This is the Vectrex news for January 18, 2012:
New Vectrex products[]
What?! New Vectrex merchandise that aren’t games or homebrewed hardware? That’s right, as the Limited Edition Vectrex Gaming Baseball Cap has several objects from Mine Storm adorn it. They are available for £23 (around $36 U. S.) and should start shipping in March. Contact kosmikneil@yahoo.co.uk if interested in looking as hip as possible while playing your vector games.
Also, Recycled Gamer finally opened up a store, currently fully stocked with several modern day converted controllers for the Vectrex, as he had been doing this for a while here and there, but now he has an online store dedicated to his craft now.
And there’s also another Vectrex-related product coming out on another platform though, but we have to keep mum about it for now...stay tuned!
New/upcoming additions[]
A combination strategy guide/walkthrough for Sectis and a review for Continuum were added (scroll down to the bottom of those respective pages under Links to read those), along with a new poll in regards to what kind of controller preference you have when playing your Vectrex was posted as well.
Also, questions have been sent to Kurt Mager, who’s behind the Star Hawk 2 homebrew, so hopefully you’ll be able to look for a page for him here in the coming weeks!
Star Castle record smashed[]
Although not necessarily as “official” as the Twin Galaxies web site, VectrexMad!’s high scores area of his web site is still a bit of fun and gets updated several times a year with people sending in their high scores of various Vectrex games.
The original Star Castle record entry for the site opened with 460,880 points from Future Primitive, then Rob Maerz (of Retrocade Magazine, and also known as Rmaerz on several internet forums) smashed that by making a whopping 1,005,310. He also recorded his feat, but unfortunately he did not realize until afterwards his camera would automatically stop recording after a certain amount of time, so he was not able to capture his entire episode of his score. However, a few pieces of it can be seen here.
Oh, and getting back to Twin Galaxies, the current high score for this game is only a paltry 48,710! Go for breaking that at some point Rob!
New videos[]
Dan Siewers shows his continued work with his Vectrex Multifunction Adapter in his new video, where he accomplished a 3-D object spinning around (which he modeled it as a tribute to the upcoming Tail Gunner game that will be made by FURY in the near future!).
There was also a video from YouTube user sebastianfpga in regards to a circuit that he built “using the vector output circuits of the original Vectrex”, but with a modern microcontroller as a CPU. It looks like his work on it advanced fairly quickly, which you can see here, although you’d have to be able to read German though (meanwhile, his video is here).
Upcoming Revival Studios products[]
From an e-mail:
I wanted to thank everyone who supported my endeavors over the last year and I am already looking forward in showing you my new stuff for 2012!!!! After a bit of tiptoe-ing in 2007, the year 2011 has been the year I finally got my feet wet with Videopac/Odyssey2 game development with 2 game releases (AstroDodge and Mayhem) and I got to release a game for the Vectrex that had been in development since 2008 (Shifted). Also, I wanted to thank the people who wrote in and/or sent me a card this year, your support is appreciated!
So what can we expect in the new year??? 2012 will be the 10-year anniversary of Revival Studios, so I am hoping to make it a special year. Here are some hints:
I'll also be continuing my Vectrex work in 2012. There are a few projects done a few years that still need finishing and release (MVR Racing and Vector Arcade: Volume 1) and I am hoping to release some sort of multicart collection of all my unreleased Vectrex stuff from the last 10 years. D:2, the sequel to Debris is also still in development and I will be looking into finally releasing VexOS and VexosBasic this year (its been finishing since 2007 waiting for a proper release).
Anyways, I am looking forward to the new year and I will be doing my very best to make it a special one for retro gamers, collectors and supporters of my work!
Sounds promising, as there’s quite a few things that the Vectrex has been lacking, such as having few racing games, among others!
And on a final note...[]
Normally this wiki (as with most) doesn’t announce there being new stub articles with an edition of the news/front page updates; however, we feel this deserves a bit of merit.
It appears that John Ross has been nosing around the wiki in the last few weeks, creating new stubs for (finally!) several of the original Western Technologies employees that were around back in the day of the Vectrex, such as Gerry Karr, Jamie MacInnis, Steve Marking and Richard Moszkowski (unfortunately the latter three have passed away :( ), along with updating the Vectrex page on Wikipedia and even commenting on Dan Siewers’s story of when he first got his Vectrex. Yes, that’s THE John Ross, who participated in that fateful little field trip that began with purchasing several small CRTs that were found in a liquidators' surplus store in L. A. and ended up with the Vectrex being created and released, along with designing the Vectrex’s monitor, the initial printed circuitry, inventing the prototype of the 3D Imager, and more.
A private message has been sent to his YouTube page in regards to answering some questions to make his stub page into a more full-fledged entry, but there has been no reply yet, which it is unknown if this will happen at some point in the future or if he is currently working on a fuller version of the page himself.
Whatever the deal is, perhaps this is the start (actually all of this happened in late December) of a very interesting 2012 for this site. Time will tell. After all, this year does mark the 30th anniversary of the Vectrex!
Until then, play, create, read, and even write if you can for your favorite vector gaming machine!
Press release
