After the Christmas update which included Alex Herbert’s VecFLASH menu I realized it really was high time to finally develop patches for Herbert’s YASI/Protector and Protector LE for the current VecFever firmware. These are truly ground-breaking games, Protector esp. just fantastic, and not only hasn’t aged but in my mind the importance of it even…
Firmware v2.40 – Merry Christmas !
Hopefully I can entice you to dig out your Vectrex and have some vector fun, playing your favourite Vectrex games or looking at new goodies for the Vectrex. And to get you interested I have added a few new things, too. The Christmas mode option of ‘Word War VI’ has been finally debugged and enabled…
Summer update
I have just finished a slightly different VecFever hardware project and since I already got quite a few ‘but is it better ?!’ questions I realized I have to explain the motivation behind it a bit further. Short answer: it is different, neither better nor worse, and runs the exact same firmware, 6809 code and…
Firmware v2.32
Two Vectrex owners notified me that the watchdog changes in v2.30 indeed did affect Vectorblade on their Vectrex, the same, tiny timing change fixed it for both of them and work afaik everywhere else, too, which is one of the reasons to release v2.32 with this change right away. If you’ve got a Vectrex still…
Firmware v2.30
This firmware finally incorporates all-encompassing changes so I went ahead and put in everything I wanted to change for a while in one go: to better support native (and frequently quite weird) ports of various wireframe games the hardware watchdog which I have been using myself for a while has been exposed for everyone as…
Firmware v2.28
The system currently stabilized before a few changes coming which’ll necessitate to change the abstraction library – and then the current apps will not work anymore – so it is a good time to release a new firmware: if you are using v2.26 you don’t really need to update the apps since the former ones…
Thermometer Cartridge
Almost exactly four years ago I whiled away a few hours building a thermometer for the Vectrex – this is probably the weirdest thing I’ve build for the Vectrex so far and the utter nonsensical nature of it still occasionally just makes me smile. The first one was literally a thermometer for the Vectrex itself…
VecFever Mark II / 128MB
Short version: For quite a few years now the VF is my main hobby retro project and I intend to tinker with/update/improve upon it for the foreseeable future. Since I still get asked frequently for one and after years of not offering any I have decided for once to build a few for others of…
Firmware v2.26 / PDP-1
A PDP-1 emulator is a curiosity I had for a while at the back of my mind: having read about the original 1962 Spacewar!, the Minskytron ‘display hack’ and in general about the history and technology of the PDP-1 I wanted to learn about it hands-on and thereby see these outputs on the Vectrex, too….
Vectrex 6809 cart. emulation the VF way
Since the v2 firmware was also specifically developed for arcade environments and/or new vectrex repro. pcbs lately I have started also developing standalone emulators for a few Vectrex cartridges. Besides being able to play them in landscape mode, say in an Asteroids cabinet, the aim here is in contrast to arcade emulators not to take…