A long time ago, must have been about 1998 I implemented vectrex support in the than relatively new MESS emulator. The implementaion I did was not approved by the administrators of the MESS project, so it was never included in any of the official versions (later it was implemented by other people, which was obviously more standard).
My implementation was able to run all at that time known (dumped) vectrex cards, including lightpen and imager games (Which even now are not yet supported by the current MESS – or now MAME).
The MESS version was DOS-compiled and probaly won’t run on current systems. One day I will wrap it in a DOSBox package (you can use the DVE-package (DVE), and copy the unpacked archive from below to one of the mount points and run Move).
Artmaster:
Minestrom 3d:
Here the original Readme:
Vectrex driver -------------- Runs all known available vectrex programs correctly. (apart from test programs I wrote to show that emulators are stupid). This includes but is not limited to: Cleansweep, Spinball (special vector routines with offset problems) Pole Position (curved vectors) Animaction (extra RAM) Artmaster & Co. (LightPen) Narrow Escape & other 3D (Imager support) Spike & Spike's Hopping (digital sound) Vectrex Frogger (custom vector routines) Cosmic Chasm (support for translucency enabled for the DOT) Enough selfcongratulation... ---------------------------- There is as yet no support for overlay files. The MAME/MESS vector routines do as yet not allow this. The display refresh frequency should be selfconfigurating, MAME/MESS only allow fixed frequencys (or I have not found out how to do it). Therefor, depending on the game... there will be some flicker. Further it is not the fastest, nor will it ever be. It runs reasonably well on my K6 233Mhz (anything from 110% to 200% frameskip 0), DOS. Starting -------- Like any other MESS driver. MESS.EXE VECTREX GAMEFILE.BIN (for DOS, for other systems...) Configuring ----------- There are some configuration possibilities and Hotkeys available. The default keyboard layout is as DVE. That means: Player 1 Joystick 1: Button 1: A Cursor Keys Button 2: S Button 3: D Button 4: F Player 2 Joystick 2: Button 1: Q U Button 2: W H K Button 3: E M Button 4: R To reset Vectrex (apart from the default MESS key) press BACKSPACE. To enable analog joystick support press J. To enable Lightpen support via mouse press L. To enable support for vector translucency press T. To enable 3D Imager support press I. There are 7 different 3D Imager support modes. Reachable via KEY 1 to KEY 6. These are option settings simulated via 'DIPSWITCHES'. Default is: all dipswitches OFF, this is Mode 0. Key 1 enables mode 1. Key 2 enables mode 2, if mode 1 is disabled. Key 3 enables mode 3, if mode 1 and mode 2 is disabled. Key 4 enables mode 4, if mode 1, 2 and mode 3 is disabled. and so on. Mode 0 is 'native' imager support, you will see CHAOS on screen. Mode 1 is only the left eye, with white color. Mode 2 is only the right eye, with white color. Mode 3 is only the left eye, with color. Mode 4 is only the right eye, with color. Mode 5 both eyes, but left is red, right is blue. Mode 6 both eyes colored, but offset to left and right respectively. NEW: Bug in shiftreg, preventing Pole Position street from beeing drawn correctly fixed. overlay support added, like DVE, but only 400x400 PCX files supported, but with all vector features... than no colors... overlay loaded is: ROMNAME.PCX only 400x400x256 files are recognized
For now here are the binaries and the sources: Move.rar