The Vectrex Computer
43 comments
·March 22, 2025ChuckMcM
banana_dick_5
[flagged]
gcanyon
I got to play on a Vectrex back in the day, it was super-fun -- especially because I had worked at Cinematronix before that. I really wish Vectrex was more successful, but vector displays were just super-limited. The positive of being pseudo-high-res wasn't enough to overcome the fact that you literally couldn't draw more than about 40-80 lines (depending on how long the lines were and how far apart they were).
gcanyon
Good lord, you'd think I could remember how to spell Cinematronics since I worked there. Hell, I created the wikipedia article on it! <grumble>
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cinematronics&old...
PaulHoule
It’s hard to believe it would work as a word processor, if you wanted 80x25 you’d have up to 2000 characters on the screen maybe with a few curves or move lines. No matter how you slice it it’s a lot of data and the electronics strike me as crazier than a raster text display and it’s still crazy for a home computer which is more like 40x20 — do you have a huge display list of lines and curves or a character array which indexes display lists for each character?
gcanyon
My experience with vector displays is <that> years old, but as far as I know it was functionally impossible. Granted Cinematronics was using even older hardware, but literally the refresh rate became a consideration doing the equivalent of boss-death/cut scenes. The more (length of) lines you draw the more the display begins to look like an old-timey submarine radar display.
PaulHoule
That's the physical limit -- the length of the line you can draw; probably you can sweep the voltage faster when you are moving from one line to the next.
Here's the best example of text display I've ever seen on a vector display
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJv94FPRddA
where you see about 60 "words" on the screen albeit with variable size and other effects you wouldn't see on computer displays at the time. The lines would be short on a full screen of word processing text but the total length would add up to more line than you'd see in those kind of games.
I'd imagine you'd need a huge display list though for large amounts of text, 10 points per char and probably more like 10 bits than 8 bits worth of coordinate though you could probably store deltas to get it down to 8 bits in the display list. That gives you a 40kb long display list for 2000 which is most of the address space of an "8-bit" computer though you could fit BASIC in the remainder of one. Thus it's interesting to think of something like the character generator ROM or something that could draw circles or Bezier curves. Sorry, but I like to geek out about old-school display controllers which have an astonishingly high parts count like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco_Dazzler
unless they include an ASIC. People making retrocomputers today struggle to build display controllers that don't live on an FPGA or a microcontroller (ESP32 is fast enough to do something like "cheap video"
https://archive.org/details/Cheap_Video_Cookbook_Don_Lancast...
with high end performance for a 1980s home computer.)
vunderba
I've also heard (not sure if true or not) that General Consumer Electronics got a really good deal on the 9in vector displays for the first batch run which made production a lot less economically viable later.
hcs
I recall reading that the design kicked off because of some stock of surplus CRTs but that didn't ultimately end up used.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/a-history-of-gaming-pla...
> The system got its start in late 1980, when one of the hardware designers at Western Technologies (Smith Engineering), John Ross, had a light bulb go off -- or, to be more precise, a surplus one-inch Cathode Ray Tube (CRT).
> Western Technologies redesigned the system as a tabletop, and later that year General Consumer Electronics (GCE) licensed it for production -- though now with a nine-inch screen.
More of that history here https://www.vectrex.be/vectrex_jay_smith.html
supportengineer
My uncle had one and he wouldn't let anyone touch it.
banana_dick_7
[dead]
bsenftner
I worked for Jay Smith, the inventor & CEO of the company that made the Vectrex, after the Vectrex was already off the market. I wrote PlayStation 1 games at his company, where Jay is also the guy that basically invented realistic physics for bowling games. We wrote the Tiger Woods PGA Golf game with the South Park scandal at Adrenalin Interactive (Jay's company.)
noman-land
What is the South Park scandal?
bsenftner
The first Tiger Woods PGA Golf game for the PlayStation has/had a copy of either the South Park pilot or it's first episode. I don't really remember which it was. The original PlayStation's disc format required a 20MB file of audio silence at the beginning of every disc, which at the time was a bit of a hassle - the size of the file. This file was supposedly to protect home speakers if someone tried to "play" a game disc on their audio CD player. When this Tiger Woods golf game was ready for initial testing, a person on the development team did not have a 20MB file of audio silence at hand, and just grabbed a 20MB file he did have, which happened to be a video of South Park, renamed it, built the testing disc... and promptly forgot. Seriously, that's how the file ended up on the gold master, into replication, and eventually people's homes. I can honestly say, this is 1st hand information: I was on the team. The game was out for some time when a Florida radio DJ announced finding this incredible easter egg that the scandal broke. I seem to remember the lead developer at E.A. got fired over it, eventually.
noman-land
Hahaha, amazing story. I've never heard about this before. This also implies that anyone putting the disc inside an audio player could listen to the South Park episode.
leytdk
i have a vectrex on the shelf, and one of these guys in a box on the desk: https://www.ombertech.com/pitrex.php
holds the vectrex cpu in halt and drives the peripherals (including display) from a pi zero
NikkiA
The storage device being 'wafer tapes' of 128k would suggest it was to be based on the Exatron Stringy Floppy. Although exatron only sold 75'/64k tapes, Rotronics/BSR sold a 128kB (presumably ~160') format version of it for the ZX Spectrum (Wafadrive) and Vic-20/C-64 (QDD).
classichasclass
Also the Texas Instruments CC-40. It was so unreliable that TI cancelled it, leaving no official way of saving files. Hope your batteries didn't run out ...
wsintra2022
So what exactly is a vectrex computer? My real question is what’s the limits of a vector display and why didn’t it take off?
kragen
Vectrex was a home video game console with a vector display. Vector ("calligraphic") displays were a common alternative for high-resolution graphics from the 01950s until about 01990. Evans & Sutherland were among the last vendors standing. I don't think it's accurate to say it didn't take off; it just landed afterwards, like cassette tapes or slide rules.
Advantages of a vector display: you can display a 1024x1024 3-D image on a machine with 16KiB of RAM and less than a MIPS. You get a lot of dynamic range, so you can make some points on the screen extremely bright.
Disadvantages: you can only draw bright lines on a black background; you can't fill areas, though you can come close if you draw a lot of lines. So all your 3-D is sort of wireframey, though you can of course do hidden line removal. Most vector displays got extremely flickery when displaying more than a few thousand lines; the alternative was the Tektronix 4014 bistable storage tube, which didn't flicker at all because it had analog memory for the vector image (and could therefore do CAD over a 2400 baud serial line) but could only be erased by flashing the whole screen green. So you couldn't do animation.
Basically, once digital memory got cheap enough to back your megapixel screen with a megabit framebuffer, and CPUs got fast enough to draw and erase diagonal lines through it in real time, raster displays could be better in every way than vector displays, so vector displays made them obsolete.
kragen
This should read, "so raster displays made them [vector displays] obsolete." Those responsible for the error have been sacked.
banana_dick_7
[dead]
thomassmith65
Nobody makes a consumer 'vector monitor' for modern computers. I know; I searched high and low for one a few years back.
kragen
But you can connect an analog oscilloscope in X-Y mode to your soundcard. Someone got Doom to be playable that way.
thomassmith65
Annoyingly, cathode-ray oscilloscopes are extinct, too, but it still is food for thought.
To edit audio on a large vector display with crisp, luminous waveforms piercing its black glass... that is the dream.
kragen
They're cheap and abundant on the secondhand market, but they certainly aren't large or black. To get your longed-for "big, black display" you might need to rewind the vertical deflection coil on a CRT TV tube; magnetic deflection is going to inherently have more difficulty with high frequencies, but it still routinely reached hundreds of kilohertz in mass-market computer monitors.
So, I believe you can get the BBD you are dreaming of. The hardest part is filling the CRT with vacuum, and that's free; people charge to haul away CRTs.
HideousKojima
Quake actually: https://www.lofibucket.com/articles/oscilloscope_quake.html
kragen
Oh, thanks!
anthk
And Quake.
kalleboo
Although there have been projectors https://youtu.be/Dl7tyF71zHA
gedy
Had a Vectrex bought on clearance from Toys R Us, sold it long ago unfortunately. I randomly though still have its Lightpen in my drawer here, any retro hardware aficionados need it?
oofoe
Puts hand up... Contact in profile. Thanks!
ndsipa_pomu
Just checked and seen a Vectrex for sale on eBay (UK). Really can't think of any justification to pay almost £400 for it though.
anthk
6809 was really easy to do vector graphics with ASM, far more than pixels. Guess why. You only had to track X and Y...
massung
The 6809 also had two hardware stacks making it excellent for Forth programming.
TMWNN
Is it true that the Vectrex's vector display can damage eyes?
LeoPanthera
No? It's no different to any other vector arcade game, except smaller.
helpfulContrib
[dead]
I really enjoyed my Vectrex, I had every cartridge and every peripheral AFAICT. I ended up selling it to offset the cost of a fancy monitor for my Amiga :-).
Related Steve Ciarcia did a vector display which was a lot of fun back in the day. You can find it in the back issues of BYTE but here is a scan https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y6SfEN8idhdZ7Y_rNh0zD9uzHEC...