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 showing problems do contact me – all of mine worked fine with v2.30 already – and there is a lot more I can do.
By the way, I should have explained this before since some might not know what a hardware watchdog is in arcade or microprocessor terms. So the short version is: it does not guard against intruders from outside as the name might imply but wants to be petted all the time just so it knows that its owner is still there and aware of it. And if it gets too agitated it will reset everything in the hope that the next instantiation of its owner fares better. This is a very simple process but extremely useful: it can protect not only against software problems but even against hardware issues, as long as they are rare and/or intermittent. This protection idea is neither new nor unique to arcade pcbs (e.g. Asteroids back in the 70s uses a watchdog) or microprocessors of course, e.g. the spot killer of arcade vector monitors exists due to a very similar reasoning: to shut operation down when an expected input for a time period has not occurred. Only the vector monitor does this to protect the phosphor and does not need to reboot something.
Anyways… back to the important things: I was able to finish ‘Word War vi’ – the entire game is implemented (but not thoroughly tested). It does however have an elusive bug with one feature, a Christmas mode where you play as Santa, so I had to disable this mode for now. Will get to it eventually – after the summer break…
http://www.vecfever.com/faq/word-war-vi/
- timings for the Vectorblade irq. cart. changed
- waitrecal behavior changed for menu / vf.lib since one Vectrex owner notified me of a weird Vectrex
- Eliminator bonus dips fixed
- Eliminator 4P initial release
- initial version of (up to) 10 extra buttons added to the vf lib.
- War of the Worlds terrain orientation fixed
- ‘Word War vi’ initial release