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…

Well, this is rather odd but maybe a developer out there might find this useful one day: Someone who shall remain nameless was struggling to find an elusive and nasty bug which only happened after hours of gameplay on real hardware and asked me whether I could maybe override the reset vector so that he…

The Italian arcade manufacturer Sidam built quite a few dedicated, quite interesting bootleg cabinets of Ataris early games, including an Asteroids clone. The cabinet quality was excellent, I actually think they are as nice as the originals. However they were also quirky: Asterocks for example uses a control panel which tilts down towards the back,…

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…

This is a massive update and the major milestone I was working towards for over a year now: dedicated Vectrex translations of all the released 8-bit vector arcade games running on the VecFever. The very last ones developed were the Z80-based ones – Midway’s ‘Omega Race’ and the Sega G80 vector hardware games (Star Trek…

Whereas when tackling the original Atari ‘Star Wars’ vector game it was a pleasant challenge -create the necessary 6809 toolset, optimizations and Vectrex advancements for a great game I’d like to play- the work for ESB was different from the outset: I knew that even though it was released years later it was an inferior…