My friend has an amazing collection of vector arcade games. It got me obsessed with them. I really wish XY displays were still widely manufactured, the experience is completely lost on other displays.
DVST stands for “direct view storage tube” which is what Tektronix called it. An HDR (high dynamic range) panel could more easily replicate the writing process, which was much brighter than the persistent brightness.
Vector displays can have extremely bright traces and points if they stop the beam or move it slowly.
one of my favourite vector games on my Atari 800XL was Mercenary. It was this open world type game, felt amazing at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9nDCg63wNc it wasn't that graphics was the best (compared to something like rescuse on fractalus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbZ-chrOgGg ), it was just a big vector world with quite a lot of places to explore.
I thought I knew almost every game for the 8-bit line. Don't recall this one, sort of a cross between Star Raiders and Rescue on Fractalus (aka Behind Jaggi Lines).
consider: 3d game engine + all gameplay constrained to a single plane + simple objects with entirely black faces and some kind of polygon edge glow effect.
In high school in the late 90's, I somehow learned that Asteroids was a vector display, and then went about writing a clone in Pascal that used a vector-based backend and rendered to the pixelly display. This ended up giving me an early introduction to a good number of linear algebra ideas...
Big thanks to all involved. 32c3 for hosting. NYC Resistor for such a great presentation. Always great when others share your obsessions.
Out of the box, ThreeJS has everything needed to get started with Vector Retro GameDev: line primitive drawing, line materials that can be shaded with any glsl function, buffer geometry for arbitrary data complexity, and on and on.
My faves are probably the old school Atari classics from the early 1980s: Tempest and the Death Star Trench Run from Star Wars. So satisfying blasting away down the tunnel ;)
This is a great look at the hardware and of vector display - if you want to get a good in-depth understanding of how Atari's original vector graphics display systems worked from the software side, though, Retro Game Mechanics on YouTube did an incredible deep dive into how it all worked, including emulating the vector instruction sets and step-by stepping through complete frame renders from Tempest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smStEPSRKBs
> Unfortunately my patch (to the MAME project) to add support for exporting the vectors to MAME was closed as "an unacceptably hacky way to achieve the intended result". Instead you'll need to clone my tree and follow my instructions on building vector MAME.
I'm sure it's hard work to maintain an open source project like that but they could have handled that a little better. They might have onboarded a new contributor had they been a little more helpful. Of course they had no duty to do so but it might have helped out the project.
I also gave a talk there, it's quite frightening to stand in the large auditorium with 1.000 people starting at you, I still remember having tremendous stage fright. The community is super friendly though and their organization is superb. I ended up speaking four times at the CCC so far, always a great experience.
I hadn’t realized that electrostatic deflected vector displays were superior to magnetic. Aren’t all PC CRTs all electrostatically deflected? They don’t need the absurd aspect ratio that the Tek 1720 has.
Also the 1720 is not that cheap right now, likely due to popularity. Does anyone know of any other good choices for a high quality vector display?
30 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 78.7 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-F7ZySfgZ0
Vector displays can have extremely bright traces and points if they stop the beam or move it slowly.
How did you play this game in vector?
But I can't find a single game engine that treats vector as first class. They all want you to provide rasters.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Tutorial/Ge...
Out of the box, ThreeJS has everything needed to get started with Vector Retro GameDev: line primitive drawing, line materials that can be shaded with any glsl function, buffer geometry for arbitrary data complexity, and on and on.
My faves are probably the old school Atari classics from the early 1980s: Tempest and the Death Star Trench Run from Star Wars. So satisfying blasting away down the tunnel ;)
https://youtu.be/OP7sTQQ0Blw
https://oscilloscopemusic.com/
https://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm
> Unfortunately my patch (to the MAME project) to add support for exporting the vectors to MAME was closed as "an unacceptably hacky way to achieve the intended result". Instead you'll need to clone my tree and follow my instructions on building vector MAME.
Also the 1720 is not that cheap right now, likely due to popularity. Does anyone know of any other good choices for a high quality vector display?