The DigiBarn Museum has a Vectrex page, including words on the artifact from its contributor, Ed Satterthwaite, who worked at Xerox PARC in the 70s and 80s.

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/vectrex/index.html

Comment from DigiBarn curator Bruce Damer: aren't these ultra retro cool, we think of the Vectrex as "the Blade Runner" machine!

Here is the second entry for the series about the history of the Vectrex.

First months of 1982:

A strict timetable demands that the first 12 games and the hardware should be ready in June 1982.  The Vectrex name is subsequently chosen, as already described.

John Hall later exclusively works on "Mine Storm" while Gerry Karr works on The Executive alone.  Gerry starts over from scratch and changes the name to the RUM (Run Time Monitor).  In the end, a number of people contribute to the RUM, most notably Duncan Muirhead who handled most of the heavy trig stuff.

Come back to the VecNews, this series will be continued!

Here is the first entry for a news series about the history of the Vectrex.

December 1980:
Large supply of 5" CRT's bought cheaply from a liquidator's surplus.
Spring 1981:
"Mini-Arcade" development begins with Mike Purvis and John Ross.
Spring 1981:
Project is re-named. Tom Sloper suggests "Vector-X", which soon becomes "Vectrex".
July 1981:
Kenner declines an option on the project.
September 1981:
Vectrex concept is licensed by General Consumer Electronics (GCE), and a 9" CRT is decided on.
October 1981:
Paul Newell, Mark Indictor and John Hall begin to engineer the Vectrex.
January 1982:
Bill Hawkins and Chris King join the Western Tech. They were both students at Georgia Tech at the time and are hired by Ed Smith as "Cooperative Education" students. They are supposed to work for three months and then go back to school. Duncan Muirhead joins a week or two afterwards. He had just dropped out of a Physics PHD program at UCLA.

Come back to the VecNews, this series will be continued!

Print the crossword | download as a PDF

Asteroids Locator Map USA

Much of arcade Asteroids’s allure is the glowing, minimalist vector screen. Instead of a standard TV monitor, which scans from top to bottom over and over again, the vector display draws straight lines from one point to the next where needed, like an oscilloscope. It can only be a simple polygon outline of one color, but it also means that the image is sharp and bright (Asteroids’s photon torpedoes leave a brilliant trace along the slowly-decaying phosphor of the screen), and simple to program (the video and sound data in the arcade version of Asteroids is just 2 KB of ROM code, and the game program is another 6 KB). It’s why www.atariasteroids.net have the Asteroids locator on the site: to this day, no home version or variation of Asteroids really does the same thing.

See this Vectrex Demo at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KDA5PeATwc&feature=related

"This is a great system -  ahhhm - if you are a retro collector like i am - then I recommend buying it..."

From us 100 Points ! This young man will become a TV reporter.

A mail from KosmikNeil (in parts):

These Baseball caps are a limited edition run of 50 only, I had Commissioned celebrating 30 years of the Vectrex arcade system which will be shipped out in the first week of March, taking pre orders now.

They are very high quality black, fully embroidered Baseball cap with four embroidered Logos, which includes the Vectrex logo on the front in pale blue (Vectrex colour), and "real arcade play" embroidered underneath on the back is the MB emblem (blue & red colours), plus on both sides of the cap are MineStorm graphics in white, Left side the MineStorm laying UFO, right side 3 Mines and your Ship which are accurately represented.

The caps sell for £23 (Approx. 36USD), which includes shipping worldwide, each cap is posted in a Jiffy bag with the cap packed out to retain its shape during shipping.

For more information or for PayPal pre orders kosmikneil@yahoo.co.uk

Kind regards, KosmikNeil aka KosmikVector