PSPVECX 1.01 - The Vectrex Emulator

[Samstag]

I'm happy to announce the expanded public release of the PSPVECX 1.01 Vectrex emulator.

The Vectrex was a home console released in 1982 that included a vertically oriented vector monitor which was a desktop-sized Asteroids/Tempest-type display. The original console was also unique in that it included a built-in Asteroids clone (Mine Storm) and used a four-button control with an analog joystick. The Vectrex still has a very loyal following of fans and a healthy community of homebrew game programmers. Despite the age of the console, commercial games are still released once in a while.

PSPVECX is a port of the VECX Windows emulator written by Valavan Manohararajah. This version plays the built-in Mine Storm game.

How to play:

Turn your PSP 90 degrees so that the analog control is at the top (because the emulator is rotated to use as much of the screen as possible). Use either the analog control or D-pad to rotate the ship. Use X to fire shots, Circle to move using thrusters, and Square to hyperspace out of danger (or into it!). Gameplay is very similar to Asteroids with a few surprises. See if you can get to level 14 and see the infamous glitch of the original game.

Known bugs/problems:

• No sounds. The original VECX emulator also didn't emulate sound, but I plan to add support later.
• Text and numbers hard to read.
• No menu, so no other roms supported.
• Not random enough.
• No phosphor decay emulated.

This is a work in progress. Future releases will add support for other games, sounds, better video emulation, etc. It has been tested on firmware 1.5 and 2.0 using Fanjita's loader version 0.8.5. It should also work on 1.0 but has not been tested.

It is available for download (while my server lasts) here.

Screenshots:

[Clay]

Awesome work!!! I threw up an article on the blog. PM Malum or Garp for a free premium membership.

[Skydevil]

Nice one!

[Art]

Awesome work!!
I'd love to see the pinball game supported.

The Vectrex crackly sound problems that came from interference from the picture tube were a trademark. Good luck trying to emulate that.

You know all copyrighted Vectrex games were given to the public free for hobbyists?
You should be able to hard code ROMS into your EBOOT file legaly if you wish.
I think I still have asm code if you are chasing it.

On the downside, I can't start it I have 1.50 and don't know what I'm doing
wrong.
There is no corrupted icon, one has a name, the other has a picture background?
Cheers, Art.

[Art]

Your pspvecx% folder is stuffed.
I had to create my own with KXpolit tool, then it worked.
I think you applied the fancy icon and background to the wrong folder.
Art.

[Samstag]

Awesome work!!
I'd love to see the pinball game supported.

You know all copyrighted Vectrex games were given to the public free for hobbyists?
You should be able to hard code ROMS into your EBOOT file legaly if you wish.
I think I still have asm code if you are chasing it.

I've read that they were made free for noncommercial use but I haven't find anything official to get that verified. If that's really the case then a later version will include all the legally distributable games I can find. I don't see any technical issues with supporting all the games, I just need to finish the loader menu (which will be 100% vector-generated too) so there's a way to select them. I originally had the mine storm rom loaded externally so the file support is already in place.

The Vectrex crackly sound problems that came from interference from the picture tube were a trademark. Good luck trying to emulate that.

Yeah that's not very likely, but I may give it a shot. I should point out here that I've never actually seen a real vextrex yet, but when mine arrives from ebay soon I'll have a better idea of what I need to do. I've also found a Mac port of Vecx that has sound emulation but I need help from someone with a Mac to decode the image format.

On the downside, I can't start it I have 1.50 and don't know what I'm doing
wrong.
There is no corrupted icon, one has a name, the other has a picture background?

I had to create my own with KXpolit tool, then it worked.
I think you applied the fancy icon and background to the wrong folder.
Art.

Oops. After it had been tested on 1.5 I had the bright idea to add an icon and background using pbpunpacker, but apparently I did something wrong. I put them in the working eboot (as opposed to the corrupted one) and it looked good on my 2.0 PSP. I recompiled the working eboot and made it available here.

I've been sorely tempted to get a second PSP so I can work on 1.5 and 2.0 simultaneously. Maybe I'll get myself a christmas present ;)

EDIT: Oops again, I think. I just realized you had to recreate the % eboot, not the one I "fixed". So my fix won't fix anything. Back to the drawing board.

EDIT2: Try this version. I used SeiPSP to generate new 1.5 and 1.0 versions with the icon/background. If that works out then future releases should work on all three.

[Art]

I can't find anything official about it, that would be difficult now, but it doesn't take
much searching to find out about it on the net:
http://romhustler.net/roms/vectrex

Smith Engineering condoned the duplication of the Vectrex system image and cartridges for non-commercial uses.

It is common knowledge among the Vectrex community.
I also heard about it when it happened, and remember being able to read the asm
source code for Bezerk :)
Art.

[Samstag]

Yeah it seemed like everyone knew about it and I found plenty of other sites like that one that mentioned it, but I was hoping to find references to something I could verify myself. But it does look like they're really free to distribute.

I'm going to contact the various hobbyist developers and try to get permission to include their games also.

[SCOTTY16]

Samstag - I just wondered if you had made any further progress with this wonderfull emulator ? Did your Vectrex arrive from Ebay ?

[Art]

Yeah.. when I saw this thread bumped I thought it was an update.. grrr.

[Samstag]

Sorry guys I haven't made much progress in the past month or so. I did get my Vectrex and it's absolutely awesome but I haven't had time to play it much either. But it's nice to know what the games are supposed to sound like.

I've been hung up on the menu system mainly because I overcomplicated the design beyond what I had time for. I think one of these weekends I'm going to do a really simple menu and release something that will play most of the other games if not with sound (I haven't even started sound yet).

[TheBoyEclectic]

Samstag -

I'm sure that you've got multiple demands on your time, so please do not misinterpret this post as "pressure." I just wanted to let you know that there are many of us who enjoyed the Vectrex as children (and I re-acquired one as an adult) who are delighted that someone is working on an emulator for our delightful handheld system.

I have enjoyed playing Minestorm via your original release and I look forward to playing many of my other favorites including armor attack and Star Castle.

Overlay support would be a real winner as you plug away at this and, as you said, eventually sound. Including the ROMs with it is an interesting option, but not necessary if you're concerned about it. The fact is that the original games were released to the public domain as others have said in this thread. The following page on ClassicGaming.com discusses the "gray area" that ROMs are. However, they specifically note that the Vectrex library is the exception:

Some companies have released their games to the public domain or condoned not-for-profit distribution. An example of this is ROMs for the Vectrex. These are perfectly 100% legal, as long as they're not distributed for profit.

http://www.classicgaming.com/cgng/legal.shtml

Please do what you can and recognize that your work is truly appreciated. Thank you for helping to keep the memory of one of the most unique home consoles alive! :)

[Samstag]

Thanks for the support. Expect a new release in the next 2-3 weeks. It might not be polished but I want to get support for cartridges in there. Overlays should theoritcally be easy to support but I'm not going to have time to work on that or sound for a while. I'm probably going to spend more time cleaning up and commenting the code so I can make it available for anyone else who wants to play around with it.

[TheBoyEclectic]

Samstag,

All is understood and that sounds GREAT! If it would be any help, I have been looking over a collection of overlays I got from the Web in .PNG format. I can easily re-size and re-format these to work with the PSP display. If possible, I'd prefer to convert these to something with a larger color palate so that the fine text and detail would be softened as opposed to becoming jaggedly unreadable.

However, I would work within whatever constraints you have in trying to integrate a translucent image into the display for the emulator. You tell me what will work best and I'll be happy to try to help.

Just let me know. :)

Take care and thank you for all of your work!

[Samstag]

That'd be great.

I don't have any hard numbers for size yet since I still need to play around with the dimensions to get the best display out of it. I'll try to finalize it this weekend.

[TheBoyEclectic]

Excellent!

Based on the fact that the Vectrex was a vertical form factor, you have wisely chosen to rotate the display to take advantage of the height. With this in mind, the rotated overlays will have a maximum "width" of 272 pixels. In order to maintain the aspect ratio of the original overlays, this will yield an image that is approximately 272x345 pixels. This will include the original border and maintain the overlay intact.

I have a few examples here in .JPG format for you to test at your leisure. Keep in mind that I can modify these in any number of ways to best suit what you'd like to do with the emulator. Just let me know! :)

Armor Attack:


Berzerk:


Minestorm:
[

Star Castle:

[Samstag]

Nice!

Thanks, I'll give those a try and see how they look.

[TheBoyEclectic]

Samstag,

I just wanted to touch base and see if you had a chance to work with the overlay files I provided. If they appear to be working, I'll gladly convert the rest that I have. If there are challenges, let me know and I'll work on whatever changes are needed (i.e., resolution, color bit depth, file format, or whatever).

Thanks for all of your hard work and let me know what I can do!

Take care,

TheBoyEclectic

[Samstag]

Sorry I thought I was going to have some time to work on this but I haven't yet. The size on those looks great. They may have to be converted from simple 24-bit the 32-bit with alpha but I'm not sure. I haven't tried doing anything with transparency yet so they may be fine as is.

I'll try to give you better feedback soon.

[TheBoyEclectic]

Sounds great! Keep me posted and good luck!

[Samstag]

No real progress right now, but I won't be needing anything changed on those overlay files. They're very close to the right size so I'm just tweaking the emulator to match. I can add the transparency in the code.

I started to use the commonly available graphics.c library but it's incompatible with the way I'm rendering lines so I'm either going to rewrite my code to use the library or rewrite the library (or something). I still don't understand the GU interface very well so I'm just going to be playing around with it until I find something that works.

EDIT: That was easier than I expected.

[Samstag]

Things are starting to come together. Here's a quick look at the games you've done overlays for:




Some of the alignments need a little tweaking (in software) but that's easy enough to play with later. I'm going to concentrate on finishing the menu system so you guys can start playing the rest of the games.

[TheBoyEclectic]

Samstag -

WONDERFUL NEWS!

I'll get hopping on the rest of the overlays and I'll PM you with a link for a .ZIP file that you can just download. (I think that will be easier for us.) I've got a meeting to get to, but hopefully I'll have that link to you later today!

So far it looks EXTRAORDINARY!

Thanks so much for all the hard work!!!

[Samstag]

Sounds great. Looks like I'm going to have a 4-day weekend this week so I should have some extra free time to finish up support for loading the rest of the games.

[SCOTTY16]

Samstag - Just letting you know, your original emulator no longer works with the latest eboot loader from Fanjita - "Super Boch" 0.97 (worked with .85, .95 and .96). Then again it never made it on to the "working" list at all !!!. (If someone has got it working on 0.97, can they let me know - cheers). Edit just tried again and it does work with .97 on fw2.0. Sorry but the loader is not always consistent.

[Psp fanboy]

I also played this on a beta-loader with a 2.6
No sound but still fun !

[Samstag]

Samstag - Just letting you know, your original emulator no longer works with the latest eboot loader from Fanjita - "Super Boch" 0.97 (worked with .85, .95 and .96). Then again it never made it on to the "working" list at all !!!. (If someone has got it working on 0.97, can they let me know - cheers). Edit just tried again and it does work with .97 on fw2.0. Sorry but the loader is not always consistent.

Thanks for the info. The current versions that we've been testing have cleaner exit code and do a few other things a little differently so it may be more stable. At some point I'm going to need a couple extra beta testers who can try it out on 2.01+ versions.

[TheMarioKarters]

I could test it out for 2.6 if you need.

[SCOTTY16]

I can test on 1.5,2.0 and 2.6

P.S. - Found that the failing of the emulator is a problem with the "Boch" eloader. The PSP seems to get in a state/mode where very few homebrews will run or will only partially run (Homer's rin and squarez are ok though !). During this time both shoulders/start will still return to the loader menu which is strange. A hard reboot re-sets the PSP (sometimes).

[Samstag]

Thanks for the info Scotty. I'll PM you guys when the next beta is ready for testing.