I've never seen anyone talk about the vertically mounted screen. I wonder if it was a purely aesthetic decision, or if technical limitations (speed) were the reason.
Valid question that I should have answered! A lot of popular arcade machines from that era had vertically mounted screens (even if they weren't all vector based). Using that orientation helped sell the "arcade in your home" pitch, differing it from your regular TV. Jay Smith has quoted this in the book "Game Over". It's also pretty aesthetically pleasing imo. The orientation makes no real difference to the speed or operation of the electron beam.
I was under the impression that the portrait orientation was to match that of arcade cabs: the original reason for this was to increase the (then current) vertical play-space of shooter games fostered by Space Invaders (for example: Galaxxians required long diving runs towards the fighter). The bulk of low cost CRT chassis were still manufactured with a 4:3 (Academy) aspect ratio - so rotating to 3:4 was an obvious design choice to improve game playability. There are exceptions: for example, the original Night Driver cab needed *width* since the game play was left-right, driving round bends in the road.
In the past I read somewhere that the vectrex and its vertical display was the result of a very large misorder of cathode ray tubes, and they needed something to do with them.
I always thought it was a mere matter of what orientation yielded the best gameplay. Most games were bottom/top style gameplay. Trying to climb something, trying to stop falling aliens, landing on the moon, etc. A wide ratio was still good for many left/right style games, it also came at the cost of a wider space it would take were it rested in comparison. I think it was overall more ideal to keep monitors "tall" versus "flat" for all games in question, including arcade cabinets. You can stack games in an arcade deeper when they're narrower, and you can stack Vectrex boxes deeper in the toy aisle for the same reason.
I had Vectrex when I was a kid in Egypt. It was the joy of my life especially after the school year ends and mom allows me to play. Now I'm 51 years old and miss those days. 😁
@Emancipatriot Thanks my friend 🙏. Gaming those days was like reading a novel vs. watching a movie. I prefer reading novels. And yes I'm exploring the planet and still playing games at my 50s lol. I lived permanently in 5 countries 🙂
I first ogled the Vectrex at Radio Shack when it was new . I never dreamed that we'd get one , but after the video game crash they were almost giving them away and my father picked one up with a bunch of games for Christmas . We played the heck out of it , it never lost it's coolness . I still have it to this day .
@@rstidman I guess it's because everybody that loves the Vectrex and got one for Christmas ends up in these same articles . I read several that were very similar to my experience . It's cool that the Vectrex is finally getting some love .
Vector displays had a nice hypnotizing effect back then, as a kid you were really powerless against its spell. I hope the collectors can keep all their CRTs alive!
Thankfully B&W CRTs are extremely long lived and durable. Plus these sets didn't run for as long as a TV would. It would take many years of arcade style usage to wear the life out of one of these screens.
@@volvo09 Burn-in was a big problem. On many of these games you could see the demo graphics burnt into the screen as black lines during actual gameplay.
I bought a Vectrex back in 1983 at 17 years old from my paper route money and still have it and play it periodically today! It's hard to appreciate nowadays but back then, the graphics you had with this system at home was light years ahead of the Atari 2600 and the like. Games like Armor Attack and Star Castle were pretty much exactly the same as the coin op game at the arcade. That was unheard of back then! Spike was also one of the first ever home games that could replicate voice. I also still have the 3D glasses and you didn't mention, the 3D glasses made the games in color without an overlay! Amazingly, everything still works as it was new, albeit the screen cover templates are a bit scratched up now. :)
I don't care that it is an old and out of production system. I still find it incredibly cool that they were willing to open it up to everyone freely and let people make whatever for it. As we all know, that doesn't always happen. And we've seen how vicious some companies can be when it comes to that kind of thing, even on something that's well and truly dead as far as they're concerned.
Its how it should be. Instead we get corporate numbskulls going after even makers of emulators because it happens to play games that are no longer even being sold!
When we moved to Jersey I was in a band with a kid who had one sometime around 91. It was already old by then, but I had never seen one and became effectuated with it. It was such a unique treasure, and I had never heard of it!
Android (1982) is a sci-fi movie starring Klaus Kinski and worth a watch - mainly because it features the Vectrex in the spaceship’s navigation and control panel!
When I was 14 years old, 1982 or so, I lived in Denton Texas, and our local Mall was called "Golden Triangle Mall." On Friday or Saturday Night, I would very often, always get dropped off at this Mall with my allowance money of $5 a week, and was told to meet back up where I was dropped off at in exactly 2 hours. One of my favorite places to go was to the JC Penny electronics section where they had a glass display case that had video games and consoles of the day. Also, on top of the display case was an Intellvision and beside it, a Vectrex. The Vectrex had a small screen but very good razor sharp graphics, on par with Astroids from the arcade and other games of that type. I also remember it being pretty expensive. I would stand here and play the games for 20 - 25 minutes and then, use the remainder of my time to walk around the mall. During this period of time in my life, I bought my very first 45 record, which was The Police, Every Little Breath She Takes Is Magic. It cost me $2.99. The very first full record album I purchased was AC/DC For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) from this Mall as well. Great times!
You are me brother! I was 13 at that time in Orange County California. I would go to this place called Gemco it was like a walmart and head straight to the electronics department. They had Intellivision and Vectrex as well as Atari they would let kids play the games and we would extend our play time by being the best salesmen that store ever had. The manager told us if we would keep answering customer questions about the games we could play all night. Those were my golden years bro.
@@jameshalleluyah8133 Great story! I loved my Childhood, and both you and went on to experience 80s music and 80s culture as we grew older that decade. I don't think I would change much, if I could. When the NES launched a handful of years later, I was caught off guard and could not afford it. I then asked for extra hours at my part-time job so I could afford the $79 dollars, which got you the NES, Super Mario Bros and 2 controllers. I remember the Friday that I was paid, that I raced to work to get my check after class, then had my Mom help me cash the check. I told her of my plans to buy the NES console for $80 bux, and she was not happy with me spending so much money on a toy, and refused to drive me to Venture, there in Topeka, Kansas where I lived at the time. By the time we got home, had dinner, I barely had an hour to get on my bike and ride all the way across town to Venture which was 30 minutes away on my bike, or, maybe a good 6 or 7 miles. I got there an hour before closing time and bought my NES, 2 weeks after launch. I think, but I am not sure, I had the extra money to buy one additional game, and it might have been Ice Climber, for $24.99 ... I think. Also, I just started a new Facebook Group called "Legendary Retro Gaming Stories!" and if it's something you are interested in, you are more than welcome to become an admin with me, and maybe we could get others to share the very cool stories from the past, as well. The channel is open to the public and is called "Legendary Retro Gaming Stories!" I will be adding art soon and a few posts. Might be fun, or a waste of time, LOL.
@@all.day.day-dreamer fun is usually a waste of time that's why it's called fun. I'm not a Facebook guy but I wish you well on your site. A side note. I bought my NES at a toy store in the Brea, CA mall. I remember just walking in and looking around and I saw this robot with colored rings and took a second look and realized it was some kind of gaming system like Atari or Intellivision. I bought the NES with a weird robot toy that put rings on a pole, I never understood the robot but it either came with Super Mario Bros or I bought it separate I do not remember. That game was amazing! For the time, the game just never ended, it was so much game for that time. Later on I was station in Fort Campbell Kentucky and would find The Legend of Zelda at the mall and that was an experience that lives with me till this day! The 80's ruled!
I bought myself a Vectrex at age 13 with paper boy money. My parents didn't want me to have it and told me I couldn't and because I defied them they took it away from me. I loved it for the two weeks I hid it from them and then I was out about $120 and punished on top. My dad put it in his office for his patients to play with. I always thought my parents sent the wrong message with their decision.
I am so glad I still have the Vectrex I got for Christmas in 1984 - which really was after it had already failed. I still have the Vectrex and all but one of the officially launched UK titles that were released - I bought them all in the 80s. Space Wars escapes me - I never saw it on sale in the UK and prices today are a bit daft.
I love my Vectrex, got one last year filled some gashes with black oil paints (a prop master secret) used car dashboard restorer on it and it looks perfect.
@ hi! You are a lucky man! I had to make do with playing pay ops games on a pay op converted Vectrex at the local toy store. Mine is a Western European MB unit. I have two video on it. One where I merely revitalized the faded plastics. And one where I continued on making a digital joystick for it - after an initial daft oversight from my part. I truly adore this machine, despite not having owned it in the early 80s. My parents are (luckily both still very much alive) more than wealthy enough to have afforded one, but we were raised very frugal. Despite being upper middle class we had to work and pay our dues, to even make a chance of getting something like that. I worked my butt off doing terrible chores to afford a videopac , only for the Vectrex to come out a year later and bring just a bit more expensive and later a VC20. Hence these days I collect everything my parents didn’t got us. Also for my late little brother. He owned a sega MegaDrive, which I collected and brought back great memories of me (his 6 year older brother) and him playing games together. To me computers and instruments, really bring back childhood memories
@ check out the video ;) the oil paint can be really any brand. Usually I use shoe polish (also any brand) to restore surface scratches but these were so light that o could do with this old prop master trick. I don’t remember the vinyl dashboard restorer I use (any one will work) but I mention the brand. It’s been almost two years and it’s still looking nice.
Vectrex was truly something unique and revolutionary in home video gaming! I mean it was all so neatly, well built on all aspects and IMO was more fun then Atari 2600, Intelvision or Colecovision thanks to its for-its-time great controller. I was lucky to be able to play on a Vectrex, and since these are very expensive and rare these days, that felt like a luxuary experience (!). I was at a retro venture and there was one there in fine condition for sale, including 4-5 games and its overlayers as well. $410 was the asking price and while I would have loved one, I could not pay that much money at the time. Luckily I was there to see a man buying it after one houer and I personally congratulated him to his investment. He was very happy about it, and told this had been a dream of his to own since young days. He told me he had 3 gaming dreams, and this was the 3rd and final one he had not achived and now he had it. He had his tween son with him and I told him, "Your son will really expereince something I very much doubts his gaming friends never will". The boy gave a smile to it and seemed to understand what a previlege this was.
I loved my Vectrex. We never had an Atari and there was no way my father was giving up the family room TV so we could play video games, the Vectrex was the perfect solution. The gameplay was fantastic and there was a great variety of games. Sadly, in the 2010s my mother put the box with it to the curb 😞 It still was working, although one of the control sticks had stopped certering. I had researched that this could be repaired with a guitar's E string and had gone to my old house and into the basement to try to make the repair only to find it was gone. She had tossed it only a couple weeks before.
Color CRTs that are raster scan (not vector driven) are all normally built in landscape mode. Getting them to work in portrait mode would require the CRT to be designed for that, pretty much from scratch. Now, why would I bring up raster scan color? Because color vector displays are also tricky. The technology used there that I am familiar with is called “beam penetration” - a higher or lower energy electron beam excites different phosphor layers. Monochrome (AKA B&W) CRTs don’t really have the same issues. Notice in this video that the color is put into the picture on screen by overlaying a sheet over the face of the CRT.
I was fortunate enough to have my dad bring one home from his regular Sunday tag sale efforts in the 80s. We had it for a couple months and boy was I in love with it. Such a great machine. It deserved a better fate in the console wars. Especially after finding out how cool the original engineers were.
I agree 100% about the part saying that the thing about Vectrex is that it's the only retro system where emulation totally fails to recreate the experience.
Not entirely true modern oled high end displays can basically emulate the vector displays pretty well, put that in a mini arcade like system und you could theoretically have a modern version of a vectrex!
It wouldn't be that hard to emulate the logic of a Vectrex with off the shelf hardware you can buy with change that falls between your couch cushions (and not notice any difference), but the CRT pretty much has to be authentic. It would be nice to see them larger than 9 inches, up to full arcade cabinet size, but those tubes are even rarer.
@@werpu12 Mmmm... yeah, a UHD OLED could get you close to authentic, with some logic to add line flickering and post-processing to add bloom and streaking... Getting vector displays exactly RIGHT is something that's very difficult to do, and rarely attempted. Back at the turn of the century, I used an arcade emulator called AstGL that attempted to get Asteroids right on my Win98 machine with a proper picture tube monitor. Attempts to simulate the bloom of vector lines and intense bloom of the high-brightness points used for bullets made it SO much better than MAME. (And the config file offered options to simulate audio noise induced from the hardware... so I tuned it to generate the Vectrex Buzz, which isn't exactly Asteroids-authentic, but... the Vectrex was my first game console, and that buzz still speaks to my soul.) But AstGL fell by the wayside, and MAME has in recent years added a lot of display options as they finally attempted to make vectors great again. I want to acknowledge that MAME has actually made the effort after years and years of ignoring the analog side of vector games.
Thanks for making this. Vectrex and the Atari 800 were the two consoles I had access to while still learning to talk. Such cool machines. I love having the world in my pocket, but I miss the physicality of old software and systems.
I had Vectrex in 1982 or 1983, I think it came from sears, it was a gift from the parents and it was crazy good, the sounds of the built in Mine Storm probably drove people crazy around me as I played it all the time, I could hear it in my sleep. a few years later when the "video game crash" happen I was able to pickup all the games I wanted very cheaply. I've seen multi carts today with all the games and new games people have made, it's an amazing system, coolest gift I've ever received, I still can't believe how much I played it.
I love the Vectrex, as it is truly a device that was ahead of it's time, and I actually wanted to buy one when the market crashed(it was only $50), but my mom wouldn't let me spend my money to buy one(she said it was a waste). Of course I bought one years later and was a HUGE collector for a time, but over the years have sold most of my collection, but still have a flash cart with tons of games. The overlays was another cool feature that many would probably assume wasn't that great, but it can actually enhance the game rather well when designed properly. I would have loved if the market hadn't crashed, and we could have seen more vector graphic arcade titles, but the homebrew community is insane for this thing. There is actually a flash cart out there that allows you to use arcade vector roms like Star Wars, and run them on the Vectrex, truly next level stuff. I've been gaming since the late 70's, and this is easily one of my favorite gaming devices of all time.
@@SammyRenard Where did they say that "woke" applied to _everything_ they ddin't like? I think you suffer from the affliction of assumption. Edit: fixed spelling.
I got the Vetrex for my 7th Birthday, 2nd Grade. I remember my single mom worked overtime to get it for me. I got Blitz, scramble (one of the best ever games) Armor Atrack and never got more. It worked for 10 years and died one day. I gave it to friend to fix and he has it working to this day.
I was an owner of one , it was boxed with 2 games , I got it in 1983 , it was thrown in the bin in the 90s by my mum, I only found this out about 15 years ago , I was gutted , it was an incredible machine , an actual arcade in your house
If the market hadn't crashed, and they'd made it _larger_ (more important than color) and sturdier for stationary installations, putting all the screen covers on a scroll so they could be swapped out automatically, people would have gone back to pumping quarters into these. It would have been awesome to have an all-in-one vector graphics arcade machine.
As soon as I started watching this one, I could’ve sworn I’d seen one of these way back when, but I couldn’t quite recall. Then you played the audio for Spike and it all came flooding back! This was one of the first computers/game consoles I experienced. I was probably only 6 or 7 years old, but I remember Spike (mostly its weird voice synthesiser - “good gosh! Molly!”) and an asteroids game. Amazing! Thanks! Off to do some research… 😊
I got the Vectrex in the 80s and still have it. It still works perfectly too. My all-time favorite home video game system. The vector graphics are still just as cool.
I saw one as a kid in a local electronic store and wanted one, but my dad immediately said no way. We already had an Atari and the Colecovision had just come out. I managed to get a Colecovision partly because they promised that the machine would eventually be compatible with Atari games with an extension. There was so much competition in the early 80s. And then you had computers on the way between Atari, Texas Instruments and Commodore.
I work at a retro game shop, and we had one of these swing in back in the Summer of '22. A beautiful thing. It worked well, though needed to be cleaned up. It went to our festival, and sold quickly.
In terms of colour vector displays, it wasn't impossible to make them but they required dual-layer phosphors where the electron gun could penetrate through one coloured phosphor to the other (since having different coloured dots alongside each other would completely defeat the point of a vector display). Even these couldn't reproduce a full range of colours due to only having only 2 phosphors, and because it required specific electron beam intensities to strike the first, second, or both phosphor layers to produce the different colours, it meant that it couldn't actually produce differing light levels. This obviously wasn't a big deal in the early 1980s, but as we got later on into the decade and things like VGA graphics, it wasn't a match for what colour raster CRTs could produce.
Full colour vector monitors are possible, but it requires a dot mask. This adds to cost, but mainly because few were made because it affects brightness and smoothness
This is confusing, because in the early days of Atari. Standard TV crt's were converted to be used as XY monitors. Tempest and other RGB XY's were standard 3 gun CRT's. I repaired all types of Arcade monitors. I have just never heard of what you are referring to.
As I said in my post, having a regular colour CRT with a shadow mask/aperture grille defeats the purpose of a vector display because you are still relying on discrete dots (or lines) to produce the colour.
Nowadays you could probably do it with a "white laser" (really well-converged multiple beams that add up to white) and modulate the lasers separately, while still only having a single deflection mechanism (well two really, one for each axis). Shoot this onto a small rear-projection screen if you want a self-contained unit, or treat it like a projector and bust out a big screen. This would also weigh a lot less than any CRT of comparable size ever could, except the very smallest like handheld TVs.
@@eddiehimself Nonetheless, color arcade games used a standard shadow mask CRT. They have a very unique look to them because of it. The color Vectrex prototype did use the kind of display you're speaking of, though color wasn't actually the biggest downfall of vector games. The biggest problem was that the frame time is not consistent, and increases with the number of picture elements. As computing power went up and processors became able to do more in a frame, the unique behavior of vector displays stopped being a performance advantage started to become a hindrance. You can actually see this with Vectrex Berzerk, higher-level rooms will bring the system to its knees as they try to draw dozens of those adorably complex little robots firing dozens of bullets at once. The game slows down and you're Neo in the Matrix, then you get farther and the walls start flickering badly as the draw time exceeds the phosphor persistence, and eventually the game just crashes because the time to draw a frame gets too long.
My mom or dad got one of these with all the games in the 80's. I had it in my room all the time as a kid and played on it almost every day. My dad and I played a lot of 2 player Armor Attack. I didn't know how rare and special it was until I was an adult, "my" Vectrex is the only one I've ever seen in real life (Sweden) and no one knew what I was talking about when I tried to describe it. Right now it is kind of lost because no one knows where the hell it is!😿
Owned one myself and loved it, I think I got it for my birthday back in '84. Convinced my dad to get it for me after it had dropped to $100. 😊 My console died quite a long time ago. Donated my surviving game collection to The 8-Bit Guy a few years ago.
There was a toy shop in my local shopping centre that had a Vectrex and I used to fast track it there after school and play it. The graphics blew my mind back then. There was no way my parents would have ever bought me anything like this so that was my only exposure to it. Fast forward 30 odd years later and I was working with a guy who had an original working one that still worked perfectly.
Hell yeah! I have 2 of these and all the games. Also have the 3D imager. I got mine when I was 16. I'm now 57 and still play my original unit! Lots of fun!!
My uncle had one of these and I loved playing it back in the 1980s. As long as I had access to this video game machine I was a happy little lad when visiting.
Seeing the Silica Shop advert brought back memories. My Dad used to take me there as a treat. I remember seeing the Vectrex in there and wanting one, but I was already an Atari fan so had the 2600 and a great collection of games, that I traded in (at Silica Shop) for an Atari 800, which I still have, up in the loft.
My best friend in primary school had a Vectrex. His dad got it cheap when it was discontinued, complete with ALL the games. We played it all the time, and I remember it being seriously impressive. The games were a mixed bag, but the best ones were absolutely superb - Scramble was my favourite. I'd love one of these bad boys but they're really expensive these days.
Great vid. I picked one up recently. They are rare and expensive but well worth hunting down. Probably my favourite retro system. There are people making all sorts of brilliant home-brew games and peripherals for them such as UV overlays.
I had an original Vectrex unit, I played Mine Storm to the crash screen, but I remember there being way more than 13 levels. I remember finding the exploit on the invisible objects levels(turn up the brightness), but I know there were more than 13 levels because the extra lives would wrap around the screen and start to overlap each other. I do believe the "crash level" was over 100, but there were many times where levels would skip to a higher number, so I couldn't tell you exactly how many there were.
GREAT video! I loved this thing so much as a 10 year old. Sears had a display unit running Minestorm and I got pretty good at it, though never good enough to crash it at level 13. A family friend had one and we played a whole lot of Scramble on it. A few years later when the Vectrex was long dead and I had a C64, one of my gaming group it turned out had a Vectrex and large collection of games (including the insanely good Star Trek game) that he had as a kid and didn't even care about it, it was dumped in a toy chest and he would roll his eyes whenever myself or other friends wanted him to bring it up to play on. Familiarity breeds contempt so they say. I hope someone got that big collection who could appreciate it eventually.
Literally the only time I've ever seen a Vectrex in person was in a dingy upstairs shop in Akihabara in 2019. I had heard legends and folktales about the machine for years, but had always assumed it to just be hype and nostalgia. That said, the deep dive here and the video of actual games being played on it has prompted me to load the system's entire library onto my Mister-- both megabytes of it. Thanks for the insight!
I still have two complete sets (including light pens and ALL games.) When they came out, I got 3 form my dad....One for at his place, one for at my mom's place and one for in our caravan at the campingground.. I love these things. Lost one over the years. (the one from the camping, since we sold that place).I even got the shops display/stand, with that globe/bowl on top in which the unit was housed. My dad negotiated that in, with the deal for 3 sets.
The 6809 was great. 8-bit data bus but internally it had 16-bit registers. Also dual stacks. PC relative addressing. Even a multiply instruction! Loved programming it.
I sometimes imagine alternative video game history where things played out differently. A Vectrex 2 could have been amazing. The fact you can have simple 3d games with 1982 tech is amazing. You could probably have had playstation level polygon counts by 1990 with a very unique look.
I remember seeing these in the shops as a child and being entranced by vector graphics and audio. Now I have two and a pitrex cart and it’s a constant go to for me. Such a unique damn cool machine.
a few of my friends had this, and was a lot of fun to play. everybody knew how tech cool it was, always wanted one :). super review. it took me right back to HS and fun times....
I got a Vectrex for Christmas when I was 8 years old. Besides the built-in Minestorm, the games I had were Spike, Pole Position, Armor Attack, Solar Quest, Star Trek, Bedlam, and Art Master with the light pen. I eventually took it to my grandmother’s and left it there so I would have something to play whenever I was over there.
I have one still sitting in the attic, with a few cartridges. Sadly it's capacitors have given up long ago (known issue), I know there's kits to fix this, might get to that one day. I remember having such a good time with this system! Fondly remember the audio buzz, and the 'watery' screen when the workload got a bit too much (you could hear the buzz lower in frequency). It all just belongs to the experience.
Best Christmas ever! I discovered the vectrex at Hill’s department store in the video game isle. Mom said it was too expensive. Santa pulled through though. Got the system and 2 or 3 games. Me and my buddy played that thing every day after school. I was heartbroken when they announced it was discontinued. I got a catalog with discount games and begged, stole and borrowed for as much cash as I could get to buy up as many as I could. I still remember having to pick and choose what games to get and leave behind forever. My vectrex still works today. Still have the overlays. Got the light pen. A few years ago, I got a gift from a friend. A cartridge with every available title on the platform as well as some home brew ones. Still an amazing game.
Restored mine 5 years ago. Added the noise suppressor circuit to the audio circuit and now it has no background noise. Just the 8 bit(?) sound system :-)
Great video as always Pete. The Vetrex was, I believe, the first home system I ever played on at a mate's house. Spike and Minestorm. Maybe I would have touched an ATARI in a shop....but I dont recall doing so before that day.
We had one of these and always enjoyed a few rounds. It wasn't the best thing out there but it wasn't a slouch either. Simpler in design made it less fussy and you didn;t have to blow in the cartridge slot like the NES and Atari.
I play on Vectrex console every year at a Retro show in Norway. It's the only console besides Virtual Boy i play on there. Last time played on this were 3 months ago. Impressive 1982 console because of the slick 3D games.
Hahaha- dude. The part at @1:00 reminds me so much of a scene from the movie Grandmas Boy where they open the door to a room full of guys doing this type of stuff 😂😂. showing all the “we’re not a normal business” type of silliness after that makes me wonder if they had seen this footage and maybe took some inspiration from it when making the movie. It’s so similar
These little machines were so cool. I had a friend who got a Vectrex in the late 1990's. I had a Playstation and Saturn at the time but not an N64 yet. Basically before late 1996. He had technically two games, Minestorm and Minestorm 2. I say technically, as both are the same game.
I've never seen anyone talk about the vertically mounted screen. I wonder if it was a purely aesthetic decision, or if technical limitations (speed) were the reason.
Valid question that I should have answered! A lot of popular arcade machines from that era had vertically mounted screens (even if they weren't all vector based). Using that orientation helped sell the "arcade in your home" pitch, differing it from your regular TV. Jay Smith has quoted this in the book "Game Over". It's also pretty aesthetically pleasing imo.
The orientation makes no real difference to the speed or operation of the electron beam.
I was under the impression that the portrait orientation was to match that of arcade cabs: the original reason for this was to increase the (then current) vertical play-space of shooter games fostered by Space Invaders (for example: Galaxxians required long diving runs towards the fighter). The bulk of low cost CRT chassis were still manufactured with a 4:3 (Academy) aspect ratio - so rotating to 3:4 was an obvious design choice to improve game playability.
There are exceptions: for example, the original Night Driver cab needed *width* since the game play was left-right, driving round bends in the road.
In the past I read somewhere that the vectrex and its vertical display was the result of a very large misorder of cathode ray tubes, and they needed something to do with them.
@@brslade I didn't realize The Onion existed back in the 80s.
I always thought it was a mere matter of what orientation yielded the best gameplay. Most games were bottom/top style gameplay. Trying to climb something, trying to stop falling aliens, landing on the moon, etc. A wide ratio was still good for many left/right style games, it also came at the cost of a wider space it would take were it rested in comparison. I think it was overall more ideal to keep monitors "tall" versus "flat" for all games in question, including arcade cabinets. You can stack games in an arcade deeper when they're narrower, and you can stack Vectrex boxes deeper in the toy aisle for the same reason.
I had Vectrex when I was a kid in Egypt. It was the joy of my life especially after the school year ends and mom allows me to play. Now I'm 51 years old and miss those days. 😁
I love how gaming has the potential to bring so many people from different walks of life together. I hope you truly are exploring the planet
@Emancipatriot Thanks my friend 🙏. Gaming those days was like reading a novel vs. watching a movie. I prefer reading novels. And yes I'm exploring the planet and still playing games at my 50s lol. I lived permanently in 5 countries 🙂
Vectrex*
yep, agreed
Me to 50 now bbut had one in uk loved it armour attack ,scarmble and minestorm
I first ogled the Vectrex at Radio Shack when it was new . I never dreamed that we'd get one , but after the video game crash they were almost giving them away and my father picked one up with a bunch of games for Christmas . We played the heck out of it , it never lost it's coolness . I still have it to this day .
you just told the same story I tell about getting a vectrex, lol
@@rstidman I guess it's because everybody that loves the Vectrex and got one for Christmas ends up in these same articles . I read several that were very similar to my experience . It's cool that the Vectrex is finally getting some love .
That's rad man!
Me too!
@@cortical1 What was your favorite game ? I mostly played Blitz and Star Trek .
Vector displays had a nice hypnotizing effect back then, as a kid you were really powerless against its spell. I hope the collectors can keep all their CRTs alive!
Thankfully B&W CRTs are extremely long lived and durable.
Plus these sets didn't run for as long as a TV would. It would take many years of arcade style usage to wear the life out of one of these screens.
@@volvo09 Burn-in was a big problem. On many of these games you could see the demo graphics burnt into the screen as black lines during actual gameplay.
1981
I bought a Vectrex back in 1983 at 17 years old from my paper route money and still have it and play it periodically today! It's hard to appreciate nowadays but back then, the graphics you had with this system at home was light years ahead of the Atari 2600 and the like. Games like Armor Attack and Star Castle were pretty much exactly the same as the coin op game at the arcade. That was unheard of back then! Spike was also one of the first ever home games that could replicate voice. I also still have the 3D glasses and you didn't mention, the 3D glasses made the games in color without an overlay! Amazingly, everything still works as it was new, albeit the screen cover templates are a bit scratched up now. :)
1981
I don't care that it is an old and out of production system. I still find it incredibly cool that they were willing to open it up to everyone freely and let people make whatever for it. As we all know, that doesn't always happen. And we've seen how vicious some companies can be when it comes to that kind of thing, even on something that's well and truly dead as far as they're concerned.
Its how it should be. Instead we get corporate numbskulls going after even makers of emulators because it happens to play games that are no longer even being sold!
Yep. Texas Instruments have been a$$holes about the TI-99/4A ROMs since 1983.
Yeah, that was a cool gesture and very much, it seems, in line with the company's ethos.
When we moved to Jersey I was in a band with a kid who had one sometime around 91. It was already old by then, but I had never seen one and became effectuated with it. It was such a unique treasure, and I had never heard of it!
Android (1982) is a sci-fi movie starring Klaus Kinski and worth a watch - mainly because it features the Vectrex in the spaceship’s navigation and control panel!
Yep! Max the android is seen playing Star Trek (aka Star Ship) in the beginning!
When I was 14 years old, 1982 or so, I lived in Denton Texas, and our local Mall was called "Golden Triangle Mall." On Friday or Saturday Night, I would very often, always get dropped off at this Mall with my allowance money of $5 a week, and was told to meet back up where I was dropped off at in exactly 2 hours. One of my favorite places to go was to the JC Penny electronics section where they had a glass display case that had video games and consoles of the day. Also, on top of the display case was an Intellvision and beside it, a Vectrex. The Vectrex had a small screen but very good razor sharp graphics, on par with Astroids from the arcade and other games of that type. I also remember it being pretty expensive. I would stand here and play the games for 20 - 25 minutes and then, use the remainder of my time to walk around the mall. During this period of time in my life, I bought my very first 45 record, which was The Police, Every Little Breath She Takes Is Magic. It cost me $2.99. The very first full record album I purchased was AC/DC For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) from this Mall as well. Great times!
You are me brother! I was 13 at that time in Orange County California. I would go to this place called Gemco it was like a walmart and head straight to the electronics department. They had Intellivision and Vectrex as well as Atari they would let kids play the games and we would extend our play time by being the best salesmen that store ever had. The manager told us if we would keep answering customer questions about the games we could play all night. Those were my golden years bro.
@@jameshalleluyah8133 Great story! I loved my Childhood, and both you and went on to experience 80s music and 80s culture as we grew older that decade. I don't think I would change much, if I could. When the NES launched a handful of years later, I was caught off guard and could not afford it. I then asked for extra hours at my part-time job so I could afford the $79 dollars, which got you the NES, Super Mario Bros and 2 controllers. I remember the Friday that I was paid, that I raced to work to get my check after class, then had my Mom help me cash the check. I told her of my plans to buy the NES console for $80 bux, and she was not happy with me spending so much money on a toy, and refused to drive me to Venture, there in Topeka, Kansas where I lived at the time. By the time we got home, had dinner, I barely had an hour to get on my bike and ride all the way across town to Venture which was 30 minutes away on my bike, or, maybe a good 6 or 7 miles. I got there an hour before closing time and bought my NES, 2 weeks after launch. I think, but I am not sure, I had the extra money to buy one additional game, and it might have been Ice Climber, for $24.99 ... I think. Also, I just started a new Facebook Group called "Legendary Retro Gaming Stories!" and if it's something you are interested in, you are more than welcome to become an admin with me, and maybe we could get others to share the very cool stories from the past, as well. The channel is open to the public and is called "Legendary Retro Gaming Stories!" I will be adding art soon and a few posts. Might be fun, or a waste of time, LOL.
@@all.day.day-dreamer fun is usually a waste of time that's why it's called fun. I'm not a Facebook guy but I wish you well on your site.
A side note. I bought my NES at a toy store in the Brea, CA mall. I remember just walking in and looking around and I saw this robot with colored rings and took a second look and realized it was some kind of gaming system like Atari or Intellivision. I bought the NES with a weird robot toy that put rings on a pole, I never understood the robot but it either came with Super Mario Bros or I bought it separate I do not remember. That game was amazing! For the time, the game just never ended, it was so much game for that time.
Later on I was station in Fort Campbell Kentucky and would find The Legend of Zelda at the mall and that was an experience that lives with me till this day!
The 80's ruled!
Here in Sweden back in the eighties you could rent a Vectrex at your local kiosk for 24 hours and choose (was it) two or three games from a chart. :)
Yes, my friend's parents had a video rental shop and used to bring a unit home for us to play on. So much fun.
Sweden was poor back then
I bought myself a Vectrex at age 13 with paper boy money. My parents didn't want me to have it and told me I couldn't and because I defied them they took it away from me. I loved it for the two weeks I hid it from them and then I was out about $120 and punished on top. My dad put it in his office for his patients to play with. I always thought my parents sent the wrong message with their decision.
Your parents did you wrong.
The death star explosion was the greatest thing I had ever seen in the arcade - those machines were gods to me back then
I am so glad I still have the Vectrex I got for Christmas in 1984 - which really was after it had already failed. I still have the Vectrex and all but one of the officially launched UK titles that were released - I bought them all in the 80s. Space Wars escapes me - I never saw it on sale in the UK and prices today are a bit daft.
I love my Vectrex, got one last year filled some gashes with black oil paints (a prop master secret) used car dashboard restorer on it and it looks perfect.
Oooh nice! Any special kind or brand of paint or dashboard restorer?
Welcome to the club. I still have my original childhood unit.
Is yours a GCE-branded, Milton-Bradley-branded, or (rare) Bandai-branded?
@ hi! You are a lucky man! I had to make do with playing pay ops games on a pay op converted Vectrex at the local toy store. Mine is a Western European MB unit.
I have two video on it. One where I merely revitalized the faded plastics. And one where I continued on making a digital joystick for it - after an initial daft oversight from my part.
I truly adore this machine, despite not having owned it in the early 80s.
My parents are (luckily both still very much alive) more than wealthy enough to have afforded one, but we were raised very frugal. Despite being upper middle class we had to work and pay our dues, to even make a chance of getting something like that.
I worked my butt off doing terrible chores to afford a videopac , only for the Vectrex to come out a year later and bring just a bit more expensive and later a VC20.
Hence these days I collect everything my parents didn’t got us. Also for my late little brother. He owned a sega MegaDrive, which I collected and brought back great memories of me (his 6 year older brother) and him playing games together.
To me computers and instruments, really bring back childhood memories
@ check out the video ;) the oil paint can be really any brand. Usually I use shoe polish (also any brand) to restore surface scratches but these were so light that o could do with this old prop master trick.
I don’t remember the vinyl dashboard restorer I use (any one will work) but I mention the brand. It’s been almost two years and it’s still looking nice.
They make plastic filler also that comes in a tube. I use it on my 3d prints.
Vectrex was truly something unique and revolutionary in home video gaming! I mean it was all so neatly, well built on all aspects and IMO was more fun then Atari 2600, Intelvision or Colecovision thanks to its for-its-time great controller. I was lucky to be able to play on a Vectrex, and since these are very expensive and rare these days, that felt like a luxuary experience (!).
I was at a retro venture and there was one there in fine condition for sale, including 4-5 games and its overlayers as well. $410 was the asking price and while I would have loved one, I could not pay that much money at the time.
Luckily I was there to see a man buying it after one houer and I personally congratulated him to his investment. He was very happy about it, and told this had been a dream of his to own since young days. He told me he had 3 gaming dreams, and this was the 3rd and final one he had not achived and now he had it. He had his tween son with him and I told him, "Your son will really expereince something I very much doubts his gaming friends never will". The boy gave a smile to it and seemed to understand what a previlege this was.
I loved my Vectrex. We never had an Atari and there was no way my father was giving up the family room TV so we could play video games, the Vectrex was the perfect solution. The gameplay was fantastic and there was a great variety of games.
Sadly, in the 2010s my mother put the box with it to the curb 😞 It still was working, although one of the control sticks had stopped certering. I had researched that this could be repaired with a guitar's E string and had gone to my old house and into the basement to try to make the repair only to find it was gone. She had tossed it only a couple weeks before.
Omg i purchased one if these for £38.99 in Woolworths. It was brilliant fun and the games, although a limited range, were very addictive.
I was about to say the same, I bought one of the very last ones our store had mere days before they closed for good no "pick and mix included" 😆
I also got one in that Woolworths sale. Sold it a few years later, wish I hadn't now
What's really tragic is that the color version of the Vectrex was just about ready for release before the crash. Ugh! It would've been soooo cooool!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO :(
Wow. I didn't know that.
Color CRTs that are raster scan (not vector driven) are all normally built in landscape mode. Getting them to work in portrait mode would require the CRT to be designed for that, pretty much from scratch.
Now, why would I bring up raster scan color? Because color vector displays are also tricky. The technology used there that I am familiar with is called “beam penetration” - a higher or lower energy electron beam excites different phosphor layers.
Monochrome (AKA B&W) CRTs don’t really have the same issues.
Notice in this video that the color is put into the picture on screen by overlaying a sheet over the face of the CRT.
Has the homebrew community gotten its hands on anything related to that, sounds awesome
@@izzyj.1079 - the existing hardware is all monochrome, and the home brew folks aren’t going to get color hardware working - see my earlier comment.
Down here in New Zealand I feel it’s a real special moment whenever I see one in person. A true gem.
I was fortunate enough to have my dad bring one home from his regular Sunday tag sale efforts in the 80s. We had it for a couple months and boy was I in love with it. Such a great machine. It deserved a better fate in the console wars. Especially after finding out how cool the original engineers were.
I agree 100% about the part saying that the thing about Vectrex is that it's the only retro system where emulation totally fails to recreate the experience.
i use recall box and its pretty close to the proper vetrex
This is probably true of the Virtual Boy as well, at least if you don't have a VR headset
Not entirely true modern oled high end displays can basically emulate the vector displays pretty well, put that in a mini arcade like system und you could theoretically have a modern version of a vectrex!
It wouldn't be that hard to emulate the logic of a Vectrex with off the shelf hardware you can buy with change that falls between your couch cushions (and not notice any difference), but the CRT pretty much has to be authentic. It would be nice to see them larger than 9 inches, up to full arcade cabinet size, but those tubes are even rarer.
@@werpu12 Mmmm... yeah, a UHD OLED could get you close to authentic, with some logic to add line flickering and post-processing to add bloom and streaking...
Getting vector displays exactly RIGHT is something that's very difficult to do, and rarely attempted. Back at the turn of the century, I used an arcade emulator called AstGL that attempted to get Asteroids right on my Win98 machine with a proper picture tube monitor. Attempts to simulate the bloom of vector lines and intense bloom of the high-brightness points used for bullets made it SO much better than MAME. (And the config file offered options to simulate audio noise induced from the hardware... so I tuned it to generate the Vectrex Buzz, which isn't exactly Asteroids-authentic, but... the Vectrex was my first game console, and that buzz still speaks to my soul.)
But AstGL fell by the wayside, and MAME has in recent years added a lot of display options as they finally attempted to make vectors great again. I want to acknowledge that MAME has actually made the effort after years and years of ignoring the analog side of vector games.
Thanks for making this. Vectrex and the Atari 800 were the two consoles I had access to while still learning to talk. Such cool machines.
I love having the world in my pocket, but I miss the physicality of old software and systems.
I had Vectrex in 1982 or 1983, I think it came from sears, it was a gift from the parents and it was crazy good, the sounds of the built in Mine Storm probably drove people crazy around me as I played it all the time, I could hear it in my sleep. a few years later when the "video game crash" happen I was able to pickup all the games I wanted very cheaply. I've seen multi carts today with all the games and new games people have made, it's an amazing system, coolest gift I've ever received, I still can't believe how much I played it.
I love the Vectrex, as it is truly a device that was ahead of it's time, and I actually wanted to buy one when the market crashed(it was only $50), but my mom wouldn't let me spend my money to buy one(she said it was a waste). Of course I bought one years later and was a HUGE collector for a time, but over the years have sold most of my collection, but still have a flash cart with tons of games. The overlays was another cool feature that many would probably assume wasn't that great, but it can actually enhance the game rather well when designed properly.
I would have loved if the market hadn't crashed, and we could have seen more vector graphic arcade titles, but the homebrew community is insane for this thing. There is actually a flash cart out there that allows you to use arcade vector roms like Star Wars, and run them on the Vectrex, truly next level stuff. I've been gaming since the late 70's, and this is easily one of my favorite gaming devices of all time.
That letter was truly heartwarming. Should be forwarded to Nintendo as an example of how to treat their fans.
Sony and Microsoft are in a race for who will crash their console the fastest with WOKE content.
@@MarquisDeSang "Everything I don't like is woke!"
Is the woke mind virus with us in the room right now?
@@SammyRenard Where did they say that "woke" applied to _everything_ they ddin't like? I think you suffer from the affliction of assumption.
Edit: fixed spelling.
@@SammyRenardAt least he didn’t sprinkle the usual “DEI” croutons on top of the word salad.
@@MarquisDeSang Okay, grandpa, let's get you back to bed.
A family friend had one of these when I was a kid. I played it every time we would go for a visit. I’d love to have one now.
I aways wanted this as a kid....im 54 years and still love video games consoles and arcades video games
I still have mine. But I'm afraid to turn it on... It may go boom
This was a cool video I never knew about this console and appreciate the time and effort you put into it 😊👍
i grew up back in the 80's i knew about the atari 2600 - colecovision & the intellivision. but i never knew about this system. until many years later
You do the best retro tech mini documentaries. Great stuff.
I got the Vetrex for my 7th Birthday, 2nd Grade. I remember my single mom worked overtime to get it for me. I got Blitz, scramble (one of the best ever games) Armor Atrack and never got more. It worked for 10 years and died one day. I gave it to friend to fix and he has it working to this day.
Proud owner of one.
People still make software for this.
If they had an OS9 cartridge for it, and a keyboard connected to the joyports, I would buy one, today.
I was an owner of one , it was boxed with 2 games , I got it in 1983 , it was thrown in the bin in the 90s by my mum, I only found this out about 15 years ago , I was gutted , it was an incredible machine , an actual arcade in your house
As they should. It's a very impressive piece of engineering.
@@valley_robotTell your mother that you are going to throw her into a nursing home.
If the market hadn't crashed, and they'd made it _larger_ (more important than color) and sturdier for stationary installations, putting all the screen covers on a scroll so they could be swapped out automatically, people would have gone back to pumping quarters into these. It would have been awesome to have an all-in-one vector graphics arcade machine.
As soon as I started watching this one, I could’ve sworn I’d seen one of these way back when, but I couldn’t quite recall. Then you played the audio for Spike and it all came flooding back! This was one of the first computers/game consoles I experienced. I was probably only 6 or 7 years old, but I remember Spike (mostly its weird voice synthesiser - “good gosh! Molly!”) and an asteroids game. Amazing! Thanks! Off to do some research… 😊
I got the Vectrex in the 80s and still have it. It still works perfectly too. My all-time favorite home video game system. The vector graphics are still just as cool.
I saw one as a kid in a local electronic store and wanted one, but my dad immediately said no way. We already had an Atari and the Colecovision had just come out. I managed to get a Colecovision partly because they promised that the machine would eventually be compatible with Atari games with an extension. There was so much competition in the early 80s. And then you had computers on the way between Atari, Texas Instruments and Commodore.
Vector displays will always look futuristic to me. They’re just cool.
UGH i got to see one in person a couple years ago ....its hard to describe just how vivid the colors are and glass smooth the movement feels
I had this system as a kid, and I absolutely loved it. Great times!
I work at a retro game shop, and we had one of these swing in back in the Summer of '22. A beautiful thing. It worked well, though needed to be cleaned up. It went to our festival, and sold quickly.
In terms of colour vector displays, it wasn't impossible to make them but they required dual-layer phosphors where the electron gun could penetrate through one coloured phosphor to the other (since having different coloured dots alongside each other would completely defeat the point of a vector display). Even these couldn't reproduce a full range of colours due to only having only 2 phosphors, and because it required specific electron beam intensities to strike the first, second, or both phosphor layers to produce the different colours, it meant that it couldn't actually produce differing light levels. This obviously wasn't a big deal in the early 1980s, but as we got later on into the decade and things like VGA graphics, it wasn't a match for what colour raster CRTs could produce.
Full colour vector monitors are possible, but it requires a dot mask. This adds to cost, but mainly because few were made because it affects brightness and smoothness
This is confusing, because in the early days of Atari. Standard TV crt's were converted to be used as XY monitors. Tempest and other RGB XY's were standard 3 gun CRT's. I repaired all types of Arcade monitors. I have just never heard of what you are referring to.
As I said in my post, having a regular colour CRT with a shadow mask/aperture grille defeats the purpose of a vector display because you are still relying on discrete dots (or lines) to produce the colour.
Nowadays you could probably do it with a "white laser" (really well-converged multiple beams that add up to white) and modulate the lasers separately, while still only having a single deflection mechanism (well two really, one for each axis). Shoot this onto a small rear-projection screen if you want a self-contained unit, or treat it like a projector and bust out a big screen. This would also weigh a lot less than any CRT of comparable size ever could, except the very smallest like handheld TVs.
@@eddiehimself Nonetheless, color arcade games used a standard shadow mask CRT. They have a very unique look to them because of it.
The color Vectrex prototype did use the kind of display you're speaking of, though color wasn't actually the biggest downfall of vector games. The biggest problem was that the frame time is not consistent, and increases with the number of picture elements. As computing power went up and processors became able to do more in a frame, the unique behavior of vector displays stopped being a performance advantage started to become a hindrance.
You can actually see this with Vectrex Berzerk, higher-level rooms will bring the system to its knees as they try to draw dozens of those adorably complex little robots firing dozens of bullets at once. The game slows down and you're Neo in the Matrix, then you get farther and the walls start flickering badly as the draw time exceeds the phosphor persistence, and eventually the game just crashes because the time to draw a frame gets too long.
The Vectrex was indeed the sh*t
Vectrex Scramble is a beautiful piece of work 😍
My cousin had one. It was a blast to play. I wanted one so bad!!! Thanks for bringing back the memory!!!
My mom or dad got one of these with all the games in the 80's. I had it in my room all the time as a kid and played on it almost every day. My dad and I played a lot of 2 player Armor Attack. I didn't know how rare and special it was until I was an adult, "my" Vectrex is the only one I've ever seen in real life (Sweden) and no one knew what I was talking about when I tried to describe it. Right now it is kind of lost because no one knows where the hell it is!😿
How can you lose something that big? 🤔
I have one, know exactly where it is. 😂
Lovely bit of kit. Was a great machine for its time.
Thanks for the video.
I really enjoyed this video. I’ve never heard of this system before but I completely dig it
Owned one myself and loved it, I think I got it for my birthday back in '84. Convinced my dad to get it for me after it had dropped to $100. 😊
My console died quite a long time ago. Donated my surviving game collection to The 8-Bit Guy a few years ago.
Oh, my first ever console! Australia around 1983 or 4.
I still have a Vectrex stored in my basement. Along with most of the games that were made for it. Still works perfectly. It is fantastic.
Thank you for this great episode!
There was a toy shop in my local shopping centre that had a Vectrex and I used to fast track it there after school and play it. The graphics blew my mind back then. There was no way my parents would have ever bought me anything like this so that was my only exposure to it. Fast forward 30 odd years later and I was working with a guy who had an original working one that still worked perfectly.
I had never even heard of the Vectrix till years after I was online, but it looks like such a cool system. Loved playing that Star Wars arcade game.
Hell yeah! I have 2 of these and all the games. Also have the 3D imager. I got mine when I was 16. I'm now 57 and still play my original unit! Lots of fun!!
My uncle had one of these and I loved playing it back in the 1980s. As long as I had access to this video game machine I was a happy little lad when visiting.
Seeing the Silica Shop advert brought back memories. My Dad used to take me there as a treat. I remember seeing the Vectrex in there and wanting one, but I was already an Atari fan so had the 2600 and a great collection of games, that I traded in (at Silica Shop) for an Atari 800, which I still have, up in the loft.
Brilliant video buddy
One of my favourites of all time
Vectrex was AWESOME for its time. Red Baron was my Fave Game.
Sad I've not gotten to play this - looks awesome!
My best friend in primary school had a Vectrex. His dad got it cheap when it was discontinued, complete with ALL the games. We played it all the time, and I remember it being seriously impressive. The games were a mixed bag, but the best ones were absolutely superb - Scramble was my favourite.
I'd love one of these bad boys but they're really expensive these days.
Great vid. I picked one up recently. They are rare and expensive but well worth hunting down. Probably my favourite retro system. There are people making all sorts of brilliant home-brew games and peripherals for them such as UV overlays.
I had an original Vectrex unit, I played Mine Storm to the crash screen, but I remember there being way more than 13 levels. I remember finding the exploit on the invisible objects levels(turn up the brightness), but I know there were more than 13 levels because the extra lives would wrap around the screen and start to overlap each other. I do believe the "crash level" was over 100, but there were many times where levels would skip to a higher number, so I couldn't tell you exactly how many there were.
A fascinating video and so nice to see such respect and praise for a totally cool system!
Played one of these 41 years ago in my local computer shop.
It was astonishing.
Wanted one then and still do now.
I've got one with a bunch of games and some screen covers. Picked up from the original owner. Interested?
GREAT video! I loved this thing so much as a 10 year old. Sears had a display unit running Minestorm and I got pretty good at it, though never good enough to crash it at level 13. A family friend had one and we played a whole lot of Scramble on it. A few years later when the Vectrex was long dead and I had a C64, one of my gaming group it turned out had a Vectrex and large collection of games (including the insanely good Star Trek game) that he had as a kid and didn't even care about it, it was dumped in a toy chest and he would roll his eyes whenever myself or other friends wanted him to bring it up to play on. Familiarity breeds contempt so they say. I hope someone got that big collection who could appreciate it eventually.
Interesting documentary, as always. I doubt I’ll ever get the chance to play on a Vectrex, so thanks for showing it off.
that HUD overlay/film is a really elegant solution to be fair
I still have one of these consoles and they are amazing.
Literally the only time I've ever seen a Vectrex in person was in a dingy upstairs shop in Akihabara in 2019. I had heard legends and folktales about the machine for years, but had always assumed it to just be hype and nostalgia. That said, the deep dive here and the video of actual games being played on it has prompted me to load the system's entire library onto my Mister-- both megabytes of it. Thanks for the insight!
I still have two complete sets (including light pens and ALL games.)
When they came out, I got 3 form my dad....One for at his place, one for at my mom's place and one for in our caravan at the campingground.. I love these things. Lost one over the years. (the one from the camping, since we sold that place).I even got the shops display/stand, with that globe/bowl on top in which the unit was housed. My dad negotiated that in, with the deal for 3 sets.
The 6809 was great. 8-bit data bus but internally it had 16-bit registers. Also dual stacks. PC relative addressing. Even a multiply instruction! Loved programming it.
Great overview and well done! Looks like you did your research.😊
Classic Game Room already told me about how great the Vectrex was.
I sometimes imagine alternative video game history where things played out differently. A Vectrex 2 could have been amazing. The fact you can have simple 3d games with 1982 tech is amazing. You could probably have had playstation level polygon counts by 1990 with a very unique look.
I remember seeing these in the shops as a child and being entranced by vector graphics and audio. Now I have two and a pitrex cart and it’s a constant go to for me. Such a unique damn cool machine.
My friend had one of these, and boy-oh-boy was it cool for the time! 😀
Still enjoy playing it from time to time. Even the kids enjoy it.
I loved my Vectrex. I wish I still had it.
I have a Vectrex It's on the shelf along with all my other retro computers, fully working too!
Great story. Thank you.
a few of my friends had this, and was a lot of fun to play. everybody knew how tech cool it was, always wanted one :). super review. it took me right back to HS and fun times....
Excellent video. I just sold my Vectrex and games to my local game store. You really do need to play one to appreciate it.
I’ve never really got my head round the difference between a vector screen and standard crt until now. Thanks, Peter!
Star Castle on Vectrex..a kids dream back in the 80's. But unattainable. Kids have everything they want today...quite sad and spoiled times.
I got a Vectrex for Christmas when I was 8 years old. Besides the built-in Minestorm, the games I had were Spike, Pole Position, Armor Attack, Solar Quest, Star Trek, Bedlam, and Art Master with the light pen. I eventually took it to my grandmother’s and left it there so I would have something to play whenever I was over there.
I have one still sitting in the attic, with a few cartridges. Sadly it's capacitors have given up long ago (known issue), I know there's kits to fix this, might get to that one day. I remember having such a good time with this system! Fondly remember the audio buzz, and the 'watery' screen when the workload got a bit too much (you could hear the buzz lower in frequency). It all just belongs to the experience.
Best Christmas ever! I discovered the vectrex at Hill’s department store in the video game isle. Mom said it was too expensive. Santa pulled through though. Got the system and 2 or 3 games. Me and my buddy played that thing every day after school. I was heartbroken when they announced it was discontinued. I got a catalog with discount games and begged, stole and borrowed for as much cash as I could get to buy up as many as I could. I still remember having to pick and choose what games to get and leave behind forever.
My vectrex still works today. Still have the overlays. Got the light pen. A few years ago, I got a gift from a friend. A cartridge with every available title on the platform as well as some home brew ones. Still an amazing game.
OMG how much I fancied this console as a teenager! I need to get one before I die.
Restored mine 5 years ago. Added the noise suppressor circuit to the audio circuit and now it has no background noise. Just the 8 bit(?) sound system :-)
Still got mine and it works perfectly, the controller is still one of the best plus it folded away neatly.
I have one as well as the PiTrex for it. Its such a cool little system!
The glorious memories of classic games when it was all about having fun
Great video as always Pete. The Vetrex was, I believe, the first home system I ever played on at a mate's house. Spike and Minestorm.
Maybe I would have touched an ATARI in a shop....but I dont recall doing so before that day.
We had one of these and always enjoyed a few rounds. It wasn't the best thing out there but it wasn't a slouch either. Simpler in design made it less fussy and you didn;t have to blow in the cartridge slot like the NES and Atari.
I play on Vectrex console every year at a Retro show in Norway. It's the only console besides Virtual Boy i play on there.
Last time played on this were 3 months ago. Impressive 1982 console because of the slick 3D games.
Hahaha- dude. The part at @1:00 reminds me so much of a scene from the movie Grandmas Boy where they open the door to a room full of guys doing this type of stuff 😂😂. showing all the “we’re not a normal business” type of silliness after that makes me wonder if they had seen this footage and maybe took some inspiration from it when making the movie. It’s so similar
New Nostalgia Nerd episode? 🧐
Noice! 🙂🍿
These little machines were so cool. I had a friend who got a Vectrex in the late 1990's. I had a Playstation and Saturn at the time but not an N64 yet. Basically before late 1996. He had technically two games, Minestorm and Minestorm 2. I say technically, as both are the same game.
Excellent video!
I've always wanted one of these especially with the PiTrex
I'm glad to have two Vectrex - the original one I bought new back in the day, and one I bought a few years ago and repaired.
ALL HAIL THE VECTREX
Nazist