Vector Games 32c3 | Hacker News Reader

Vector Games 32c3

trmm.net

78 pointsrbanffy30 comments

This is a great look at the hardware and of vector display - if you want to get a good in-depth understanding of how Atari's original vector graphics display systems worked from the software side, though, Retro Game Mechanics on YouTube did an incredible deep dive into how it all worked, including emulating the vector instruction sets and step-by stepping through complete frame renders from Tempest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smStEPSRKBs

You can also read the incredibly well done documentation from Jed Margolin, the Atari engineer that worked on the actual hardware.

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

My friend has an amazing collection of vector arcade games. It got me obsessed with them. I really wish XY displays were still widely manufactured, the experience is completely lost on other displays.

I think we could replicate some of that with HDR panels. At least the Tektronix DVSTs could.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-F7ZySfgZ0

What is an HDR panel and a DVST? The video is a tektronix 4006 storage tube.

DVST stands for “direct view storage tube” which is what Tektronix called it. An HDR (high dynamic range) panel could more easily replicate the writing process, which was much brighter than the persistent brightness.

Vector displays can have extremely bright traces and points if they stop the beam or move it slowly.

Big thanks to all involved. 32c3 for hosting. NYC Resistor for such a great presentation. Always great when others share your obsessions.

Out of the box, ThreeJS has everything needed to get started with Vector Retro GameDev: line primitive drawing, line materials that can be shaded with any glsl function, buffer geometry for arbitrary data complexity, and on and on.

My faves are probably the old school Atari classics from the early 1980s: Tempest and the Death Star Trench Run from Star Wars. So satisfying blasting away down the tunnel ;)

To see Tempest being discussed again after all these years is awesome. I have fond memories of playing that game in the arcade.

What an extremely difficult game after, I think, level 8. I admire people who are skilled at it.

I really want to mess around with 2d vector game dev because the aesthetic allows me to not think much about the artwork and I love how it scales.

But I can't find a single game engine that treats vector as first class. They all want you to provide rasters.

You can dynamically generate SVG:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Tutorial/Ge...

Svg is a surprisingly hand craftable format.

Use an immediate mode GUI toolkit. GUI toolkits tend to use vector graphics more heavily

Never considered that. Thanks!

In high school in the late 90's, I somehow learned that Asteroids was a vector display, and then went about writing a clone in Pascal that used a vector-based backend and rendered to the pixelly display. This ended up giving me an early introduction to a good number of linear algebra ideas...

https://amp.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/ah6mc9/how_to_make_a...

https://processing.org/reference/line_.html

consider: 3d game engine + all gameplay constrained to a single plane + simple objects with entirely black faces and some kind of polygon edge glow effect.

one of my favourite vector games on my Atari 800XL was Mercenary. It was this open world type game, felt amazing at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9nDCg63wNc it wasn't that graphics was the best (compared to something like rescuse on fractalus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbZ-chrOgGg ), it was just a big vector world with quite a lot of places to explore.

I don’t understand. The Atari 800XL output raster and used regular monitors/CRTs.

How did you play this game in vector?

I thought I knew almost every game for the 8-bit line. Don't recall this one, sort of a cross between Star Raiders and Rescue on Fractalus (aka Behind Jaggi Lines).

It's sad, but the whole feel of a vector display is lost on these. Vector displays have no filled backgrounds.

I hadn’t realized that electrostatic deflected vector displays were superior to magnetic. Aren’t all PC CRTs all electrostatically deflected? They don’t need the absurd aspect ratio that the Tek 1720 has.

Also the 1720 is not that cheap right now, likely due to popularity. Does anyone know of any other good choices for a high quality vector display?

I also gave a talk there, it's quite frightening to stand in the large auditorium with 1.000 people starting at you, I still remember having tremendous stage fright. The community is super friendly though and their organization is superb. I ended up speaking four times at the CCC so far, always a great experience.

From the article:

> Unfortunately my patch (to the MAME project) to add support for exporting the vectors to MAME was closed as "an unacceptably hacky way to achieve the intended result". Instead you'll need to clone my tree and follow my instructions on building vector MAME.

I'm sure it's hard work to maintain an open source project like that but they could have handled that a little better. They might have onboarded a new contributor had they been a little more helpful. Of course they had no duty to do so but it might have helped out the project.

Oscilloscope Quake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMli33ornEU

Are there any libraries to do emulate this vector style in Javascript/HTML?

Not Javascript/HTML, but there is music library:

https://youtu.be/OP7sTQQ0Blw

https://oscilloscopemusic.com/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54915037/how-to-make-a-l...

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