All about the Vectrex

Hi,

I know I am one of a couple of Veccy owners here, so I thought I might make a dedicated thread for Vectrex matters, especially as the scene seems so lively right now.
Certainly, there have been several significant releases over the past two to three years that have made the Vectrex's USP, aka the display, very attractive to collectors but even more so to players of videogames.

The Pitrex has really set things on fire, while the earlier Vecfever was a new technology that married the display to computing power it was quite limited.
The Pitrex is relatively simple but accomplishes a lot of the same things, and is entirely self-contained, no connection to a PC required, aside from setting it up.
It's a hybrid device, pairing a custom made pcb with a RPi0.

The device has allowed two main threads of development.
One uses the Linux environment to run a Mame branch called VecMame, this is pretty impressive but has needed a bit of setting up and it can be slow.
The other is Baremetal, which is the one I am following.
Again, the RPi needs a Linux environment installed at the start, but once the image is flashed to your SD, after that it is just a matter of extracting the appropriate zip file from Malban, the main developer of this branch, and you are off to the races, so to speak.
He has allowed the entire back catalogue to be played as if on a normal flash cart, he also has a range of arcade titles running on the Veccy, from BattleZone to Asteroids Deluxe, which look incredible on a vector monitor.
What been a very interesting development though is an option called "Speedy Vectrex" which is an enhanced environment for a selection of standard Vectrex games.
Scramble, a port of the Konami classic, was released back in '82 on the Vectrex and looks and plays great, but playing it on the new Speedy option and it's a revelation, it could well be the best version of Scramble on any system, including arcade, smooth and crisp.
Malban has also provided the latest version of his outstanding Vectorblade game, up to 1.10 now, and a new one to this environment called ZBlast, which is a conversion of a Linux title of the same name from about 18 years ago, and this looks astounding on the Vectrex monitor also.

So, that's where things lie for me at the moment, this hasn't really gone into the other homebrew that's emerged over the past few years, Vector Pilot, WireOut and Vector Patrol.
If you have a Vectrex I can't recommend them highly enough.

But, to repeat, if you have a Vectrex you should get a Pitrex soon.
They seem to be out of stock right now but the supplies are supposed to be coming and the device is dead cheap, and it really is incredible what the volunteer group of developers are producing for the new hybrid format.

Here's Zblast, just added to the Pitrex baremetal package yesterday,