Vectrex Emulation?

[DaveC]

looks great. so smooth! makes me want to try out a real vectrex. yay for analog gaming.

also, i realize this is a bit premature but: this seems like the perfect application for sub-pixel hinting, apart from a text reader. just throwing it out there. that or wu anti-aliased lines. or just straight up supersampling.

it's well beyond my ridiculously low level of coding. so sorry if sound like an ungrateful bastard. this emu already rocks and it doesn't even open roms yet!

Anti-aliasing? sub pixel? I think it would just be nice to have sound first. That is just me I guess.

 

[halo9]

Well, got into a small fight whilst out shopping, got a nice big black eye and broken cheekbone, but now I'm out of the a&e dept, I'm back to coding Might as well do something whilst I can't chew with half my mouth!

Hope you're joking. Sounds pretty bad.

Thanks for the preview! Plays very nice from just a schematic. Very impressive stuff. I'm looking forward to seeing this progress further.

 

[Trip]

I can't even remembering hearing about the vectrex system before :blink:, Just tried your fist release though Squidge & I luv it.
As far as I'm concerned that's true classic gaming & will be perfect for the 2X

Sorry to hear about your trouble too Squidge. I got sucker punched on a night out the other month myself & recieved the same kind of injuries. Do you give yourself a new black eye every time you blow your nose like I did? That's actually pretty funny & makes a decent party trick for impressing the ladies

 

[thumpgun]

funny thing about the no sound, is when i was playing the demo i could hear all the sounds -even the start up tune in my head and no im not mad ,,just spent a long time with this game in my youth lol, great work so far :blink:

 

[Squidge]

halo9: No, I'm not joking.

Tripmonkey_uk: I've not blown my nose as of yet, but I've had a few unexpected sneezes, which caused whatever was in front of me to become showered in blood

Thanks for the comments so far anyway. The rendering code is pretty well optimized to get the current speed, and anti aliasing via sub pixel rendering will slow it down by a lot unless I think of a good way of implementing it. At the moment, most of the rendering is done via large lookup tables created at program startup.

 

[gaterooze]

Hope you're feeling better soon, Squidge.

And great work -- my Vectrex broke down a while ago, so this will be wonderful

 

[thumpgun]

as you mentioned you got hit , i thought you might want to see this guy lol http://www.spikedhumor.com/articles/74971/...Gone_Wrong.html

lol

 

[b._.o._.b]

Fun playing Minestorm again, thanks! Can't wait to see the possibility to start other roms implemented as well.

 

[Squidge]

Have some sound

Sound isn't really optimized yet, and sometimes plays a little fast, sometimes a little slow, but see what you think.

Not really got a lot of time at the moment due to starting back work

 

[Trip]

Works great for me Squidge thanks. I even got past level one eventually lol.
Hurts my hand though as the fire & thrust buttons are too far apart

 

[Squidge]

I wouldn't worry about that, I'll make the controls fully configurable later on so you can use whatever button you want. (Will be necessary if you decide to use the rotate function that i'll be putting in too)

 

[Gruntfuggly]

Wow - great work Squidge - plays the first level very nicely. Big crash on level 2 though - started playing down a audio scale and flashing the screen...

The vectors seem to have an odd sort of 'vertical stripe' along them - is that to be expected? Or does my LCD need adjusting?

Looking forwards to some more releases of this!

Tripmonkey_UK - try to avoid thrusting as much as you can - it's pretty hard to control on the Vectrex at the best of times. My usual trick is to thrust to the 'emptiest' part of the screen at the start of the level, provided it's not too close to the edge...

 

[thumpgun]

sound is spot on, well done, can't wait till see what you will release in the next demo,,,,,great work....me like alot

 

[Trip]

I wouldn't worry about that, I'll make the controls fully configurable later on so you can use whatever button you want. (Will be necessary if you decide to use the rotate function that i'll be putting in too)

Sounds good chief cheers

Tripmonkey_UK - try to avoid thrusting as much as you can - it's pretty hard to control on the Vectrex at the best of times. My usual trick is to thrust to the 'emptiest' part of the screen at the start of the level, provided it's not too close to the edge...

Cheers for the hint.. I need all the help I can get

 

[DaveC]

Just tried this. It is a great release The sound sounds pretty good. Other than the timing sometimes it is pretty exact. The speed is real good too.

Just wondering though I noticed that it doesn't fill the screen top to bottom is that a math or table thing? I suppose you set up some kind of matrix and that is how it works out maybe. I did notice the vertical stripes too, that is strange, it is like an LCD timing thing, weird. Hopefully this will be continued, the hard part of emulation is done, now all it needs is a button config and ROM loader.

One thing though is I have a hard time getting to the thrust quickly where it is now. If you do a simple change maybe you could make it the "a" or "b" button.

If you do the rotate screen like MAME you could use the same control scheme. That is when the screen is the normal landscape mode volume controls volume. If you flip to portrait mode the volume becomes 2 of the 4 buttons that you can set as game controls.

Thanks for the cool emu.

 

[Ze_ro]

Wow, I'm glad to see this emulator is coming along so nicely! I'm very impressed!

The vectors seem to have an odd sort of 'vertical stripe' along them - is that to be expected? Or does my LCD need adjusting?

I get that too... it's like the vectors are "bleeding" vertically...

One thing though is I have a hard time getting to the thrust quickly where it is now. If you do a simple change maybe you could make it the "a" or "b" button.

The button configuration on the Vectrex was always kind of weird... it always seemed like each game used the buttons completely differently, and you never knew whether A or D was going to be shoot. In fact, the whole controller was a rather strange design (You wouldn't think so by looking at it, but if you try holding one, you'll understand). Depending on how you held the controller, it was actually hard to reach some of the buttons... Getting a working button configuration that works perfectly with EVERY Vectrex game would be very difficult. Having to choose only two of them for the Volume buttons would make it even harder. It would actually be nice if the final release of the emulator allowed you to set controls on a per-game basis.

--Zero

 

[thumpgun]

you wont supposed to hold the vectrex controller ,,it was meant to be placed flat on a table so that your left hand controlled the stick and your right hand had ever finger on a different button,,,with your thumb holding the edge.....

 

[Ze_ro]

I find the joystick is far too small to actually use it like an arcade stick... it's easier for me to hold it like a gamepad, and just move the tiny stick with my left thumb. Holding it like this though, it's very difficult to reach the A button with my right thumb... my guess is that this is why some games (Protector/YASI for example) use D and C for important stuff and leave A for less used things, like hyperspace.

--Zero

 

[DaveC]

Squidge are there any future updates of this planned?

If not maybe the source could be released so someone could add button config and ROM selection? It shows much promise it just has a few loose ends.

 

[Squidge]

Yes, there are updates planned, but PC usage is extremely small at the moment and restricted to a laptop.

I'm still recovering after the above surgerical procedure.

As soon as I'm back on my feet and back to normal, updates will resume