Vectrex Programming at German University 2018

[hcmffm]

Thank you, Peer, for the final update of the Vectrex project page 2018. Some game projects have been canceled but again it's quite a number of projects that have been progressed very far or even finished. It's amazing what the students drafted, designed, and "crafted" in even less time than the previous years! My congratulations and a "Thank you!" to all the students for the effort and time they put into the games! I still have to have a look at the final versions and the new games like Keyboard Hero which came out of the nothing.

Cheers,
Helmut

[hcmffm]

Vector War VIII, the international Vectrex tournament, is in sight and one, perhaps even two games developed in this year's programming course will be played during Vector War. Intention is to make more people aware of these cool homebrew games and to appreciate the effort that you (students) put into designing and developing these games. I'll post again once the decision on the game(s) is made.

[hcmffm]

Decision is made: The two games "Floor is Lava" and "Asteroid Cowboy" will be played in Vector War VIII. Including these games in the Vector War is a bit of an experiment but I'm pretty confident that this experiment will succeed! At this point another big "Thank you!" to all the students for your excellent effort during your term and for your providing games, overlay graphics, and manuals to everybody for free!

2018 project gallery

[Peer]

Greetings everyone,

this is absolutely great, and we feel honored. Thank you very much, Helmut!

I will relay these news to the students, and I am very curious about how the games will be perceived in Vector War VIII.

Many Cheers,
Peer

PS: There are some more Vectrex related news I had wanted to post for quite some time now, but (as usual) never actually got around to do so. In short:

The developers of "Asteroid Cowboy" and "Treasure Diver" have also ported their games to the Nintendo GameBoy. Those were two very interesting projects, focusing on software architectures and layers of implementation which used the same C code for the core game logic and different APIs for rendering the graphics on the vector based Vectrex display and the pixel based GameBoy display. If I find the time I will try to post some screenshots of both versions here.

In yet another project, the developer of "Asteroid Cowboy" is currently working on a debugging framework which allows for using native debuggers (like gdb or MS Visual Studio) to debug and trace the C code developed with the C programming environment used in our course. This again is a very interesting topic. The project is not about writing another Vectrex emulator. It is about providing an environment which allows to compile the C code from our Vectrex projects to a native and annotated (say Windows) executable game binary which then can be run and debugged by means of a native (again say Windows) C debugger. The binary simulates the Vectrex screen and controller inputs, but not any Vectrex hardware related things like timing or low level stuff. The aim is purely to have a tool which can be used to debug the game’s high level logic, with all the comforts of a sophisticated C debugger. This is a thing we have been missing in the course. For debugging any hardware or timing related things, Vide is best. Vide offers superb assembly level debugging, and Malban also did his very best at relating generated assembly code to the original high level C code, but the limitation is intrinsic to gcc6809, which is based on gcc 4.3. Assembly code annotation and instrumentation (which is used and exploited by modern C debuggers and links assembly level symbols to C level symbols) was introduced only in later versions of gcc, so there is not much one can do with gcc6809. This project is a big step towards overcoming these issues as far as debugging the high level C game logic is concerned, am I am very curious about the final results which will be available approximately by end of October.