Vectrex!
19Ever heard of the Vectrex video game system? Own one? Built one from scratch?
It’s a standalone console with a built-in black & white vector display. A vector display draws lines from one point to another, instead of the usual (old) TV or computer’s raster (side to side) display. The same thing as an old oscilloscope, or many old video arcade games like Asteroids, Space War, Tempest and Battlezone.
I hear you say, what’s up with the colors, if it’s B&W? They used a simple, but clever trick of transparent colored screen overlays that were tailored to each game. Above you see Minestorm and Armor Attack in place. Here are some more.
Minestorm is the built-in Asteroids type game, and cartridges are used for additional games. The controller stores in the front of the case, so it’s a tidy, fairly portable, little package.
The Vectrex was trying bring the exact arcade experience home. Unfortunately for the company (GCE, then bought by Milton Bradley, then by Hasbro) the Vectrex was introduced a year before the great video game crash. Fortunately for me, at the time, the Vectrex was discounted from $200 to $150, and eventually to a firesale closeout at $50.
You might think it would be just another forgotten footnote, but the vector display has always made it stand out. And then in the mid 90’s John Dondzila released the first new Vectrex game in over 10 years. That opened the floodgates, and there are now far more (and mostly better) games than the original releases. At the same time, Sean Kelly created a multicart that held many games. Jay Smith, the creator of the Vectrex, gave his blessing for free use of the original games. I’ve heard he’s astounded at what’s been created for his baby since then.
Things have only accelerated over the years, there are multiple multicarts of various types (fixed, USB, SD card); handmade, arcade quality, controllers; adapters or hacks for current game controllers; and a couple of projects to run actual arcade games on the Vectrex with a cartridge that has a computer on it. A $10 Raspberry Pi Zero looks like a Cray supercomputer to the Vectrex’s 6809!
Just a month ago someone reproduced the Vectrex main PC board, and last year Eric Schlaepfer created a single board Vectrex clone called Scopetrex that will turn an old oscilloscope (or any vector display) into a Vectrex.
That’s one of my next projects. I’ve had a 20 inch vector display in the shed for years.
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I have been interested in the Vectrex since I discovered John Dondzila’s website in 1995 or '96. I had never heard of it before. I still have never seen one in real life.
I did not know that a clone had been designed. I’ll be looking into it in the near future.
Also, I’m pretty sure that Dondzila’s Purple Dinosaur Massacre was the first computer game I ever downloaded from the internet.
Fascinating! I’m a computer and video game geek going back to the TI 99/4A and Atari 2600 days. Somehow, I managed never to actually hear of this gizmo…
@shahnm I still play my TI 99/4A with my kids. They like A-MAZE-ING, HANG MAN, and HUNT THE WUMPUS.
The Space Invaders clone TI INVADERS is the best home version of the game from that era, in my opinion. Much better than any of the licensed ports I played.
I have a pair of joysticks, but it’s always a pain to get them to work.
One thing that’s kind of interesting is that the joysticks plug into a single point and the TI-99/4A strobes each of them on alternating frames if you’re playing a two-player game. Actually, I am not 100% sure that it is synced to the frame rate, but I expect it is.
This means that on some one-player games they don’t bother to alternately strobe the joysticks and you can play with either one, or mess up the person playing by messing with the second joystick.
@Limewater @shahnm I’d never heard of it, either.
I do miss the TI 99/Ataris of yesteryear. I had a Kaypro 4 when I was a kid (yes, it was a business computer, but I didn’t know any better), and I loved playing Ladder on it: https://ostermiller.org/ladder/ …and Star Trader! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trader
@Limewater @shahnm @UncleVinny I remember the TI 99/4A firesale, they were stacked 10-15 feet high all over the front area of the local Grand Central store. It took a long time to sell them all.
I was already infected with the Apple ][+ bug at the time, so I didn’t have much interest in getting one.
@Limewater @shahnm @UncleVinny Not really related, but I also had an Atari 5200 console, so any gaming potential was already covered.
Here’s a take on the Vectrex from one of my favorite car weirdos, Jason Torchinsky.
https://jalopnik.com/the-torchinsky-files-meet-the-vectrex-the-strangest-g-1843543685
The video is about 10 minutes long, he does a great explanation of vector displays in a few seconds of handwaving.
@blaineg ah man, my favorite arcade games as a kid were vector based, like Tempest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(video_game), of course Asteroids, Armor Attack, Star Castle (I hardly ever hear anyone talk about this one! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Castle) and the Star Wars game (https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9773)
I was super drawn in by those clean bright lines, I guess raster stuff looked sloppy to me.
@UncleVinny It looked sloppy, because it was! Remember how low raster resolutions were back then? Every diagonal line had very visible aliasing (stair steps).
I’ll bet the display you’re looking at right now is somewhere between 1920 x 1080 pixels, and 4096 x 2160 pixels.
TV back then was something like 486 x 440, but it was so blurry it provided a lot of natural anti-aliasing.
The Apple ]['s low-res mode was 40 x 48 and hi-res was a whopping 280 x 192 pixels.
The Vectrex looks great today, but back then it was stunning.
@blaineg @UncleVinny I think at this point Star Castle is best remembered as the game that inspired Yar’s Revenge on the 2600.
Yar’s Revenge began development as an attempt to port Star Castle, but Howard Scott Warsaw, the developer, convinced Atari to instead let him make a game that would actually work on the console.
@blaineg @UncleVinny
Nit: I think you’re conflating low resolution with aliasing. Aliasing is, of course, a product of insufficient resolution, but not all stair-step is aliasing. If you go back to the late seventies or early eighties, I’m not sure that there are any true examples of aliasing in home video games. For aliasing to occur, you have to be under-sampling a signal with higher frequencies than you are displaying.
As far as home computers went, I don’t think this became a factor until they at least started using scanned images.
The most readily available examples of aliasing I can think of that would have been readily visible on a normal TV would be if someone on screen was wearing a highly-textured pattern or tight pinstripes or something and your saw a moire pattern (spatial domain aliasing), or when you saw a spinning wheel on a car and it appeared to slow down and/or go backwards (time-domain aliasing).
@Limewater @UncleVinny Sure, but sometimes an ounce of inaccuracy saves a pound of explanation.
Terminology also varies some in different fields. I worked at computer graphics pioneer Evans & Sutherland in the 80’s and 90’s, and image quality was a huge deal on the graphics terminal/workstation side of the business I was in. Aliasing was part of the everyday vocabulary, shorthand for for vector line quality as displayed on a raster display. The term of course has broader application, but we cared about line quality.
The long established PS300 system used a vector display for realtime wireframe image generation & manipulation. Then when the user was happy with the results, they’d hit “render”, and the mainframe would crunch for a while, and then deliver a static raster image to the PS300, which would display it on a separate raster monitor. and these were huge and heavy monitors: 20" screen, but the box was more like 25" x 25" x 30".
Frames per second? HA! Minutes per frame!
It sounds horrific now, but it was bleeding edge back then. And vector quality was always a major selling point, the competition couldn’t touch us.
The last years I was there, the new PS390 was introduced. It only had a raster display, but horsepower had increased enough to make it work. Of course vector quality was still a big deal, and the big brains had invented all sorts of wild things like pixel sub-sampling, yada, yada, yada, to get solve the stairstepping/aliasing problem.
Not everything, of course, but a lot of the fundamentals of computers graphics were invented at Evans & Sutherland.
If I remember right, the Italian made Fimi displays (with Matshushita CRTs) had the mind blowing resolution of 1024 x 768. It really was back then, honest. All of us techs were hungry for the first out of spec display to hit the discard pile!
I found it really amusing several years later when the first 3D video accelerator cards (Voodoo, etc.) for PC’s started showing up, and the arcane graphics vocabulary from work (pixel, voxel, triangles per second, etc., etc.) started showing up in the normal world.
@Limewater @UncleVinny As the PS390 took over, we wound up with a lot of surplus PS300 raster & vector displays. By happy coincidence, the raster display was a perfect match for the Amiga, and its interlaced hires video mode. That had a very annoying flicker on normal, short persistence phosphor displays.
The E&S display had a VERY long persistence phosphor, and eliminated the flicker. Playing video games could get funny/ugly depending on the game though, moving objects would leave substantial trails. It looked really cool on some games.
A couple of us grabbed a trailer full of them dirt cheap, and resold them to fellow Amiga users at a very nice profit. Everyone was happy with the deal.
I got calls about them for a few years, after we sold out of them in a matter of weeks.
I still have one raster, one B&W vector, and one mystery to me (at the moment). I’m REALLY hoping it’s one of the color vector displays, as someone has a color board hack for the Vectrex.
@Limewater @UncleVinny My partner was disappointed when we found the B&W vector display, as he thought it was useless. I gladly took it as part of my cut because I wanted to have a 20" Vectrex! But I was always a little too concerned about destroying the Vectrex in the attempt, and never went beyond planning.
I’ve got a Scopetrex PCB, and need to order the parts for it now. This is going to be fun!
There was a lightpen accessory, with three not-a-game cartridges available: art, music, and animation.
There was a much rumored, but never released game called Mail Plane. Turned out it was completed, but never put into production. Someone paid nearly $900 for a prototype cartridge that showed up, and then he dumped the ROM and made it available to everyone. He’s a hero.
The lightpen carts do nothing at all if the lightpen is not plugged in, so people have sometimes thought they were broken.
The original lightpen is hard to find, and expensive.
But many clones have been made, and it’s trivial to make one yourself.
A marker body is commonly used.
A clever fellow who goes by Rastislav integrated the controller buttons into this build.
I really like his design.
I remember seeing those at Gemco and probably K-Mart. I didn’t have the cash to pick them up on clearance (I still remember the $50 clearance TI99/4As and Vectrex systems but $50 might as well have been full retail).
At the university they had a couple of Tektronix vector terminals connected to the CDC Cyber mainframe; there were some cool games on those terminals
@duodec Mine came from Lionel Playworld, and they were stacked nearly to the ceiling. It was a madhouse. Consoles were $50; games were $5-10, maybe a little more for some; controllers were $10 or $20, I can’t remember. Either they didn’t have any 3D Imagers, or I thought they cost too much.
I wish I’d had the foresight and ability to buy out the place, I’d be a rich man today.
The holy grail of Vectrex peripherals is the 3D Imager.
Not only did it create stereoscopic 3D images, it added COLOR to the Vectrex. Using magic, of course. No, wait, I mean science. And a funny little wheel.
The black half does the eye switching, and the color sectors add color. Draw at the right time, and the user sees red, green or blue. The area of the colors varies with the games. As you see from the label, this one works with two different games.
The square in the center is the drive connector, and the hole at the edge of the white disc is used to sync the disc with the screen. The disc is spinning an inch in front of your face, but everything is enclosed, and the discs load from a door at the bottom of the mask.
The effect works very well. I was fortunate enough to snag a used one years ago, way before eBay, or even the Web was invented. I bought it off of a complete stranger on Usenet. The Internet was a lot smaller and cozier place back then.
Because of the scarcity and cost there have been several homebrew projects over the years. Currently Matronix is selling a completely new imager for 99,00€.
And someone has just started on a 3D printed design.
@blaineg Sorry, a typo there. Madtronix.
https://madtronix.com/vectrex/id-3d-imager
Ah yes, the Vectrex! I always loved these. Many years ago I came close to inheriting one from a friend, but alas, it was not meant to be. I’d love to have one someday.
@PooltoyWolf Prices have climbed steady over the years, with crazy spikes that come and go. They can cost several hundred to insane for a system, more with games and peripherals. But I have seen people get them for $100-200. Some lucky few have even scored them at local charity shops or random private sales for $50 or less.
@blaineg FOR VECTRON!
Oh wait, that’s a little different…
@UncleVinny
I’m stealing that for use elsewhere!
@blaineg it’s one of my favorites!
There’s a lot of Vectrex info out there on the net: an active sub-forum on Atari Age, developer and fan pages, etc.
But the Vectrex Fans Unite! Facebook page is very busy with everything from repair questions and answers to collecting info, to new projects inn process, to new product announcements. You’d think the thing was in current production.
It boggles me to see frequent posts of: “Here’s a little demo I whipped up last night”, or “Here’s a simple little game”, or “Here’s a $10 blinking LED attachment for your cartridge”.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/vectrex
If you just want to play the games, there are several emulation options. You lose the vector charm of course, but the gameplay is still fun. Some do try and fake the effect, complete with bright endpoints on the vectors.
If there’s interest, I’ll dig up some info on emulators.
I had one, well my brother had one. I got the Colecovision and he got the Vectrex. I think it might still be in my old bedroom at my mother’s house. I guess I’ll have to go dust it off and get in on the retro craze!
EEK! HELP! SPIKE!
OH NO! MOLLY!
A roommate of mine had a Vectrex and my nephew has recently acquired a Vectrex.
Love this. We teach the classics up in here
@capnjb Very nice, I had multiple Apple ]['s back in the day. I loved that the hardware was so accessible, and the schematics were in the manual.
@blaineg I’m rocking a ][e Platinum these days.
I found an estate auction that had 6 cases of 5 1/4" disks. It contained every game from my childhood and more. It’s fun to run down memory lane with my daughter. I also have an Atari 2600 connected to a 65" curved 4K Samsung… so that’s weird, but my kid loves Adventure and pretty much any Activision game. 
Like I said… we teach the classics…heh.
@blaineg @capnjb
and Guinness is certainly a classic!
@capnjb A 2600 connected to a 65" screen is admirably weird! What sort of adapter are you using? I don’t think the engineer that designed HDMI had been born yet, when the 2600 was new.
@blaineg Just standard coax with the slider box to switch between game and TV
It took a little futzing, but with enough stubbornness anything is possible. 
And if you’ll notice, my IIe is connected to a Dell 20" flat panel 
(It was one of their first panels and still had a composite input) The one thing I haven’t figured out yet is how to connect my VR headset to the 2600 
I’d call it VRtari and make bazillions!
@capnjb I dug my Atari 5200 out a few weeks ago and realized I had nothing with an RF input anymore. My Amiga monitor is the only thing I found that has composite input, so I bought a kit to bypass the automatic RF switchbox and add composite out.
What I really want is the Sophia mod that adds DVI out, but I’ll have to wait for another batch to be made.
@blaineg All the things forever!
I never had a 5200 but I remember a really great space game I would play at my friends house.
@blaineg @capnjb I regularly hook my 2600 up to an HDTV, but it’s an HD CRT so it looks pretty decent.
@blaineg @Limewater That sounds heavy
@capnjb Possibly Star Raiders, a first person “simulator”. One my favorite.
@blaineg Yes!
@blaineg @capnjb Yeah, it’s somewhere between 200 and 240lbs. I don’t know exactly.
Oh yeah, I scored one as a kid when we were stationed in Germany. (USAF Brat) I think I bought off somebody who was leaving, at a yard sale. Had to hide it in my closet and sneak it out to play, as my parents had already bought us all an Atari 2600 and TWO video games would have been insanity, in their minds.
Sadly, it was lost or sold in one of our subsequent moves and even though I bought one of the iPad emulators it just isn’t the same.
I wasn’t quite right when I said the 3D Imager is the holy grail. It’s really this:
Yes, Mine Storm is the game built into every Vectrex, no cartridge needed. That makes this a curiosity. It’s also very rare.
See, there was bug in some versions that crashed the game at level 13. It’s tough to get there, so most people probably never hit the bug. GCE decided to send a fixed version to anyone that wrote in and complained (remember writing letters?). Few got to level 13, not all versions were bugged, and not many people knew about the offer (I didn’t), so there aren’t many out there.
The cart is officially labeled “Mine Storm”, but it’s called “Mine Storm 2” for identification.
If you happen to have one, let’s talk.