Speed and difficulty of older games

The zvg is amazing piece of hardware. Since vector monitors are so hard to find I was thinking of using a USB based oscilloscope (which uses a normal PC as display) to handle that issue. With something like www.picotech.com usb devices would work well. The software runs on win/mac/Linux and they also have a windows SDK available to handle everything else.

Since it does handle color that makes it even more interesting ..

https://www.picotech.com/library/oscilloscopes/xy-display-mode

They have some really interesting applications that third parties have developed in this section ...

https://www.picotech.com/library/picoapps

This was very interesting application for monitoring ...

https://www.picotech.com/library/picoapp/doctor-aquarium

 

Not following you there... If you're outputting to a normal display, why wouldn't you just use a PC at that point?

 

Yes.

Here is another interesting thing discussion on vector graphics and Atari coin-op vector graphics and associated video games. Nice discussion on the hardware which I find the most interesting ...

http://www.jmargolin.com/vgens/vgens.htm

 

Very interesting. When I really got into electronics it was a real eye-opener realizing how much analog-thinking the real-world imposes on "digital" hardware... you're constantly battling fluctuations and coming up with ways to wait for something to finish and buffering and timing. Good low-level hardware engineering often strikes me as even more of an artform than programming.

This kind of stuff was painfully common on arcade machines according to my buddy who repaired them for a living:

 

Agreed.

I completely missed that part about the asteroids production problem. It is cool to have hardware designers just create a new board to solve the problem and not stop production. It would be interesting to see if they would even consider doing that today for any type of consumer electronics.

 

Also found it interesting towards the end that they only sold about 300 of the Red Baron games (versus 25,000+ of the popular games). I'm surprised I had a chance to play it in sleepy little early 80s Orange Park FL.

I mentioned that to my dad and he told me he spent about 30 hours playing it before he took his homebuilt on its first real long-distance flight. (We'd built the plane over the previous two years... prior to this he did some short, low test flights, just a minute or two at a time.) He said the feel was more like his plane than any home computer flight sims he tried. Kind of funny. 30 hours at 25 cents a pop... I wonder how much that cost!

 

That must have been very interesting when thinking about the total cost ... especially in light of the following.

http://videogamehistory.wikia.com/wiki/Red_Baron_(arcade)

That aircraft looks very interesting. That must have been fun building it. What type is it? How long was the long distance flight?

 

I assume he played over several weeks so it had plenty of time to reset...

It's a Rutan Quickie (by the same guy who designed Virgin Galatic's SpaceShipOne). Canard design, virtually impossible to stall. Range was much longer than you'd want to be stuck in that tiny cockpit. I think 600 miles or something like that. It was fun to build, the whole family worked on it. I learned hot-wire foam carving and fiberglass layup at the age of 10 or so. I actually flew it a short distance when I was about 12.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Quickie

 

That is a great family project. Did you work on any other aircraft after that one?

 

No, parents got divorced not too long after that photo was taken and the plane got sold. (I found it online a couple years ago, somebody up in Michigan owns it now.) My dad is finishing up another plane now. I've always had the urge but I want something that can be used for travel and that's not in my budget (mostly because insurance is completely out of control).

 

Have you seen this before?

Vector Graphics Rendering with Unity and Audio (a work in progress)

https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=54047.0

 

Well that's pretty awesome.

 

It is amazing how nice vector graphics are. There are a few threads on drawing various graphics every month or so. They should have a contest for vector graphics using a real vector graphics monitor.

This was another website I saw (based on the same original thread) which also looks very interesting ...

How to draw oscilloscope lines with math and WebGL

http://m1el.github.io/woscope-how/index.html

 

@longroadhwy if you have a VR headset you might enjoy this. Got to play it a little at Unite last week. It has much more of the old school vector look through the headset than these screenshots suggest and they nailed the feel of the gameplay.

https://pixelstrikegames.com/super-vektoroids/

 

Wow. That does it look exciting. Which VR headset did you use at the demo or did you get to try different VR headsets?

I wonder if they used any assets from the unity asset store for their vector processing or something they created themselves.

I did find a video linked from their website. It looks like space duel in some cases.

Do they have a Unite 2016 (LA) post show forum thread? It would be interesting to hear what people liked about the show.

 

We played that on a GearVR, I think. We got to try out every headset (different games and demos) except the Hololens -- there were a few around but we never managed to line one up, sadly.

The guy I talked to wasn't a dev (marketing is my guess) but he said it was a custom shader. Based on the look of things like the asteroids, my guess is they're 3D objects with edge highlighting, like I speculated about earlier. It did have a very Space Duel feel in places. It was pretty interesting projecting an essentially 2D game into VR -- it was like a vector screen that wrapped around you in 360 degrees.

There is a thread here but it isn't getting much activity. Given some of the amazing stuff we saw (especially Timeline) I was surprised the forums don't have much about Unite. I know forum users went, I ran into several without even trying.

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unite-16-los-angeles-keynote-watch-the-livestream.439043/

They said the various breakout talks would be posted in a few weeks.

 

This would be a really interesting multi-player game. But it appears to be a single player only game based on this statement from their website.

>>Compete with players across the world for the top spot in the World Leaderboards!<<

 

Yeah single player. Sometimes it was easy to lose track of your ship (they'd put little yellow arrows at the edges of your vision if your ship went off-screen, so it must be a common problem). It moved fast enough that I think it would be very difficult to track a human player. Honestly it required so much looking around and turning in place, I imagine it would be pretty tiring to play for longer periods of time.

 

How much do I love and miss traditional arcade games, you ask? (You did ask, right?) I have no idea how much lawn-mowing money I fed to this angry space-bastard throughout the early 80s, but yesterday this happened...

 

It also kind of blows me away to think that Sinistar was just 240 x 292 on a big old 19" display.

Actual size:

 

Nothing like the Sinistar voice that is for sure.

 

Why is your Q200 experimental aircraft park in the street garage !?

One of the first 80' vector graphics: I remember a flight simulator, not "Flight Simulator" that came out later. This earlier simulator came out close to the Commodore release.
There was only 1 runway and nothing more! The mountains were on the map but not shown in the horizon line.
Example approximation:

That was the runaway ¡So much fun!

Much less detail than the First flight simulator!

 

I played that same one (subLogic Flight Sim), but even earlier on a TRS-80... which looked like this:

 

This is an interesting video on the author (Bruce Artwick) of the sublogic flight simulator and later Microsoft flight simulator.

 

Did you ever see this vector game called Cosmic Chasm by Cinematronics?

 

Haven't seen that one before, it looks pretty cool, especially for 83.

 

Since I've turned this thread into some sort of Video Gamer Retirement Home, I'll add these -- at Unite in LA my wife and I met a friend for dinner just around the corner from Flynn's Arcade in TRON:

 

Have you seen this Star Trek vector game?

 

That is great. It is nice to see how these older game still hold their own.

 

Wow, I had completely forgotten about the Star Trek game.
I loved it, played it constantly. It was really difficult.

 

Star Trek does look like a nice game.

I did not know that Sega created so many vector games ... I only knew of Atari and Cinematronics products ...

space fury

Zecktor

Tac/Scan

 

Yeah I liked Space Fury a lot, too. I've never seen Tac/Scan or Zektor that I can recall.

Space Fury was always the loudest thing in the arcade, for some reason.

 

Have you seen this "Forty Years of Lunar Lander" article before?

http://www.technologizer.com/2009/07/19/lunar-lander/

 

Yes, I've seen the article. I had a copy of that DEC book, "101 Basic Computer Games" too.
One of our designed-but-on-hold Unity projects is actually an alt-history Lunar Lander spinoff.

 

Hehe, i've always been a fan of Lunar Lander games, in fact my first 'published' game (a type-in listing in a magazine) was a variant of Lander for the Apple ][, about 34 years ago

(I did a flash version for the 25th Here)

 

Well, I just spent waaaaay too much time playing that.

 

Not sure how I missed this. That book sounds interesting I wonder if they still have copies of it in PDF format somewhere.

I think the Lunar Lander spinoff would be good to see on the forums as game development series.

 

https://archive.org/download/bitsavers_decBooks10Mar75_26006648/101_BASIC_Computer_Games_Mar75.pdf

 

This is great. Thank you.

Did you ever play Tail Gunner 2 (vector game) in the arcade?

 

I know the game but I don't remember whether I've played it. I suppose that means it didn't make much of an impression if I did play it.

 

I see they have more discussion here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/supervektoroids/