ClockworkRobot

They will begin shipping from the 18th (overlays are not here yet and i'll be working all next week).

Don't be down.. i suspect a red barron will appear.

If you're into the 'behind the scenes' stuff, I just uploaded scans of some of the notes i made as i created Stramash Zone: http://www.clockworkrobot.com/stramash-zone-some-notes/

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.

http://www.clockworkrobot.com

Here's a nice big photo:

Taking orders now. Should start shipping in a week or 2.

It's not limited as such but I've only got so many boxes and overlays printed. When they're gone they're gone and there's no guarantee there'll be other runs. We did 2 runs on Nox/Deathchase and there could be more of them too but it depends on whether we think there's further demand or not. After less than 24 hours, 22% are sold.

If there's any interest in repro carts: https://www.facebook.com/groups/371491356629747/?ref=br_rs Not thought pricing yet but even though the 3d printing is expensive I'm sure i can get it a little lower than $250 :-)

I can assure you the developers are as shocked as anyone.