ToyguyVT

Cool! Happy to say then that it was indeed the PLA chip. Launched my 3 available test games and all are looking fine. My Bard's Tale II character disk is bad, so that's unplayable but Elite looks like it will be fun.

OK, so I picked up a PLA pull chip and popped it in. The machine now boots up normally and the flashing text is gone. Never having ever used one of these back in the day, is the normal screen display a light blue text on a darker blue background? Seemed kind of odd to me that the text wasn't white. Or maybe it's the color memory chip?

Already delivered and they look great. Nice work!

Recorded this tonight while familiarizing myself with the Vectrex adjustments in advance of my cap kits arriving. I'm hoping to do a more complete one once the caps have been replaced. For now, maybe this is helpful or at least interesting to someone. https://youtu.be/w56uC4Ph2o0

Thanks to my new VecMulti I was able to finally run the test cartridge on my Vectrex and I can see it's got some video issues. There's a tiny bit of misalignment in the Integrator test but the big issue is the linearity screen. The top, bottom and left bright white bars look pretty good but the white bar on the right is completely missing and there seems to be a bit of bending or fold-over on the right edge but it may just be that the beam is driven too far past the edge. I know there are X and Y size controls on the power board, so that should be straightforward. I suspect those adjustments will require a centering change though, so it looks like I'll be needing to use the magnets. If I remember correctly from my old TV repair days, there's no need to loosen the yoke clamp screw, right? The magnets will just rotate on their own? The vertical/horizontal alignment of the image is fine so I should not need to mess with the yoke position. On the Distortion 2 test, the pattern is nice and sharp and the lines evenly spaced, but there are small gaps in the lines in various places. Any idea what causes that? Distortion test 1 is hard to evaluate with the screen driven off the right edge for now but generally the triangles look OK. I'm going to go ahead and order a full cap kit for the machine along with new integrator caps. I have a scope so I can do the DAC adjustment for zero volts. The rest of the tests seem mostly OK. Sounds and controllers test well. Deflection protect and brightness control also appear to work properly and focus is good in all locations.

Mine just showed up today too. Looking forward to taking it for a spin in a bit. Shipping from the UK was surprisingly quick. Thanks Richard!

It ain't dead yet! :-) After some research I went down and measured the output at the regulators. Both were pretty solid - 12.1v and 4.9v. I'd prefer another tenth or so on the 5v rail but at least they're good. I decided to spend a little time and re-seat all the socketed chips. This included the 3 ROMs, the 2 CIAs, the MPU, the PAL, the SID and the VIC. I also cleaned off the old heat sink goop, bent the fingers down a bit on the heat sink and re-coated everything with new goop. Turned it on and it's back to its old self. Still has the flashing letters so now I need to hunt down a PAL and probably a 2114. Anyone making PALs still these days? I saw there were some aftermarket replacements but I got the impression they were long gone. True or no? Thanks!

I opened it up tonight and did some quick testing. The +5v line, measured at the LED connector, is only showing about 4.7v. The 9v AC is showing around 10.7 volts. The 9v fuse looks and tests fine. I forgot to measure the 12V regulator - have to do that tomorrow but I am thinking maybe the 5v logic power is just too low and preventing the thing from booting. A quick glance at the schematics seemed to indicate that the 9v AC is used only in the modulator. Is that correct?

Thanks for the info but looks like this one is toast. It went black screen last night after shutting it off to switch diskettes so I think it's dumpster fodder now.

A friend gave me a C64 system a few years back. I'd forgotten about it and stumbled on it this past weekend and decided to try and get it going. I got an adapter and cabled it up to my MAME cabinet's TV F connector. It's got a 1541 with it so I hooked that up. On power up, it boots, the blue background and border look fine but the lettering is flashing rapidly. I only have 2 games that came with it to test with so I loaded both up. ELITE comes up and generally looks good, with some flashing in the various lines of the control panel at the bottom of the screen. Starfields and ship graphics look OK. One joystick I tried did not seem to work correctly, haven't tried the second one yet. The other game is Bard's Tale II. It also boots but looks really bad. The EA logo page has a white border and you can see the EA graphic but the background is a bunch of rapidly changing color bars. Upon booting into the game and asking for the character disk, the UI looks generally good, but there is a lot of flashing at the top border and in the small window on the upper right. I can't go further than that as it appears the character disk is bad, throwing a read error. Sounds seem to be OK as far as I can tell, never having heard them before, but it's full and rich and does not sound "off" in any way. The PCB looks to be the later model with the fingered heat sink shield. I think the board number was the one that ended in 425 but I forgot to write it down. Based on some web surfing, I think I'm looking at a replacement of the U17 PAL and the 2114. Does that sound about right? I also know I'll need to do something with the power supply eventually but I don't want to buy a new one quite yet until I see if I can get this sorted out. If so, I'll pick one up from Ray Carlsen. Thanks for any advice/validation. Dave

Thanks for the writeup Malban - that was very helpful. I am hopeful that learning assembler may work out but at 63 years old, who knows. My brain doesn't absorb new things as well as it used to... As I've said, I like the Vectrex32 and some of the things it might open up with its improved hardware specs, so I will probably get one even though I think its use is likely to be limited to one-off solo projects. I've been working with your VIDE the last few days and it's a very nice piece of work, Thanks for making that available to the community. I've been able to do some basic vector drawing and simple text display so far. Next I will have to investigate how to animate them. I also saw the posting on the VecFever and that looks really interesting in conjunction with the IDE. Once it's released, that will probably be the environment I intend to learn on.

Yes, I do think before I write, thank you very much. The point being made here was that the BASIC cartridge, while cool in allowing someone to do their own game coding in a modern, easy-to-use language, isn't really effective for developing games for others to play because, as I understand it, you have to have the $150 device to do so. Consequently, if I develop a killer game that I might like to sell, the cost of entry for someone who might want to buy it becomes $150 plus the cost of my game. If there were a less-expensive, run-time only version of the BASIC cartridge, that would reduce the cost of entry. I also noted that it may not be feasible to do this. In fact, on further research, I'd guess that it isn't as you'd need the same PIC processor and RAM to run the game, since the Vectrex becomes just an I/O device. Still I can see some value there as a prototyping tool, trying out game ideas, looking at the vector character designs on the actual hardware, etc.

Thanks gentlemen! Knowing that everything is relative now makes sense. I was able to get the effect I wanted with this: draw_line: jsr waitrecal ;Reset the CRT lda #00 ;Get y ldb #00 ;Get x jsr move_pen7f_to_d ;go to (x,y) lda #$7f ;Get the Intensity jsr intensity_to_A ;Set intensity lda #00 ;Get y ldb #127 ;Get x jsr draw_to_d ;draw a line to (x,y) lda #30 ;Get y ldb #-127 ;Get x jsr move_pen7f_to_d ;go to (x,y) lda #0 ;Get y ldb #127 ;Get x jsr draw_to_d ;draw a line to (x,y) bra draw_lin I dropped the extra call to waitrecal and moved the X location back 127 units. Maybe not the most efficient thing, but the end result works :-)

I'm just starting to play around with this new Vectrex and was fiddling around with VIDE and one of the programming tutorials. It has you just draw a simple line, which worked fine. The suggestion was to play around with that and try different things so I attempted to draw two lines :-) This was the first try (leaving out the equates and initialization block, etc: draw_line: jsr waitrecal ;Reset the CRT lda #00 ;Get y ldb #00 ;Get x jsr move_pen7f_to_d ;go to (x,y) lda #$7f ;Get the Intensity jsr intensity_to_A ;Set intensity lda #00 ;Get y ldb #127 ;Get x jsr draw_to_d ;draw a line to (x,y) lda #00 ;Get y ldb #00 ;Get x jsr move_pen7f_to_d ;go to (x,y) lda #30 ;Get y ldb #00 ;Get x jsr move_pen7f_to_d ;go to (x,y) lda #30 ;Get y ldb #127 ;Get x jsr draw_to_d ;draw a line to (x,y) bra draw_line This results in this: So OK, I guess drawing inherently resets 0 to the previous endpoint. So I try this next: draw_line: jsr waitrecal ;Reset the CRT lda #00 ;Get y ldb #00 ;Get x jsr move_pen7f_to_d ;go to (x,y) lda #$7f ;Get the Intensity jsr intensity_to_A ;Set intensity lda #00 ;Get y ldb #127 ;Get x jsr draw_to_d ;draw a line to (x,y) jsr waitrecal lda #30 ;Get y ldb #00 ;Get x jsr move_pen7f_to_d ;go to (x,y) lda #30 ;Get y ldb #127 ;Get x jsr draw_to_d ;draw a line to (x,y) bra draw_line I've inserted another cal to waitrecal before doing the second line. I now get this: OK, that has the starting point reset but why the heck is that line diagonal? I'm stumped... Thanks in advance!

Having just acquired a Vectrex, I've been doing lots of reading and research and this device looked interesting. Still does, actually, but I think its shortcoming is likely to be the fact that anyone who might want to play a developed game appears to have to already have the unit. That's a steep entry price for anyone who'd be interested in just playing the games. It might be useful to have a lower cost "playback-only" variant of the cartridge but who knows if that's even feasible. That said, I may still get one to fool around with.