KevinThere’s something exhilarating about working to get a crusty old type in program running. Trying to parse out the bugs on your end and getting it running is like a glimpse into someone’s work they spent hours coding and laboring over. You’re reviving what was once a dead digital artifact! That’s so cool!
Success in my type-in efforts after several runs through the code to fix transcription errors (and make sense of 40 year old shorthand that the conversion tool needed help with). Here is Falling Stars for Bally BASIC, sold on cassette tape in 1981! The cassette version is lost, but a type-in listing was sent privately to the Arcadian newsletter's publisher, and thanks to a scan of that, I was able to bring this program back to life.
The game itself is a nifty little take on Missile Command, with waves, score multipliers, and neat effects for the Bally. It runs on the 300-baud BASIC cart, which is not emulated, but it should be convertible to the 2000-baud format, which is. I've sent this to Ballyalley and Gaming Alexandria for publication, so please look for it!