This is a massive update and the major milestone I was working towards for over a year now: dedicated Vectrex translations of all the released 8-bit vector arcade games running on the VecFever. The very last ones developed were the Z80-based ones – Midway’s ‘Omega Race’ and the Sega G80 vector hardware games (Star Trek being my favorite).
Not surprisingly after working on this for so long developing and polishing code or creating new optimizations for performance or output stability the tools and graphics code changed quite a bit over time. Then I borrowed Malban’s ‘worst there is so far’ Vectrex (and he gave back my former ‘worst there is’ contender that he had on loan at the same time) last week and saw a few issues in a variety of places because a specific sampling time assumption of mine fails in very specific situations on this one.
So I went through absolutely every graphics code I’ve written and updated it – even Robot Arena, the Core or 2048 showed issues on this ‘bad’ Vectrex. And this was the incentive to go through all emulators, update and test all the games’ output on this Vectrex and whilst doing so make sure that all optimizations I might have developed for later emulators is in place everywhere.
For the emulators this only affects the ‘non-boost’ drawing path and slows graphics down further ever so slightly – a bit less than a percent and usually a lot less than that so not noticeable.