RE: Asteroids mini-cab with Vectrex monitor

Many thanks for all your friendly comments!

The only loose end of the project, in my current view, is the surprising
“short vectors” effect shown here:
http://www.e-basteln.de/asteroids/asteroids_monitor.html#results (lower
picture). Not a big problem, but I’d love to understand what is going on. As
mentioned on the web page, I also see this when using my oscilloscope as the
display, so it does not seem related to the Vectrex monitor. Is this a known
effect? Is the Asteroids board indeed switching the vectors off early, maybe
to compensate for delays in the original monitors?

Many thanks for any comments or ideas!

Juergen

On Feb 24, 2013, at 2:04 PM, Jürgen Müller <juergen@e-basteln.de> wrote:

My first post to the list – but I have spent quite a bit of time reading the
archives over the last few months!

A few years ago I bought two non-working Asteroids boards, after becoming
intrigued with the digital vector generator. (I certainly had no idea how
they achieved those line graphics, much neater than on my Apple II, when I
first saw the game in 1981.) Managed to fix them both, built a little
“picture frame” cabinet with power supplies and buttons for one of them, and
have hence been able to play Asteroids on my oscilloscope. Nice, but
something was missing…

Over the last few months, I built a little bar-top cabinet for the other
Asteroids board. I definitely wanted a real vector CRT – a broken Vectrex
console served as the donor for the monitor. I think I found a good solution
for accelerating the XY driver to keep up with the Asteroids drawing speed;
small-signal bandwidth (rather than drive voltage) was the key.

I have put together a little web site describing this project, with photos
of the cabinet and details of the XY driver. Please have a look at
<http://www.e-basteln.de/asteroids> www.e-basteln.de/asteroids if you are
curious. Questions and comments are welcome!

Regards from Hamburg, Germany –

Juergen

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Received on Tue Feb 26 15:55:52 2013