2048

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 never played it.

However, I also had at the back of my mind back then that it would be a nice challenge to program a game for the memory constraints of the original time – 4096 bytes – and at one point I just knew that ‘2048’ would work perfectly. 2048 bytes luckily was never used on the Vectrex, that would have been a stretch.. 4K was already tight (but comfortable), it has an attract mode, keeps the current high score, nice sounds and (in my eye, of course) looks gorgeous. 

Obviously you can play this on a multicart where you can add games but since it is so small you can also quite easily build your own cartridge by converting an old one using a 2732 eprom and an original Vectrex 4K pcb. I myself used a dead Berzerk cart. whose pcb/shell was lying around here for a few years. In case you’ve never considered this: the Vectrex masked roms have /OE and A11 switched compared to a 2732 so you have to reroute those lines. It’s quite easy since all you have to do is cut the two lines wiggling underneath the eprom on the component side and reconnect.

So I’ve just cut at the red lines (didn’t have to for /OE since that trace was already missing), rubbed off the paint from the two traces (green) and soldered the leg directly to it from the component side.

Afterwards I have increased the memory footprint massively to the normal homebrew size of today – 64K – for a deluxe version: music, longer attract with a nice title page, two rulesets to choose from, hiscore tables etc. This is the version which is included on the main page. The smaller version is all you need, though, game-wise identical for the normal ruleset and the game just excellent.