Release Pandora-Vectrex : Vectrex Emulator For Pandora V1.1.0

[DaveC]

That was pretty quick.

It is opposite though. You have it so the Vectors are black and the overlay is a bright background instead of a transparency. The overlays didn't emit light, they filtered it and just changed the color of the vectors.

Technically if there are no vectors you should just see a black screen (in a dark room). The background in the Armor attack shouldn't be bright yellow. That isn't really accurate. If that could be fixed it would be a great addition.

Thanks much for this emu.

 

[zx-81]

Ok thanks, i see now how it looks like. i've never owned a vectrex, and the only one i've seen. it was on a museum in Paris where they didn't use any overlay. I will fix this as i can.

Anyway i took the overlay form another emu (overlay archives, with many overlays that were drawn manually). As i can see on this picture, my overlay is not accurate at all.

 

[zx-81]

It is opposite though. You have it so the Vectors are black and the overlay is a bright background instead of a transparency. The overlays didn't emit light, they filtered it and just changed the color of the vectors.

It's a simple xor between overlay and the vector (grayscale).
[/quote]

Technically if there are no vectors you should just see a black screen (in a dark room). The background in the Armor attack shouldn't be bright yellow. That isn't really accurate. If that could be fixed it would be a great addition.

It's a bit more complex, since the 'red' borders should be seen without any change (it's not black on your picture). The bright yellow background looks like this one i guess : http://cgrempire.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/armorattack_overlay_800.jpg
So if you want something really accurate, we need to reproduce the physical property of the plastic overlay. What i can do is a simple color average, or may be we can use two pictures one for the 'static background' and another one for the vector (dark = no vector, color when there is a vector).

 

[zx-81]

Here is a new beta version that is much more accurate for overlays :
http://zx81.zx81.free.fr/public/pandora/vectrex/pandora-vectrex-v1.1.1-pnd.zip

I should release it officially if no major bugs are found,

 

[Gruntfuggly]

This will be one of the first things I try when my Panda arrives...

 

[zx-81]

if it doesn't consume too much cpu, i will try to port it on other console (such as caanoo).

 

[DaveC]

Here is a new beta version that is much more accurate for overlays :
http://zx81.zx81.free.fr/public/pandora/vectrex/pandora-vectrex-v1.1.1-pnd.zip

I should release it officially if no major bugs are found,

That is better but still is not really accurate. I know it is impossible to get perfect but this is still pretty far from what it was. In the Armor attack example you are making areas that should be almost black a pretty light yellow ("almost" as you get light bounce from vectors but that is too much to worry about) . Look at that picture again you see the contrast is much beter on the real thing. With this you are losing that nice contrasty glowing image.

If you used a .PNG image and put that over the emu screen you can have values that range from opaque to almost invisible. If there was a way to load a .PNG image that reads it's transparency data that would work almost perfect (close enough). I know in MiniMenu I made images with varying degrees of transparency and it worked out fine. The PNG structure already pretty much has what we need.

Is there a way maybe to just display a simple .png picture over the emu screen to get the effect?

 

[Jumpman]

WOW, thanks ZX & DaveC. Overlay support is for sure welcome, hopefully it doesn't take to much effort to straighten it out, and get it to a respectible level. I've never used any emu for Vectrex except for one, and it barely ran. I knew some of the more advanced PC ones offered this support, but I never had the time to try any. My Pandora is due back within the next few weeks, and this is for sure one of the first emu's I try once it returns. Good luck ZX, your work is some of the best!

Chris

 

[zx-81]

That is better but still is not really accurate. I know it is impossible to get perfect but this is still pretty far from what it was. In the Armor attack example you are making areas that should be almost black a pretty light yellow ("almost" as you get light bounce from vectors but that is too much to worry about) . Look at that picture again you see the contrast is much beter on the real thing. With this you are losing that nice contrasty glowing image.

You can modify the png by your own and set the color you want. I can't do much better since i'm using software render and i have to use a simple algorithm to have acceptable fps. I've tried many different technics today, and that's the best i've found. I will publish the code as always. You may give it a try. If you know an open-source PC emulator that works with overlay with a very good render stuff, then i would be interrested to know how they did it ... I've read few months ago that a guy has developped a new "old-school" render mode in stella to fit better the CRT/video artefacts. But all those render mode are really CPU consuming, and this vecX is not really fast enough ...

 

[fusion_power]

I find it very impressive, that the original Vectrex hat only 1,5MHz CPU clock. And it was able to make pretty fast vector graphics.
I guess, the Pandora has no problems with vectror graphics itself (500MHz Power! ). So if a Pixel-Image stresses the Emulator, I have the crazy idea to convert the overlay graphics itself into vectors (???) And then you don't have to deal with an Pixel-based Image anymore? ^^""
Just a noob idea, I know.

 

[Gruntfuggly]

MESS supports overlays for Vectrex, but I haven't tried them so I couldn't say what they look like...

 

[DaveC]

That is better but still is not really accurate. I know it is impossible to get perfect but this is still pretty far from what it was. In the Armor attack example you are making areas that should be almost black a pretty light yellow ("almost" as you get light bounce from vectors but that is too much to worry about) . Look at that picture again you see the contrast is much beter on the real thing. With this you are losing that nice contrasty glowing image.

You can modify the png by your own and set the color you want. I can't do much better since i'm using software render and i have to use a simple algorithm to have acceptable fps. I've tried many different technics today, and that's the best i've found. I will publish the code as always. You may give it a try. If you know an open-source PC emulator that works with overlay with a very good render stuff, then i would be interrested to know how they did it ... I've read few months ago that a guy has developped a new "old-school" render mode in stella to fit better the CRT/video artefacts. But all those render mode are really CPU consuming, and this vecX is not really fast enough ...

Ok, what is the exact res of the overlay image for 1:1pixel map ? I will try to see if I can come up with something that will look good. I would like to do some test Images.

Where do I put overlay images and how are they named?

 

[Macleod]

From previous zx-81 post:

the folder 'over' contains overlay. You need two images for the overlay for the two render modes (rot90 and normal). The filename must be the same as rom file with _rot90.png and _norm.png added at the end.
I've added an example for the game 'armor' (over/armor_rot90.png and over/armor_norm.png) You need to activate 'overlay' in the settings menus.

 

[zx-81]

@macleod: thanks

@all: the new official version is on my blog
http://zx81.zx81.free.fr/serendipity/index.php?/archives/496-Pandora-Vectrex-Vectrex-Emulator-for-Pandora-v1.1.1.html

i won't create a new thread, since there is almost 50 users for this emu, and they have all read that thread already ...

 

[Iorgy77]

I recieved a broken vectrex a couple of weeks ago. I have given it to a friend to attempt a repair and just purchased a multicart for it.

I tried this emulator last night and I am blown away by the quality of vectrex games. I sent through a small donation just to say thank you for this and everything else you port to our favourite systems, thanks zx-81.

Is everyone just renaming the artwork from the goodset for the transparencies?

Is there any chance this emulator could show box art in the menu when selecting games?

 

[Gruntfuggly]

Where did you get your multi cart from? Do you mind if I ask how much you paid?

Hope you get it back working - it's a great machine... there's something quite awesome the first time you see the ship laying the mines in Minestorm - make sure you have the volume turned up loud and the lights down low...

 

[Iorgy77]

I was waiting for the 72 in 1 multicart which was supposed to be available at the end of February 2011 from here:

http://vectrex.playntradeonline.com/

But then I found this which is futureproof as it uses a microSD card:

http://vectrex.biz/

It is a little pricey but considering how much the games cost and that I got the vectrex for free I think its a pretty good deal.

 

[Gruntfuggly]

I'm torn - I've already got 19 carts, but I'm missing a few of the original games which don't come up very often. So I keep feeling the need for a multi-cart, but it feels too expensive for just a few games!

 

[Isaac]

I tried the Caanoo overlays http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/caanoo.cgi?0,0,0,0,71,662 but they don't seem to work. Because of the size ?

 

[DaveC]

I tried the Caanoo overlays http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/caanoo.cgi?0,0,0,0,71,662 but they don't seem to work. Because of the size ?

The Caanoo is 320 x 240 and the Pandora is 800 x 480 so yes that will be an issue.

I was going to do some but they reduce contrast too much so I don't use them as of now.


@ZX, could you at least consider a setting for opacity level of the overlays? (using the transparency layer of the PNG spec would be best but I guess that is more work). You know like a 0%-100% setting in the menu to set the transparency of the overlays? That should be easy to add I would think.