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ClockworkRobot

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    Terror Tube 3D

    in Vectrex

    Posted

    Post by marblemad on 17 minutes ago

    Some experiments with making a new 3D vectrex game and also exploiting the 3D imager to do 2D colour vector graphics!

     

    youtu.be/G12ZF9OmN3A

     

    Still a lot of work to be done on the game but I think we have a good proof of concept.

     

    Terror Tube 3D prototype.

    • Like 6

    Chimney Hunt by Clockwork Robot

    in Vectrex

    Posted

    CHIMNEY HUNT!
    A free vectrex game. visit
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/vectrex/
    and find the download.
    The Story:
    It's Christmas time but disaster! Due to price increases Santa can't afford to make enough presents!
    The gifts he's lost over the years whilst delivering down chimneys would be enough to cover the shortfall if only there was an economic way to collect them all.
    Elf boffins from the temporal engineering department to the rescue. By adapting the space folding technology that lets Santa deliver presents to 7 Billion people in one night, they've managed to space-warp every chimney on earth into one gigantic mega-chimney. You must fly down the mega-chimney and collect all the lost presents to save Christmas.
    Dare you enter the Mega-Chimney?
    Good Luck!

     

    • Like 3

    Stramash Zone for VECTREX. Available Now.

    in Vectrex

    Posted

    Stramash Zone, is SOLD OUT !
    I just want to give a great big thanks to everyone who bought a copy.
    I really hope you all enjoy the game.
    Hope to be releasing some more projects next year including:
    Maximum Overdrive, a top down driving game inspired by a favourite ZX Spectrum game.
    and
    Pollinator, A game of balance and insects.
    THANKS!
    • Like 6

    Pollinator for vectrex. Coming not very soon.

    in Vectrex

    Posted

    Thought I'd let you all have a sneak peak of "Pollinator, 'Bee One' with Nature", my new vectrex game project.


    Pollinator is based on an electromechanical arcade machine we built earlier in the year, which its self was inspired by Ice Cold Beer (which its self is based on a traditional pub game).



    This is a very early preview of the basic game mechanic but my ambition here is to produce a fast, smooth, relatively simple game but with oodles of levels and animation.




    "Bee the Best".

    • Like 3

    Stramash Zone for VECTREX. Available Now.

    in Vectrex

    Posted

    Well, Vector Zone, rolls nicely off the tongue.

     

    Whereas, Stramash Zone, sounds like you are trying to say "Smash Zone" with a st st st st stammer.

    vector pilot, vector patrol, that's Kristof's bag.

    I like Stramash. Lovely word. If you don't like my native tongue, haud yer wheesht. ;-)

    • Like 2

    Stramash Zone for VECTREX. Available Now.

    in Vectrex

    Posted

     

    Congrats! I placed my order already, so cool that you made this game. Your site mentioned that this game has been in development since 2013(?), I was wondering what was the hardest part, did you try to replicate Battlezone's Math Box chip, maybe?

     

    Obviously, the next question (from someone like me who owns the arcade version) is will completing this conversion make it possible to see a Red Baron conversion for the Vectrex in the future (please please please...)?

    i actually got most of it running in 2014. i kind of did a bit every Christmas. I'm really a bit of a newb at coding in assembly. This is only my second releasable vectrex game, in fact i started it before finishing NOX! There's an ancient thread on Vectrex Fans Unite that i recently resurrected where it was discussed if 'that' 3d tank game was possible on the veccy. I kind of naively said why not? A zx spectrum could do it. It sort of got created to settle a friendly argument :-)

     

    There was nothing essentially hard about it. Just masses and masses of simple and there's also the issue of me now completely forgetting how it works! No i didn't refer to that other 3d tank game other than playing my cabaret from time to time. It has 4 processors to do the math, a processor built in ttl logic to do the vector generation and another processor to run the game, as well as a processor to handle sound and input + some analogue sounds too.

     

    The vectrex has a 6809 and a sound chip so replicating the original as it's executed on original hardware is a non starter. Stramash Zone doesn't have any fancy hardware hidden in there. This game could have been released in 1982.

     

    I think SZ's performance is comparable to other 3D tank games released on similar hardware back in the day. I loved those games. I bought Rommel's Revenge and 3D Tank Duel back then (weirdly i bumped into one of the guys who programmed 3D Tank Duel a few weeks ago - put my foot in my mouth and got all excited and said "You wrote Rommel's Revenge"!). I think it goes "3D Combat Zone" < "Stramash Zone" < "Rommel's Revenge+3D Tank Duel". 3D Tank Duel was probably the best port but it had a horrible colour scheme so that marks it down. :-)

     

    The trick to getting SZ to work was to save a lot of processing time and pre-calculate the 3d rotation on the objects. This used up tones of rom but saved a lot of cycles. That way I just had to do the 3D projection on the fly.

     

    The biggest problem was the RAM. You don't get much ram on a vectrex and in order to get a stable (ish) image I've got 2 gargantuan chunks of ram reserved so i can build the 3d landscape in one whilst displaying the previous frame, then swapping the frames over. If i didn't do that you'd see a tank then a cube then a saucer, etc. So i wound up using almost every single byte of ram. I even had to go hunting for chunks of system ram that you're not really supposed to use as they're reserved for functions that i fortunately wasn't using :-)

     

    The full game also uses up almost every byte of rom (32k). The vectrex lets you page the rom so i've got the full game on one chunk of 32k and another 32k containing the menu system and also some simplified game variant (Rammy Zone and Gloaming Zone).

     

    Talking of Gloaming Zone.. Red Baron is kind of battlezone but with the tanks (planes) rotating on the other axis.

    the way i built my 3d engine, It was a very simple task to swap a couple of axis and BOOM, i had Stramash Zone with a top down perspective.

    That'd effectively be your Red Barron engine.

     

    But am i going to make it? Probably not, because, i've proved my point and there are some coders out there who are way more brilliant than me and i'd like to see them take a pass at it. I think it's going to appear but i'm not going to say anything more on that.

     

    also i don't like Red Baron.

    • Like 3
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