Not only Konami’s Time Pilot and Namco’s Galaga have been ported and vectorized but also all vintage romset variations thereof plus the ‘Gatsbee’ hack, eleven romsets total. More a result of my own curiosity while I was digging into the code of these arcade games since the gameplay differences of the romset variations are usually…
Firmware v2.53 – Merry Christmas !
As Vectrex presents for this Christmas I did something different: vectorizing three raster arcade games of the time. The idea here is to emulate the original game and create an evaluation functionality for the raster hardware to somehow mimic it using vectors. This is similar work to porting a vector game but much more time-consuming:…
RnS public release, FW v2.49 and general project info.
Rocks ‘n’ Saucers – public release For the 40th anniversary of the Vectrex (released in the USA in 1982, Europe in 1983) I wanted to offer a present of my own to all the Vectrex fans out there. Which one to choose was easy: it just had to be my fifth 6809 Vectrex game, my…
Firmware v2.46 – Alex Herbert’s Protector
Important later update: Original post below: After the Christmas update which included Alex Herbert’s VecFLASH menu I realized it really was high time to finally develop patches for Herbert’s YASI/Protector and Protector LE for the current VecFever firmware. These are truly ground-breaking games, Protector esp. just fantastic, and not only hasn’t aged but in my…
Firmware v2.40 – Merry Christmas !
Hopefully I can entice you to dig out your Vectrex and have some vector fun, playing your favourite Vectrex games or looking at new goodies for the Vectrex. And to get you interested I have added a few new things, too. The Christmas mode option of ‘Word War VI’ has been finally debugged and enabled…
Summer update
I have just finished a slightly different VecFever hardware project and since I already got quite a few ‘but is it better ?!’ questions I realized I have to explain the motivation behind it a bit further. Short answer: it is different, neither better nor worse, and runs the exact same firmware, 6809 code and…
Firmware v2.32
Two Vectrex owners notified me that the watchdog changes in v2.30 indeed did affect Vectorblade on their Vectrex, the same, tiny timing change fixed it for both of them and work afaik everywhere else, too, which is one of the reasons to release v2.32 with this change right away. If you’ve got a Vectrex still…
Firmware v2.30
This firmware finally incorporates all-encompassing changes so I went ahead and put in everything I wanted to change for a while in one go: to better support native (and frequently quite weird) ports of various wireframe games the hardware watchdog which I have been using myself for a while has been exposed for everyone as…
Firmware v2.28
The system currently stabilized before a few changes coming which’ll necessitate to change the abstraction library – and then the current apps will not work anymore – so it is a good time to release a new firmware: if you are using v2.26 you don’t really need to update the apps since the former ones…
Thermometer Cartridge
Almost exactly four years ago I whiled away a few hours building a thermometer for the Vectrex – this is probably the weirdest thing I’ve build for the Vectrex so far and the utter nonsensical nature of it still occasionally just makes me smile. The first one was literally a thermometer for the Vectrex itself…