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169:. A number of people at the Habitat, as well as some from Nutting, worked on the project, adding a keyboard, memory, and additional connectors. A separate display chip created text, which was then mixed with the output from the display chip for the screen. Also included would be a new version of GRASS3, known as
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market, but the
Nutting people managed to convince management to get DeFanti to port GRASS3 to the platform under contract. The idea was to build an external box that would be used with the existing console to turn it into a "real" computer, a system known as the
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magazine contains an article by DeFanti (et al.) that seems to suggest that the ZGRASS-100 was already "dead", and that the UV-1 was intended to be used for high-quality video output. Ad copy from the same era suggests that Bally intended to sell the UV-1 as a
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and similar machines. This makes the ZGRASS-100 somewhat unnecessary, so whether or not Bally intended to offer both remains a mystery. Either way, in 1980 Bally decided to exit the industry altogether, dropping both Z-Box projects, and the
Astrocade too.
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Although Midway had already given up on the
Astrocade, they later sold the rights to the design to a 3rd party, Astrovision. Some time in the mid-1980s Astrovision decided to release the original "add-under" version of the hardware, now known as the
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so the machines could be installed and left running for years – a floppy disk would burn out very quickly in this role. The additional RAM was not normally visible to the
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and a larger 16 KB ROM with additional Zgrass commands in it. To this basic system the
Habitat added high quality video output circuitry and a
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that were needed to boot the machine, so a disk was no longer required. Much of the additional RAM, up to 256 KB of it, was dedicated as a
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DeFanti had been working at the
Habitat for some time when, in 1977, he was introduced to Jeff Frederiksen, a chip designer working at
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or the display hardware, but a new memory controller could switch in blocks of it so a number of screens could be
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division of Bally, to create a standardized graphics driver chip. They intended to use it in most of their future
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case (thus the R) with considerably more RAM and a 32 KB ROM which contained the parts of
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At about the same time, another version of the same basic parts was built as the
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The final version of the Z-Box was the only one to be produced, as the
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Bally's intents for the UV-1 are not entirely clear. The
November 1980
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companies. It represents what seems to be the first dedicated graphics
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at a personal computer price point, a project they referred to as the
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Datamax UV-1R, with the associated analog breakout box on top
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they were working on which would later turn into the
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141:. Nutting had been contracted by Midway, the
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74:Learn how and when to remove this message
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234:if the disk needs were not that large.
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110:. It was primarily the brainchild of
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