gtoal

You're right, however the Pi Zero doesn't support a sound output port, so you either have to add one or use HDMI and some module to extract the sound from the HDMI output. We reckoned neither of these are likely to be done by the majority of Pitrex users. One other option may be to use Bluetooth *if* you have the later Pi Zero that supports it but most existing users probably don't. I do hold out a little hope for the possibility of interleaving the sound along with the graphics as done in StarWars but my understanding is that that would require an almost complete rewrite of how the graphics was driven, and it was hard enough getting it to the level of reliability that it now has. (it's very sensitive to timing issues and any multitasking activity on the Pi was likely to cause graphical glitches in the earlier versions of the graphics driver)

Two points: 1) 5K pot vs 10K pot: not a big problem. You can feed the two sides of each pot from a couple of voltage dividers, and build the voltage dividers using two of the small cheap trimpots rather than with fixed resistors, so that you can just tweak them to set the scale and to center the joystick accurately rather than have to work it out mathematically. You're going to want the trimpots anyway just to ensure accurate centering of the joystick at 0,0 so might as well also use them for the voltage dividers on the inputs to your joystick module. (Sorry, I don't have a specific diagram to hand, but basically its the same as the area at the top right of the diagram below, except that instead of using that digipot, you just use the joystick module (with PB0/PW0/PA0 being replaced by the joystick module's X pot, and PB1/PW1/PA1 being replaced by the joystick module's Y pot. All the other connections to that chip in the diagram are irrelevant when using a joystick module rather than a digipot) So 4 trimpots plus your joystick module are all you need. Easy to breadboard as a test. Just make sure the trimpots are roughly in their center before you power it up so that you don't short +5 or -5 to GND. (I've done that on my Vectrex and it survived but I wasn't at all happy about it and would prefer to avoid the risk.) Ignore the button part of that diagram (which is only relevant to the USB to Vectrex converter that I took the diagram from). For a home-made controller you just connect the button wires through your button switches directly to the Vectrex ground wire. You should probably should put a resistor in the path between each button and ground but it really isn't necessary. It's cheap & hacky but it works. 2) Since you have a USB joystick already - you might be able to build one of these https://gtoal.com/vectrex/joystick/USB-to-Vectrex.html on a breadboard and just use your USB joystick? (We're also working on turning that into a PCB some time later this year.) Downside: it needs a Pi and some programming. Easy stuff if you're a programmer at all. Not an option if you're not a programmer though. The USB converter is basically the same circuit as what you need for your 5K joystick module except that the joystick is replaced by a single digipot chip - and a Pi to drive it. Graham PS The Vectrex test rom will help but I wrote this simpler joystick test code that you might find easier to use: https://gtoal.com/vectrex/joystick/AnaJoyTest.bin

Are you planning to sell made-up boards (and the programming adaptor) or is this the sort of project where you release the Gerbers and people get them made and assembled by services like JLPCB etc? (and people build their own adaptors) I ask because I'm pretty sure I'm not up to assembling surface mount components. I think I maxed out at soldering 0.1in DIL packages. But if you're planning to sell completed boards I'm potentially interested. Do you know yet how much you'll be able to sell them for?

I made a couple of Mr Boston repros last year as fun items for the Vectrex Fans Unite! Secret Santa present swap. They look good under glass but wouldn't stand up to close hands-on inspection (they contain an obviously modern PCB for example, and the edge connector is visibly different even from from the outside) but if you just want something cool to put on your shelf, they're not too hard to make and look good. I posted all the artwork on the VFU group (links below). I'm not offering to make one though, you'll need to expend some effort yourself. Given the strong feelings in this community about reproductions you might want to write REPRO in large friendly and indelible letters on the inside of the cart, if not also the outside, should you build one yourself. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=6084626221601414&set=p.6084626221601414&type=3 All the real carts have pretty shitty looking labels so I used the well-known old antique faker's trick of tea or coffee staining the paper parts. (You have to love those Lovejoy novels!) Carrying the labels around in your pocket for a week helps too 🙂 (Just be aware that raster-printed labels are clearly recognisable under a magnifying glass, and there are other ways to easily distinguish real Mr Boston carts by anyone who knows the key telltale.) https://www.facebook.com/groups/vectrex/posts/2004289553114745/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/vectrex/posts/2004290273114673/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/vectrex/posts/2004292616447772/ https://gtoal.com/vectrex/MR-BOSTON-NOTES.txt https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/MISSING/rebuilt-print-Clean-Sweep-two-up.pdf The box is just a standard Clean Sweep box with an added label (above) and I suspect a Clean Sweep overlay could probably be modified with white Letraset but I didn't go that far myself since my effort was just for fun and not an attempt to create a passable fake. Sean Kelly sells a very nice repro overlay that is clearly marked as such - that would be your easiest option. Add a bottle of hooch and a Mr Boston bartenders' guide and you'll have quite a nice display in your game room. G

This would be better in a separate Pitrex thread, but since you're new here I'll answer here this time, but please don't flood the Vecfever thread with a lot of followups. The info below is mostly known to the members of our Facebook group, Vectrex Fans Unite!, where we hang out more often than here or proboards. The Vectrex hardware doesn't really support sampled sound (except in a couple of very limited ways where the sound is carefully interleaved with the graphics, as in the Bad Apple demo etc) so *all* arcade games that have sound need to have *all* the sound completely recoded from scratch to use the tone generator on the Vectrex to produce effects that sound a bit like the originals. [*] Malban from the PiTrex team did a few by hand (the most popular games, such as Asteroids and Battlezone) and asked for programmers in the community to help out with adding sound for more games, but no-one volunteered. All our code is on github and anyone who wants to improve the games is welcome to modify it. The VF is considerably more developed because Thomas, the developer, has the resources to work on that project extensively - the three of us who put together the Pitrex do not. We got it to a stage where it's acceptably playable but none of us are currently putting dedicated hours into converting more games - we all have our own interests and although sometimes what we're working on overlaps with game emulation, at other times it doesn't - for example my most recent Pitrex work has been R&D in the graphics area under Linux, for supporting the use of the Pitrex as a general purpose vector display for programmers such as in CAD applications. Remember, Pitrex is a community project, not a commercial product. We open sourced the hardware design (by Kevin) and agreed to Kevin selling the boards commercially to ensure that there would always be a good supply of them, but the other team members don't make a penny from board sales or anything else, so although we do consider the project to be ongoing, you should expect further development to be intermittent, with 2023 having been a rather lean year. One last thing; the Pitrex wasn't designed initially as a general arcade emulation machine - it was an offshoot of my wanting a mechanism to run the arcade version of Tailgunner on the Vectrex. That project actually was what spurred Thomas into adding arcade emulation to the VF and by the time we started to get the Pitrex hardware working, Thomas was well ahead of the game in emulating vector arcade games, and the Pitrex became seen as a cheap (but admittedly inferior) substitute for the VF which was in short supply. But the fact that it is actually usable as a general purpose emulator should be seen as a bonus, at its heart it's still a Tailgunner platform! Graham [footnote *: unless you use the linux sound hardware on the Pi Zero, but that requires hardware which not all Pitrex users will have. Also most of the O/S support for sound is only available on the Linux Pitrex implementation, but the most R&D and the primary release for gaming has been done on Raspberry Pi bare metal, so things like using Bluetooth for sound are not currently practical. Getting emulators like AAE to run smoothly under linux so such things are possible is the sort of R&D that we *are* currently working on, at the expense of modifying individual games to add approximate sound-alikes, but that sort of R&D is more long term and we can make no promises for when/if something usable will come out of it. ]

Here's a vector-style platformer in 'Scratch' that would serve as a good template for a Vectrex-style game that's not actually implemented on a Vectrex: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/176626049

Just to note, he said 'cost' not 'price' 🙂 I think he's saying he makes them for himself and that's how much it costs him. I don't think he's selling them at a Euro each. btw I think he's in Spain - I remember reading his posts on a Spanish board last year ... yes, found it: https://www.va-de-retro.com/foros/viewtopic.php?p=183951 so postage to the US for a cheap home-made overlay would be excessive.

All our regular members know this of course, but for the benefit of the lucky few who've recently acquired a Vectrex, just a quick hello to say that it's a good idea to get a loadable cartridge if you can find one as you can load roms like the test rom on to it and not have to buy a dedicated cartridge. Also you can get bare vectrex cartridge PCBs from various folks and Sean Kelly sells perfect injection-moulded clones of the plastic part of the cartridge to make it look nice (or you can 3D print your own). A neat trick sometimes done is to embed a small LED voltmeter in the cartridge when making a test cart as discussed above ( ). Also if you want to modify the test software to add your own tests, I have a WIP disassembly of it at https://gtoal.com/vectrex/disassemblies/TestRev4.asm

You should have received a sheet with the PiTrex that has the address of our chat group. You could ask here and I'll be happy to answer but asking on our group is more likely to be answered quickly and more definitively! Here's where to go to join: https://groups.io/g/pitrex-dev There may be a slight delay on your first post as there are anti-spam measures in place but they'll be removed as soon as you've posted.

That would be great, thanks! It's unfortunate that booklet printing is no longer a feature of Windows printer drivers - it used to be many years ago! I'll take my temporary versions down when you add that option. You'll notice when you create them that the front and back checker patterns on some of the manual covers won't align - for Clean Sweep I had to create those as a two-page spread which I then split so that they joined up again when printed as a booklet. Having done a crude version of just 2 manuals recently, I appreciate more than ever how much effort you put into recreating the entire suite of manuals! It's much appreciated. Does Corel Draw offer the option of creating a print version on a printer that does double-sided printing automatically? It's quite awkward to have to do two runs of the same file, selecting half the pages on one run and the other half on the next run, while ensuring that you put the output of the first run back in the printer tray in the proper orientation. I remember how we had to do that years ago before the printers handled the flipping for you and it would inevitably lead to at least one wasted run when I put the papers back in the wrong way round or the wrong way up! Graham

Here's another 2-up manual for printing and center-stapling. This one has a couple of extra pages for a gatefold pull-out. Identify the place in the manual where they would go, cut off the single page that is to be replaced by the fold-out, and attach with 'invisible tape' on one side. Obviously do all this before stapling. There are two pages (30 and 31) where the fold-out is a 2-page sheet; but page 32 folds out a 4-page sheet (which you can trim down to about 3.5 pages). You want the folded pages to fold down to a little narrower than the regular pages so that when you trim the stapled booklet you don't accidentally cut off any of the fold edges and lose most of the fold-out! https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/MISSING/vectrex-service-manual-print.pdf The first page should be on better quality paper and in colour, for the cover. The rest can be in black and white. Print centered with 'fit-to-printable-area' and double-sided, with the flip on the short edge. I've oriented the images for portrait mode so don't worry about selecting landscape. All the pages print as double-sided, even the ones that just have printing on one side - it should make it easier for you to print without messing about with multiple files or printing subranges with different options. I've straightened as much as I can but have not photoshopped the images at all and it is all bitmap from a scan, there's no re-typed text so it's not up to Helmut standard. I've tested it as a 'mini-manual' on US letter using the printer driver's down-scaling. But it should work at the original size on A3/11x17 too, though I haven't tested it yet. Unlike the previous post of a Clean Sweep manual, I've finally worked out how to set the absolute size in a pdf file 🙂 Graham

Since I needed a clean copy of the Clean Sweep manual to print, I tidied up the above scans in Photoshop and recreated some of the text similar to the way Helmut does - this should tide anyone over until Helmut adds Clean Sweep to his collection. I did use one of Helmut's graphics (of the computer) which was cleaner than my scan. (Sorry it was created in Photoshop, Helmut, I don't have and wouldn't know how to use Corel Draw. Nevertheless if you want the PSD files for each page let me know and I can upload them for you.) I redid the cover so that when printed two-up, the two cover sheets join up seamlessly - and rather cheekily I tweaked the page colour a tiny bit to yellow the paper and make it look more like my own original. I've been using this paper to print on and it's pretty close to the real thing: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JZ7Q6CD (when you guillotine the booklet to size, the edges of the paper will look bright white compared to an original old copy - one way to disguise that is to dip your finger in tea or coffee (no milk!) and run it along the edge to stain it darker!) The manual prints to almost the exact right size on US letter paper if 'fit to printable area' is selected. You need to print double-sided and centered, with 'flip on short edge' selected. I don't know if it will print the same size on A4. (I'm still learning how to put together pdf files but haven't yet mastered setting absolute size/resolution yet.) The file https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/MISSING/rebuilt-print-Clean-Sweep-two-up.pdf is pre-built for booklet printing so you can fold the double page in the middle and staple and trim it. A regular copy for viewing on-screen or assembling into a booklet some other way is at https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/MISSING/rebuilt-Clean-Sweep.pdf . It ends up very hard to distinguish from an original! The 'old paper' tint was done by trial and error on my laser printer. It's quite possible that an inkjet or some other laser might render it differently! If the colours come out weird then just print in black and white mode.

"Golden Old Style" is a modern clone of Goudy Old Style which is what the original would almost certainly have been. I'd have to see the original to know which foundry's version was used - there are often very small differences in one or two glyphs that distinguish them. Occasionally the only detectable differences are in the kerning. Similarly, Avalon is likely to be a clone of ITC Avant Garde. (The Q is very distinctive.) Given the use of Gill Sans I suspect they're all Monotype fonts, though it could actually be Humanist which is Bitstream's clone version. Most foundries would have reasonable clones of Helvetica, Avant Garde, Goudy Old Style and Gill Sans, but seeing them all together strongly hints of Monotype fonts.

I needed to print a Clean Sweep manual today, and since that is the single one that Helmut hasn't finished yet, I had to hack out a quick scanned version of it myself. If they're of use to anyone, the files are in Full scan, regular format: https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/MISSING/Clean_Sweep_Manual_Scan.pdf As above but optimised a little for screen viewing: https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/MISSING/Clean_Sweep_ScreenRes_Manual_Scan.pdf And the one I actually needed, for printing 2-up double-sided (landscape, flip on short edge) to create a booklet: https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/MISSING/print-Clean_Sweep_Manual_Scan.pdf If the scans are helpful to you Helmut, you're welcome to them. Copies of your own manuals are temporarily in the parent directory https://gtoal.com/vectrex/print-manuals/ where I've been experimenting with writing a program to re-page the pdf files so that they can be printed as proper booklets (2-up, portrait, flip on short edge). The software is not quite perfected yet but when it is I'll send you the sources if you want them. (I haven't actually printed the 2-up version yet as I just finished this around 5am and need to head for bed now, but they look OK to the Mark-1 eyeball...) Graham

At the moment, complementary. The Vextreme hardware is almost identical to the Vecfever hardware but apart from one test by Malban, doesn't have any of the native arm execution that makes the Vecfever excellent, so it functions primarily as a multicart. Whereas the Pitrex is primarily an emulation engine and comes closer to the VF's emulation, but it isn't really a multicart, although it sort of gets the same effect, by emulating the Vectrex. It's all about the software. Both units have hardware that can do all the VF can do, but it would take a lot more software effort for either one to be equal to it. Both are hobby projects and neither has the manpower to dedicate to software improvements - expect them to come along over time as people work on them as and when.