Category: Uncategorized

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…

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…

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…

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…

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….

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…

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…