Vectrex Emulation on the Raspberry Pi.

[woodentulip]

Happy Holidays.

After getting my RPI from Newark/Element14/Farnell; I have had some great fun getting the BBC Model B emulator up-and-running; and getting a copy of Elite working on it to take me back to 1986 when a friend of mine brought over his UK Television / BBC_B micro and assorted software when he emigrated to Canada with his family.

Good Memories...

He was astounded to find that I could get my hands on a US - UK power converter that didn't suck-eggs; and he could have fun converting some of his student documents over to computers usable in Canada. (TRS-80 M3 Coco) And after making an RS-232 cable that also did not suck; he found to his delight that he could print, save, transfer and get his homework from friends overseas and could use it for school in Canada.

Being a "Timex" lad, I knew how to both get UK-Mains computers / TV's working in North America, for Sinclair Spectrums, as well as knowing both Parallel and Serial I/O for same.

And now to the topic at hand.

Vectrex on the Raspberry Pi.

With RISC_OS being the best OS on the RPI (IMHO) as oppsed to the "Wheezy" debian build and such, I was really thinking to build this as a "Vectrex" EMU runtime; with some added features, like FATfs access, and USB access for same (SD-Card as well, but getting data to/from it I would prefer using the USB. -- Less Wear and Tear.)

This has two advantages:
1 - Portrait mode for a DVI / HDMI connected monitor / display.
2 - Audio is either HDMI, or 1/8-inch phono.

The Graphics would likely be runtime SDL I guess. (OpenGL / cGL might be a second option) But like the VectRegen on iOS Audio would be an interesting. (I'm not interested in a regen of the "buzz" really; for those who know it corresponds to the video display list for effect would find the VectRegen version really annoying.)

One option I am also looking at -- is using a Laser-Mirror driver rather than the HDMI, this may have to be done via the breakout cabling and would need custom support to control, but Laser-Based vector display would allow a scalable method of vector display as opposed to using Vector->Raster conversion.

Thoughts?

-sean

[gauze]

I was thinking of making a veccy dev station out of one, but the only 6809 assembler I know of that is open source would either need some rewriting (or my code would) because it doesn't assemble my AS09 code. Waiting for x86 emulator I guess

[woodentulip]

Hrm, If you are targetting 6809 on Linux (Wheezy) then you could patch GCC on ArmLinux to do 6809 on GCC.
As illustrated here: www.boxofdoom.net/2011/09/22/how-to-compile-gcc-for-the-6809-processor-gcc6809/

Or, In my case, I was thinking of using a Vectrex EMU to run on RPI in SDL mode. It's really getting a libstdc on that runtime to get file management / menu interface management to work.

I was going to keep it really basic. Since Most/All of the EMU's I have found are dependent on an OS runtime. Nice thing about RPI is that you can do embedded runtime (no OS, just boot to app.) which is closer to what I used to do on Z80 computers {TS/2068, and Northstar Advantage} and keep it simple.

-sean

[kokovec]

If you actually manage to turn a Raspberry Pi into a mini Vectrex then I might build a bunch of Vectrex controller to USB (HID) adapters.
That would be a cool little machine and the perfect homage to the venerable Vectrex.
Using a Laser-Mirror driver would be the icing on the cake!

[woodentulip]

I also was thinking this: www.medialas-showlaser.de/nexxus.html?&L=1

-sean

[gauze]

I tried the gcc 6809 cross compiler a while ago, I don't think C is real good for vectrex dev.