I am offering a bounty of $100 (paid via PayPal) to someone who adds support for the 2000-baud tape format to the astrocade emulator in MAME. Currently, there is no tape support at all. I want to, at minimum, be able to load Bally BASIC programs into the "AstroBASIC" cartridge.

I wrote extensively about this much-needed feature at mametesters.org. The "report" I made is there. It's called:

"07072: astrocde and clones: [Enhancement] 2000-Baud "AstroBASIC" Tape I/O Support Missing"

Here is a direct link to that thread:

https://mametesters.org/view.php?id=7072

Is anyone interested in trying to add tape support to the Astrocade emulator?

I'm not sure how to work out the details of this, so perhaps we can talk about it publicly here. I'm not even sure how to approach this if more than one person is interested.

I don't think that there is an official way to offer a bounty for work on MAME. Someone on the BallyAlley Yahoo group suggested that I post here. If this is not correct, then can someone please point me to where I could offer a bounty for a feature to be added to MAME?

I'm hoping that $100 is enough to inspire someone to look into the code for this often-overlooked game console from 1978.

Adam