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Vectrex homebrew carts won’t play


Tron Unit

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I have a weird Vectrex problem.  Just set up my game room after moving. Vectrex plays Minestorm and all of my official carts fine.  I opened up my copies of Stramash Zone and the Big Blue for the very first time today and they don’t play right.  Stramash Zone flickers and can only see a white dot that moves when I move the control stick.  The Big Blue is so dark I can barely see it and sometimes it looks like it’s not even on but there’s sound.  These are brand new carts.  The contacts look fine.  My other games play fine.  What could it be?

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So basically what happens is the boot screen title menus are fine. On Big Blue after selecting the game it gets very very dark.  So I turned up the brightness on the back which was already set half way.  Turning it up a quarter more helped as I could see a picture when previously I could not. If I turn it up too far though you can see the white center dot and the trace vectors and dots.

 

On Stramash Zone I could play the game but the top of the screen is wavy and jittery around the score and radar.  Sometimes tanks will literally disappear but if I fire they will blow up.  It’s like they are cloaked or ghost tanks.

 

And yet I have no problems with any of my other games and have to turn the brightness back down to normal half way.  

Edited by Tron Unit
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Graham, I don't think Big Blue uses any bankswitching. IIRC the vectors are just being drawn at a lower intensity, just dial the Vectrex brightness back a bit when you see the dot in the centre of the screen. Stramash zone is probably the same issue. Wobbly vectors will happen occasionally, especially with games such as Stramash Zone that are drawing a lot on screen. 

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Hi,

 

BinaryStar is right, there's no Bank Switching (or anything clever!) going on in Big Blue; just BIOS calls to set intensity... I set intensity generally at the lower end of things so on the odd Vectrex it requires the brightness to go a bit higher but mostly it's fine as is (it's ok on all 7 of my test machines).

 

In Frontier I went a bit higher with the intensities in general.

 

Cheers,

 

Chris

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Older games seem to only use a few of the brighter intensity levels from what I've noticed. Modern homebrews are all over the place with intensity which is normally a good thing. If you get a test cart or rom there is an intensity check that you can mess with.

 

Wobble is normal. Especially with a lot of drawing and farther away from the center.

 

 

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