The Vectrex Computer
amigalove.com
amigalove.com
Related Steve Ciarcia did a vector display which was a lot of fun back in the day. You can find it in the back issues of BYTE but here is a scan https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y6SfEN8idhdZ7Y_rNh0zD9uzHEC...
Here's the best example of text display I've ever seen on a vector display
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJv94FPRddA
where you see about 60 "words" on the screen albeit with variable size and other effects you wouldn't see on computer displays at the time. The lines would be short on a full screen of word processing text but the total length would add up to more line than you'd see in those kind of games.
I'd imagine you'd need a huge display list though for large amounts of text, 10 points per char and probably more like 10 bits than 8 bits worth of coordinate though you could probably store deltas to get it down to 8 bits in the display list. That gives you a 40kb long display list for 2000 which is most of the address space of an "8-bit" computer though you could fit BASIC in the remainder of one. Thus it's interesting to think of something like the character generator ROM or something that could draw circles or Bezier curves. Sorry, but I like to geek out about old-school display controllers which have an astonishingly high parts count like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco_Dazzler
unless they include an ASIC. People making retrocomputers today struggle to build display controllers that don't live on an FPGA or a microcontroller (ESP32 is fast enough to do something like "cheap video"
https://archive.org/details/Cheap_Video_Cookbook_Don_Lancast...
with high end performance for a 1980s home computer.)
Fun fact: at the end of that video, the default high score list includes me! I'd forgotten this, so thanks for the bump to find this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010
which I think you could have made a word processor for even though it couldn’t scroll. I remember drawing charts on it though, not looking at a lot of text. I think the one I used was side-by-side with a WYSE terminal that was VT-something compatible.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/a-history-of-gaming-pla...
> The system got its start in late 1980, when one of the hardware designers at Western Technologies (Smith Engineering), John Ross, had a light bulb go off -- or, to be more precise, a surplus one-inch Cathode Ray Tube (CRT).
> Western Technologies redesigned the system as a tabletop, and later that year General Consumer Electronics (GCE) licensed it for production -- though now with a nine-inch screen.
More of that history here https://www.vectrex.be/vectrex_jay_smith.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cinematronics&old...
holds the vectrex cpu in halt and drives the peripherals (including display) from a pi zero
If anyone else is interested in Vectrex light pens, here are some instructions on building your own: https://playvectrex.com/vectech/mvlp/mvlp_f.htm (Site uses frames, so I had to bust it out to get the direct link. Be sure to check out the top level as well for some other projects.)
Doesn't look too hard, so maybe I'll give it a go once I manage to clear all this _other_ stuff off my bench...
Advantages of a vector display: you can display a 1024x1024 3-D image on a machine with 16KiB of RAM and less than a MIPS. You get a lot of dynamic range, so you can make some points on the screen extremely bright.
Disadvantages: you can only draw bright lines on a black background; you can't fill areas, though you can come close if you draw a lot of lines. So all your 3-D is sort of wireframey, though you can of course do hidden line removal. Most vector displays got extremely flickery when displaying more than a few thousand lines; the alternative was the Tektronix 4014 bistable storage tube, which didn't flicker at all because it had analog memory for the vector image (and could therefore do CAD over a 2400 baud serial line) but could only be erased by flashing the whole screen green. So you couldn't do animation.
Basically, once digital memory got cheap enough to back your megapixel screen with a megabit framebuffer, and CPUs got fast enough to draw and erase diagonal lines through it in real time, raster displays could be better in every way than vector displays, so vector displays made them obsolete.
To edit audio on a large vector display with crisp, luminous waveforms piercing its black glass... that is the dream.
So, I believe you can get the BBD you are dreaming of. The hardest part is filling the CRT with vacuum, and that's free; people charge to haul away CRTs.