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: all graphics objects have to be figured out and manually vectorized. The end result is worth it, though, they work great on the Vectrex. So do power up your Vectrex and try them out ! If you are new to Pooyan: Pootan is a bootleg and nearly identical but the Stern licensed romset is a later, harder version so I recommend starting with Konami’s original Pooyan.
This year Jess Askey after years of improvements also finally released his v1.0 romset for Major Havoc: the promised end. Now even in multiple romset versions, esp. also in German and French. The localized ones need a bit more polishing but do work already so all three language versions have also been ported and included here.
All these games have very high vector counts so if you have never tried out whether the expert option ‘graphics boost’ can be used with your Vectrex then it might be worth trying this out with these. If a Vectrex does not support the boost mode only a few vectors will be wrong in the y direction sometimes, most times way off.
Changelog
v2.53
- added Pootan, Pooyan and Pooyan(Stern)
v2.52
- updated year to 2023
- updated 'Major Havoc PE' to v1.00 and also added apps for both the new German and French romsets
- increased supported application size by 128KB (for mhavocpe..)
- Asteroids/Asterock/Asteroids Deluxe v2.5: substituted analog measurement with digital one for 'digital joystick' option for vecadapt/megapad boundary case
- gravitar/lunarbattle v2.4: emulator core updated
v2.51
- added 'Bomb Jack'
- added another optimization to offload more vectors onto the 6809 (used by both dkong and bombjack)
- added marginally slower but minutely more precise drawing option to menu
v2.50
- added 'Vector Kong'
- added vector object functionality
- added marginally slower but minutely more precise drawing option to vf lib