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…

This ‘Christmas’ firmware includes the latest projects, esp. Akalabeth, Dungeons of Daggorath and Voom. Also a few more Vextrex emulators, the last addition is Web Warp/s – although for once I have not (yet ?) throttled it to the normal Vectrex speed but kept it running faster since I myself prefer it this way, in…

After finishing ‘Akalabeth, World of Doom’ I was still in an early RPG mood so I ported ‘Dungeons of Daggorath’, too. This game was exclusively released for the RadioShack TRS-80 Color Computer which also uses a 6809 just like the Vectrex. That there were no other 8-bit ports back in the day is the reason…

As mentioned the v2 firmware was developed completely anew specifically with modern vector applications in mind. So today I wanted to offer a sneak peek under the hood of this new runtime environment. Any application needs to have access to and deal with several basic things: a sense of time, available user input and a…

The new firmware is fundamentally different so let me take a step back and elaborate: For some time now the initial firmware was insufficient for my recent developments simply because it started as a Vectrex development system and was held back by the 6809 menu and design decisions based on it. By now I however…

For debugging purposes I sometimes use serial output so the vf has an accessible uart and I’ve build a few cart. which include a uart-usb pcb. At one point since the hw already existed I was wondering how to use this serial port also by the 6809. This 6809 serial implementation went through a few…

Lately several new Vectrex cpu pcbs have started appearing in order to see the Vectrex vector output on a wider variety of vector hardware. The Vectrex cpu pcb is very well suited to this – esp. the digital side is quite simple and the parts are even now still available – not always the exact…