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 Asteroids clone. So that you can build yourself a standalone cart. to play some decent Asteroids on your Vectrex. The binary should work on other multicart. at least in principle: they need to be able to deal with the 1-wire communication with the DS2431 memory chip. (As a hail-mary there is a known-to-be-working check in the binary for at least one problematic multicart. out there to entirely disable this communication code)
( more info. about the game is under Info/Projects/ )
Firmware v2.49
There is a bug in the v2.46 firmware affecting VF with the additional serial port. and certain option settings so if you use v2.46 please do update asap. Besides the bug fix only two noteworthy things have been added: the max. no of frames of supported videos doubled and another, extremely basic and early curiosity has been added: a version of ‘Tennis for Two’
v2.49
- added analog joystick measurements for second joystick to the vf lib
- added 'Tennis for Two'
v2.48
- fixed serious serial '#VF:BOOT' output side-effect introduced in v2.43
v2.47
- multi bank loads changed to handle twice the frame # (doubles supported video time)
- removed unnecessary file seeks for consecutive bank # loads (every other bank)General Project Info.
First of all I have to apologize: I am indeed sorry; but there is no way I can reply to all people who contact me. This is a hobby project after all and for some reason lately the amount of people asking a variation of the ‘how can I get one’ question has even increased.
Here due to the ever increasing madness level of our times my hobby-time lately had to be reduced development-wise. And when it comes to production an important reason not to build more VF is still the availability of the microprocessor used (or lack thereof..). But mostly my own lack of interest to build more, to be honest, since I do not enjoy building them; it just takes too much time. And developing is just more fun – currently I am working on another arcade game conversion for the Vectrex, something different this time.
However, since it might make a lot of people happy I can feel myself edging towards trying to think about maybe, just maybe, start to get used to the idea to investigate how to eventually get a few more of the ‘DIY’ micro sd pcb variant for others. Maybe. Since with this version it is not my time to add mods to it (there the full spectrum is available: led/serial/service button/real time clock) and get it nicely into a shell.