Category: Uncategorized

First firmware to include ‘Elite: the new kind’. A few changes in the firmware to better support Elite (the text system and a new optimization feature) necessitated a complete recompile of the other apps. against the new, changed library, too. Also includes a few bug fixes (e.g. Fortress of Narzod was inaccessible in v2.22 or…

Two decades ago C.J.Pinder reverse engineered the BBC disk version of Elite and wrote a modern equivalent – ‘the new kind’ – which over time was ported to a multitude of systems. His game is extremely faithful to the original, using the same ships, trade items, missions and what is also important: the same random…

This ‘Christmas’ firmware includes the latest projects, esp. Akalabeth, Dungeons of Daggorath and Voom. Also a few more Vextrex emulators, the last addition is Web Warp/s – although for once I have not (yet ?) throttled it to the normal Vectrex speed but kept it running faster since I myself prefer it this way, in…

After finishing ‘Akalabeth, World of Doom’ I was still in an early RPG mood so I ported ‘Dungeons of Daggorath’, too. This game was exclusively released for the RadioShack TRS-80 Color Computer which also uses a 6809 just like the Vectrex. That there were no other 8-bit ports back in the day is the reason…

As mentioned the v2 firmware was developed completely anew specifically with modern vector applications in mind. So today I wanted to offer a sneak peek under the hood of this new runtime environment. Any application needs to have access to and deal with several basic things: a sense of time, available user input and a…

The new firmware is fundamentally different so let me take a step back and elaborate: For some time now the initial firmware was insufficient for my recent developments simply because it started as a Vectrex development system and was held back by the 6809 menu and design decisions based on it. By now I however…

For debugging purposes I sometimes use serial output so the vf has an accessible uart and I’ve build a few cart. which include a uart-usb pcb. At one point since the hw already existed I was wondering how to use this serial port also by the 6809. This 6809 serial implementation went through a few…

Lately several new Vectrex cpu pcbs have started appearing in order to see the Vectrex vector output on a wider variety of vector hardware. The Vectrex cpu pcb is very well suited to this – esp. the digital side is quite simple and the parts are even now still available – not always the exact…

Well, this is rather odd but maybe a developer out there might find this useful one day: Someone who shall remain nameless was struggling to find an elusive and nasty bug which only happened after hours of gameplay on real hardware and asked me whether I could maybe override the reset vector so that he…

The Italian arcade manufacturer Sidam built quite a few dedicated, quite interesting bootleg cabinets of Ataris early games, including an Asteroids clone. The cabinet quality was excellent, I actually think they are as nice as the originals. However they were also quirky: Asterocks for example uses a control panel which tilts down towards the back,…