Category: Uncategorized

Quantum was developed by GCC for Atari and used the nicest vector hardware you could think of at the time: similar to Tempest it uses an Atari color vector generator and two Pokeys for sound. But instead of an 8-bit CPU they used the back then absolutely brand new Motorola 68000. Plus no vector rom…

Happy Easter ! Namco’s Rally-X from 1980 was an impressive arcade game for technical reasons: it uses smooth scrolling in a subset of the screen complete with clipping of all objects – but was too hard and frustrating to play. This luckily was fixed a year later by Namco with a ‘New’ Rally-X romset. This…

Not only Konami’s Time Pilot and Namco’s Galaga have been ported and vectorized but also all vintage romset variations thereof plus the ‘Gatsbee’ hack, eleven romsets total. More a result of my own curiosity while I was digging into the code of these arcade games since the gameplay differences of the romset variations are usually…

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:…

Rocks ‘n’ Saucers – public release For the 40th anniversary of the Vectrex (released in the USA in 1982, Europe in 1983) I wanted to offer a present of my own to all the Vectrex fans out there. Which one to choose was easy: it just had to be my fifth 6809 Vectrex game, my…

Important later update: Original post below: 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…