Other consoles of 1982 plugged into the family television and built their pictures from rows of dots. The Vectrex came with its own 9-inch black-and-white screen, and it drew with lines. Electronic Fun with Computers & Games thought it looked “just like a portable television”, but its pictures resembled “those found on arcade games such as Asteroids and Tempest”, because it worked the same way: the electron beam travelled directly from point to point, leaving a sharp line behind it, with no pixels anywhere.
General Consumer Electronics (GCE), a company known for game watches and calculators, launched it in the autumn of 1982 at around $200. Electronic Fun recommended it to readers who were “tired of having to share the TV with people who want (of all things) to watch programs instead of playing video games”. Two years later it was gone, sold off at $50 a console.
Fast facts
- Launched: autumn 1982 in the United States, at about $200.
- Maker: GCE, a subsidiary of Milton Bradley from 1982.
- CPU: Motorola 68A09 at 1.5 MHz: a 6 MHz crystal divided by four.
- Memory: 8K of ROM holding the system routines and a built-in game; 1K of RAM; cartridges of up to 8K.
- Display: built-in 9-inch black-and-white vector tube, a Samsung 240RB40.
- Sound: General Instrument AY-3-8912, three tone channels, plus sound made directly by the processor through a digital-to-analogue converter.
- Controller: a panel with a self-centring analogue joystick and four buttons, stored in the front of the console.
- Built-in game: Mine Storm.
- Discontinued: 1984.
Drawing with one converter
GCE’s service manual describes a machine with no video chip at all. A single 8-bit digital-to-analogue converter, an MC1408, turns numbers from the processor into voltages. A multiplexer then sends that one voltage, in turn, to four places: the Y-axis drive, a zero reference, the brightness (Z-axis) control, and the sound circuit. The converter’s output itself drives the X axis. One chip, shared in time, positions the beam, sets its brightness and makes sound.
The lines come from integrators, circuits whose output voltage keeps rising for as long as an input is applied. The processor sets the X and Y voltages, then switches them through to the integrators with a signal the manual calls RAMP, which “determines when and for how long the X and Y axis voltage levels will be applied to the integrator amps”. The voltages set a line’s direction and speed, and the time RAMP stays open sets its length. A second signal, ZERO, discharges the integrators, “initializing them for the next signal to be integrated” and returning the beam to its starting point.
So on a Vectrex, drawing a line is a matter of timing. The 68A09 has to be there at the right moment to close each line, and it redraws the whole picture from scratch on every pass. Busy screens take longer to draw. The manual warns owners that “it may appear that the images pulse” and that “this slight pulsing is normal”, and says the overlays were designed to “virtually eliminate” it.
The same converter reads the joysticks. The manual explains that the processor feeds it a series of values and compares each voltage with the stick’s position “until the MPU generated voltage is equal to the joystick voltage”. The console has no separate input chip for the sticks. The four buttons on each controller are read through the spare input port on the AY-3-8912 sound chip.
A vector tube can be damaged if the beam stops moving, because a stationary spot burns the phosphor. The Vectrex watches its own Y deflection and shuts the tube down “in the event of a software or hardware failure”.
The processor suited the job. GCE chose Motorola’s 68A09, and one printing of the service manual adds a note on why: “hardware multiply and divide!” Rotating and scaling shapes means a lot of multiplying, and Electronic Fun praised the “3-D capabilities” of Mine Storm, whose enemy ship lays its mines and then disappears into the distance.
One kilobyte
The service manual lists an 8K ROM holding “common subroutines, the ‘executive’… plus one complete game”, and “two 1 K x 4 bit 2114 type static RAMS”. Together they make one kilobyte of RAM for everything a game needs to remember. Launch coverage did not always grasp this: Electronic Fun told its readers in November 1982 that the Vectrex offered “64K of memory”.
Colour from plastic
The screen could show only white lines of varying brightness. Each cartridge came with a plastic overlay that clipped into two tabs in front of the tube. It added colour to fixed parts of the screen and labelled what each of the four buttons did in that game. Electronic Fun thought they were “not as tacky as they sound”, adding “a surprising amount of color to the graphics”. GCE’s own manual promised “brilliantly clear images and special visual effects like rotation and zooming”.
The games
The launch catalogue listed twelve cartridges “currently”, plus Mine Storm in the console. Electronic Fun’s preview named Armor Attack, Berzerk, Clean Sweep, Hyperchase, Star Trek and Scramble, with Space Wars, Star Hawk, Rip-Off, Solar Quest, Blitz! and Cosmic Chasm to follow at about $30 each. Mine Storm was the built-in Asteroids-style game, with mines seeded by an enemy ship that “gradually disappear[s] in the distance”. In Britain, Computer and Video Games in November 1983 found Milton Bradley’s Web Wars “a very fast and addictive” game, on sale at £22.50.
Electronic Games counted “roughly two dozen titles in all” by the end, including Pole Position, Spike, Star Castle and Web Wars. A light pen with Art Master arrived in mid-1983, and a 3-D Imager later that year, with goggles that “added color and made the vector-scan graphics jump right off the screen”.
Milton Bradley and the end
BYTE already described GCE as “a subsidiary of the Milton Bradley Company” in December 1982, and Electronic Games later dated the purchase to 1982. Milton Bradley sold the console in Britain too, where retailers listed it at £149 in June 1983 and £129 by March 1984, with cartridges from £19.95.
It arrived just as American video game prices began to fall. Electronic Games reported that Milton Bradley cut the price “from its original selling point of $200, first to $150 and finally to $100”, but could go no lower “because of the high cost of manufacturing the unit”, and never reached the volume it needed at $100. After “losses of over $31.6 million on the Vectrex”, Milton Bradley stopped making it in 1984. Shops cleared their stock at around $50 a console, with cartridges at $5 to $10.
Afterwards
The Vectrex kept a following after production stopped. By 2003 Edge found hobbyists still writing new cartridges for it and making a multicart that held almost the entire library.
Sources
- General Consumer Electronics, Vectrex service manual (1982), and a 47-page printing of the same manual: specifications; circuit and technical description (the 68A09, the crystal and clock, ROM and RAM, the AY-3-8912 and the buttons, the DAC and multiplexer, the
RAMPandZEROintegrator controls, successive-approximation joystick reading, spot-burn protection); the consumer instructions on overlays and pulsing; the parts list (6.0000 MHz crystal). - Motorola, MC6809-MC6809E 8-Bit Microprocessor Programming Manual (1981), §1.11.1.1: the crystal runs at four times the bus frequency.
- Electronic Games, vol. 1 no. 8, October 1982, p. 35: GCE enters the market; the $200 price.
- Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, vol. 1 no. 1, November 1982, pp. 34–35: preview of the console, its controller and overlays, the launch games and Mine Storm.
- BYTE, vol. 7 no. 12, December 1982: the $200 price, GCE as a Milton Bradley subsidiary, and the 68A09.
- TV Gamer, June 1983 and March 1984: British retail prices for the console and cartridges (advertisements).
- Computer and Video Games, issue 25, November 1983: review of Web Wars.
- Electronic Games, vol. 2 no. 13, July 1984, p. 9: “Milton Bradley drops Vectrex”.
- Electronic Games, vol. 2 no. 14, September 1984, p. 84: the price cuts, the $31.6 million loss, clearance prices, the full list of titles, the light pen and 3-D Imager.
- Edge, issue 122, April 2003: Vectrex retrospective, including the hobbyist scene.