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…
Scopetrex & other, new Vectrex cpu pcbs / Firmware v1.31
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…
Vectrex: NMI
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…
Sidam Asterocks
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,…
2048 – 4K v1.2
A few years ago I have met the developers of a puzzle game for the C64 on local retro meetings and afterwards played it on my SX-64 while restoring it. That game is C-2048 by P1X3L.net (hi to ALeX and Retrofan !). I did not know the original by G.Cirulli and to this day have…
Update: firmware v1.28 & all emulators updated
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…
Atari Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back – the protection
Whereas when tackling the original Atari ‘Star Wars’ vector game it was a pleasant challenge -create the necessary 6809 toolset, optimizations and Vectrex advancements for a great game I’d like to play- the work for ESB was different from the outset: I knew that even though it was released years later it was an inferior…
Update: Warrior v1.3
Vectrexmad! notified me of the ‘Reconstructing Warrior: Vectorbeams, Natural Magick & Business Intrigue’ paper by Thomas R. Rousse. Very interesting read – and one particular thing mentioned was that Outerworld Arcade’s Timothy Shiels created a Warrior romset for a custom four joystick control panel using four digital joysticks. If you do not know the story:…
Update: firmware v1.26
fix for Vectorblade (starting with v1.24 it became unstable on some Vectrex) and updated year to ‘2020’
the KiWi Vectrex stand
When developing the ‘serial 6809 dma’ capability in 2018 by adapting a MAME version so that it could mirror the graphics output on the Vectrex I started to also add an ‘orientation’ option to the vector terminal cartridge right away so that the output could be either rotated (and aspect ratio corrected) for normal Vectrex…