The Astrocade was built in 1978 by Midway's own arcade engineers, out of the hardware they made coin-op machines with. It showed far better pictures than the consoles beside it, and almost nobody bought one. MAME is the way to play it.
We have 31 Bally Astrocade games on My Abandonware, Wizard of Wor and Space Zap among them — arcade games that came home to the machine their coin-op versions already ran on.
Emulator
MAME is the only real choice. It knows the console as astrocde, its software list covers the cartridges we hold, and it wants the system ROM of the machine.
Nothing else is maintained. The console never had a following big enough for a second emulator, and the one dedicated program you may read about, WinArcadia, does not emulate it — it covers a different family of 1970s machines.
MAME wants astrocde.zip, the 8 KB program built into the console, in its roms folder. See our page about BIOS files to get it.
Running the games
Start the astrocde machine, then load the cartridge from the file manager. Our games are .bin files inside a zip, 2 to 7 KB, and they need nothing else.
On the command line, mame astrocde -cart game.bin does the same in one step. In RetroArch, put astrocde.zip in the system folder and open the game with the MAME core.
The console starts on a menu of its own, and the first thing you will see is four games that are not on your disk.
The four games inside the console
Gunfight, Checkmate, Calculator and Scribbling were built into the machine. They are in the system ROM, so they are on the menu before you load anything.
We list them as one download for the sake of the catalogue, but you do not need it: start MAME with no cartridge and they are already there. Calculator and Scribbling are not games at all — one is a calculator, the other a drawing board.
The knob
The Astrocade controller was a pistol grip with a knob on top, a joystick and a paddle at once. Several games are unplayable until it is mapped.
Brickyard / Clowns, Bally Pin and the other bat-and-ball games read the knob, not the stick. In MAME, open the input settings of the machine and give Paddle an axis — a mouse, or the stick of a gamepad. Without it the bat does not move, and the game looks broken when it is only waiting.
I need help!
We do not provide support for running abandonware games. One site has kept this console going for twenty years.
Bally Alley holds the software, the manuals, the newsletters and a page on setting MAME up for the machine. The Bally Arcade/Astrocade forum of AtariAge is where its people talk.
Checked in October 2026 against each emulator's own documentation and, where it exists, its source code. Game counts and file sizes come from our own catalogue. These guides were drafted with the help of an AI assistant and checked by hand before publishing. If something here is out of date, tell us.