playvectrex

Whatever controller you use, make sure you can reliably move RIGHT without it glitching down or up, and reliably do a diagonal move (DOWN + LEFT) and (UP + LEFT). A good way to check that your controller does this well is by loading up the Test Cart Rev. 4 and Joystick test OR the Joystick Test app buy Chris Binarystar. When you have the controller in the neutral position, you should be able to tap RIGHT and let go and never see it go up or down. Also when you check the diagonals, make sure the line touches all of the way up into the corner. Do the same test where you are neutral and then move the stick directly into the diagonal. If it doesn't reliably go fully diagonal, you will have serious trouble clearing the maze levels. Usually when it won't go fully into the corner for diagonals, what you'll find happens in game is you think you are pressing into the corner... but you are a little more LEFT and UP/DOWN is not registering at the same time... so your ship doesn't go UP/DOWN right away when you need it to. The opposite can happen as well, you end up going UP/DOWN but not LEFT so you end up crashing into the forward wall. Hahaha too funny.

3RD MAZE LEVEL JOYSTICK MOVES >> \ > / > \ >>> / >>> / >>> \ >>> / >>> \ >> \ >> / >>> / >>> \ >>> (try not to correct with UP and DOWN too much, but UP is more forgiving than DOWN with the tight passages) When you approach the 3rd maze level for the first time, make sure you are somewhat forward >> and then / to drop down into the opening... it's tight!! You can send two bombs away before you go / as well if running out of fuel. LEGEND \ = UP and LEFT diagonal / = DOWN and LEFT diagonal > = RIGHT a bit >> = RIGHT a bit more >>> = RIGHT all of the way!!

Wow, not an official entry... but with this above link for the WASD HJKL key setup... I just played a few games and was finally able to beat the first maze level with the keyboard & emulator! It took like 4 tries, wasting most of my lives... but I made it through and collected some more points. Not bad for the emulator I'd say.

If you have a flash cart, check out Scramble with infinite lives... it lets you practice the 3rd maze level a lot. You can also start the GAME at 3 and get to that hard maze level the first encounter of it, if you'd like to speed things up. You can see it took me over 550k points of tries before I got it for the first time and this is a very sketchy/dodgy attempt at that, with the joystick flapping all over the place. I'm much smoother now with it!

Ladies and gentlemen, I've finally done it this morning! Blasted through 100k! First game, sat down with my coffee blurry eyed... and only got a good drink of it after this game! This was the best run I've had with Scramble and the score would have been much higher (130k+) if I collected everything along the way. I tend to not do that because it involves really hugging the ground and flying forward a lot which is riskier. I made it to the end of the 3rd maze level with 5 lives, but died exiting too low! I typically avoid nudging the ship in these tight areas because it can lead to going too far and crashing into the opposite side. That said, it restarted me at the Enemy Base level with 4 lives so no worries! I died on something stupid on the Mountains level, and then made it to the Caverns with the next life and ran out of fuel... now with 2 lives, made it through the caverns. At this point the vector gods of randomness were smiling down upon me because I breezed through the Flameoids/asteroids level without any trouble and ran out of fuel during the End City. Restarting the End City with 1 life remaining, I just barely made it to the maze for the 4th time now... and MADE IT THROUGH the hardest maze level for a second time (or would you consider this the first... I dunno... semantics!)... this time not getting hung up on anything at the end. HOWEVER... ran out of fuel right at the top of the Enemy Base level. I already had well over 100k+ by this point, so with one life remaining I focused on not missing any fuel, but it ran out so fast you can see where I died trying to get the fuel there in the Mountains level. 112,370

Sounds like something shorted out upon powering it up... a surge taking out an old worn component. A good section to check would be the -13VDC section which is a few caps and diodes. I've heard of one of those caps shorting out taking out the -13VDC rail. Easy to power up and measure the voltages on the large 4 pin connector and see if you have -13V and the other ones. Obviously don't touch the neck PCB while it's on. https://retrorepairbear.co.uk/services/ comes up a lot in the facebook group for UK repairs. Good luck and looking forward to seeing you come back

I believe the issue is the /CARTS line is used to drive /CE on the PROM, but no-buzz veccy's don't have that line connected, so it floats around. This causes the data lines to output garbage while the system is booting, which interferes with read/writes to the VIA, RAM and MCU. If you want to try this mod, it should work. Cut the trace highlighted in pink, wherever you can... and then add a wire where the blue one is shown. Keep the solder on the PCB finger near the top to avoid getting it down by where the cart edge connector in the vectrex touches the PCB fingers. UPDATE: One person has confirmed this mod works on their 31xxxxx vectrex I

So close to 100k.... nooo! Got this last night, and a couple more games this morning like 80.6k 92k but generally bad luck on the asteroids. 99,450

Played two more games while cooking a pizza and had a mini breakthrough. Got to the 3rd maze level with 4 or 5 lives and then proceeded to choke and die over and over at the beginning of the maze entrance. Made it through with last life and kept it going for a while barely hanging onto fuel multiple times. 94,930

Nice, and you got past the hardest parts first try! Almost squeaked through!! Yeah if you die on the Asteroids level, hold down and forward before you spawn for the best chance of getting down there... and be prepared to fly up and down like a crazy person just in case

This was a super intense game, considering the last game I died at the 3rd maze level after almost making it through. This game I got to the 3rd maze level with all 5 (or 6?) lives and sailed through first try! I even had enough fuel to finish out the level. Ran out of fuel the first part, tried again and kept getting enough fuel to make it to the second part but ran out of fuel again. Then got through the second part and the asteroids field was super fast... almost made it to the end of that and died. Then was doomed to lose the rest of my two lives pretty quickly there again. My hands are still tingling from this run. 92,850 I do feel like the asteroids level is the hardest to ace. You'd think the 3rd maze level would be the hardest, but the asteroids are kind of random, so sometimes you just keep getting bad runs of the asteroids and can't avoid getting hit.

One person on the facebook vectrex group received it. They are shrink wrapped, and thankfully they busted it out of its shrink wrap deathtrap!

I tried to get a reasonable score with the emulator yesterday, and could not remember how to change the keyboard controls so that I could make the WASD keys the joystick and HJKL keys the buttons. So I started playing around with trying to use a bluetooth gamepad as the input, and found that it wouldn't map the D-pad on my 8BitDo controllers by default, but would only map the analog left stick. My second issue then was that the 8BitDo left stick wasn't fully going into the corner when pushing the stick diagonally, and this was causing the maze level to be completely unplayable. My work around was to download a free joypad to key mapper app for Mac called Enjoyable v1.2, and use that to map the left stick to the arrow keys, and buttons to ASDF... then play with keyboard controls. That worked, but every time I pressed button 4, or the F key... it was toggling fullscreen for some reason. Luckily Scramble duplicates the BOMB / FIRE buttons on 1 and 2 as well, so I mapped by joypad buttons to be 1 and 2 only or A and S. No more fullscreen issues. Despite this, my best score with the emulator was only like 35k or so. Still fun, but I think to get the really high scores you need a bit more control.

This is my first attempt this morning at Scramble with my blue Vectorcade controller. I tried the purple SNES controller but it's just not repeatable for diagonal movements, so I just can't reliably fly through the maze level with it. The Vectorcade though does much better with diagonals. I only had one life left by the time I got to the 3rd maze level, so I died... game over. 77,590

Great score! But how the heck did you die right there? xD My best is only like 80,500 from years past, but I died in a silly way just flying too low, ran out of shots, and crashed into a fuel station or something.

A digital joystick might help here... something that has corners like an 8-way arcade stick. I like to use my Vectorcade controller for Scramble.

Congrats, that's a great score! The 4k bonus is on the even number levels after you get to like level 12 or 14 or 16... there's like an 'X' at the top and if you get that one you get 4k points. It's really helpful to make sure you get that to maximize your points because the levels get so much harder to navigate up to the top past like level 20. I'm also looking forward to Scramble, and have a love hate relationship with the 3rd maze level

First and only game on Easter morning, 103,002 (level 26 or 27)!! I had 3 lives left at 80k which really helped... but they whittled down to 1 life left at 98k so with immense pressure I completed the odd level and was at 99k Only had to fly up into a bunker to make it to 100k, so I starred at the stars and made sure I was flying up in the easiest part... I did not focus on getting 4k bonus... and prayed I would not get shot by the UFOs. I ended up getting 100 points at the top, lol... but when the level ended I had 102k! Started playing another odd level and got one or two more UFOs, and then just kind of spaced out flew too close to an asteroid and crashed into it. I can finally be done

I've probably played 30 - 40 decent games in the last two days. This one was the best, and my controller died on the last level, last life I had... so I had to swap controllers and it threw off my flow. Ended up not even getting any more points with the second controller... 100k might not be possible before the end of the month for me... but I'll give it a few more tries tomorrow. 98,594

Nice run! Although, you play VERY risky so I bet you could go even higher if you didn't make the risky moves. If you watch my video I explain the risky stuff, a big one is not crossing over under UFO's up close without cover of the asteroids. That said, if you keep getting the lit UFO's in order, and get lucky, you will have a high score as well. At 1:23 it looks like you bumped into the left side of the bunker area, since no UFO's were near you. Something I noticed about this game watching your video... a lot of the lag in this game could be reduced by not showing the previous high score, which is always visible at the top... even after you pass it on the bottom live score. Everyone is doing great! I need to put some more games in and try to get that 100k+ score.

You should seriously consider getting a flash cart so you can play tons of freely available games. Not to mention you can play Scramble with the infinite lives hack to practice and get better at whatever level you keep dying on. In no particular order VEXTREME VecFever PiTrex VecMulti VecFlash BackBit

Made a walkthrough video on how I play GWSL, and just happened to somehow get my highest score yet, 97,412

I'll shoot a video later of my game play techniques... it's nothing fancy, but it's worth taking a look.

I'm really terrible at Protector/Defender, so I'd love to be forced to learn it. I'm also very terrible at Vyrzon, so don't expect any high scores from me there

A friendly back and forth between me and Tony L. You can go a lot further though... there are some good videos on Twin Galaxies making it look easy as well.