Nobody 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.
And Quake.
The Vectrex Computer
31–40 of 47 posts
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#32I 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.)
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#33Nobody makes a consumer 'vector monitor' for modern computers. I know; I searched high and low for one a few years back.
Although there have been projectors https://youtu.be/Dl7tyF71zHA
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#34I 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.)
What is the South Park scandal?
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#35[dead]
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#36I 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).
Good lord, you'd think I could remember how to spell Cinematronics since I worked there. Hell, I created the wikipedia article on it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cinematronics&old...
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#37I 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).
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 whi…
My experience with vector displays is 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.
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 whi…
My experience with vector displays is 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.
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.)
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#39I 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.)
What is the South Park scandal?
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.
Re: The Vectrex Computer
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience with vector displays is 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.
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 li…
Yep, Atari was always a challenge to us on the vector front. I think the most drawing we ever did was the center of the Cosmic Chasm, about 2 minutes in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ0Szz8gpiE
Fun fact: at the end of that video, the default high score list includes me! I'd forgotten this, so thanks for the bump to find this.