Anyone know of this? (new Star Castle)

[VectorX]

Wow, just looking through the Vectrex FAQ, with many long-dead links...

Vectrex Game Development - Jonathan Velasco
(new version of Star Castle)

Was there ever a ROM released for this? How far the guy got with it? Whatever happened to him?, etc.

[hcmffm]

Quite interesting. In the Google Groups I've found some discussion about a modified version of Star Castle. At some stage, John Velasco had binaries for download but these had problems on DVE and Mess .37b. The download link no longer works. Perhaps someone (e.g. John Donzila) has those binaries.

John Velasco at rec.games.vectrex said:

... Why would I revise Star Castle? Just to make it a little more closer to the
arcade version. I have an upright SC, so I'm making just a few changes.

In particular, I'm adjusting the ship (cruiser) movement a bit more accurate
to the original. Other minor changes, accurate scaling of objects, adding
the background stars, thrust graphics, energy cannon animation, new overlay
to colourize the three rings correctly. ...

Click here to see all posts of John Velasco at rec.games.vectrex

[VectorX]

Thanks, I had gone looking there for it last night, but obviously I didn't look long enough

[50tbrd]

Sounds like it was worth it to me.

[gliptitude]

Seeing how difficult it apparently is to produce quality overlays, it would seem better to adjust the rings to fit the existing overlay, rather than a new overlay to fit the rings.

[VectorX]

By the way, just to clarify for those who are hearing of this for the first time like myself, this isn't something "new" as in the last year or two (or less), this was like in the year 2000 or so.

[50tbrd]

Very interesting reading those archives. John, Chris Tumbler and Manu P. were all involved in helping Jon Valasco debug his program.

[xefned]

It looks like he stopped development in phase 3 of his planned 8 phases.

[50tbrd]

Doesn't seem like he got very far.