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
The Vectrex Computer
21–30 of 47 posts
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#22Nobody makes a consumer 'vector monitor' for modern computers. I know; I searched high and low for one a few years back.
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#23Had 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?
Puts hand up... Contact in profile. Thanks!
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#24Nobody makes a consumer 'vector monitor' for modern computers. I know; I searched high and low for one a few years back.
But you can connect an analog oscilloscope in X-Y mode to your soundcard. Someone got Doom to be playable that way.
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#25So 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?
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.
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#26Nobody makes a consumer 'vector monitor' for modern computers. I know; I searched high and low for one a few years back.
But you can connect an analog oscilloscope in X-Y mode to your soundcard. Someone got Doom to be playable that way.
Quake actually: https://www.lofibucket.com/articles/oscilloscope_quake.html
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#27Nobody makes a consumer 'vector monitor' for modern computers. I know; I searched high and low for one a few years back.
But you can connect an analog oscilloscope in X-Y mode to your soundcard. Someone got Doom to be playable that way.
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.
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#28Just checked and seen a Vectrex for sale on eBay (UK). Really can't think of any justification to pay almost £400 for it though.
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#29Re: The Vectrex Computer
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you can connect an analog oscilloscope in X-Y mode to your soundcard. Someone got Doom to be playable that way.
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.
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.