmers selling their own games for its BASIC cartridge. They even supported a newsletter, the Arcadian, that shared coding tips.

Everything about this system was odd, from the pistol-grip controllers, to the built-in software on ROM, to the calculator-style keypad set into the unit itself, to the almost-but-not-quite Atari-style joystick ports. But I don’t want to steal 8BSaT’s thunder, watch the video if you’re interested in learning more!

A Real Computer? Exploring the Bally Computer System aka Astrocade

rodneylives