Old Sad Games

The Vectrex was introduced by General Consumer Electronics (GCE) in 1983. The British version was imported by Milton-Bradley (MB), the well-known toy maker.

There are many Vectrex resources on the Net, including a DOS Vectrex Emulator, and of course the 'rec.games.vectrex' newsgroup. The machine is based on the powerful Motorola 8-bit CPU, the 6809.

The basic Vectrex was supplied with a single built-in game, called Mine Storm. This is actually a thinly-disguised version of Asteroids. However, since you're shooting at mines instead of rocks, they are allowed to shoot back, or follow you around, or even become invisible.

I have nearly all the game cartridges ever produced for the Vectrex. I was lucky enough to find someone who had bought one of each game cartridge when they were still being sold by Woolworth's.

A rare add-on item for the Vectrex system, the light pen allowed the user to interact directly with the screen display. It was supplied with a simple drawing program called Art Master and a more advanced animation program, AnimAction, was also available. I have both of these, bought directly from MB in about 1984.

The 3D Imager was a really rare add-on, which gave the system a stereoscopic three-dimensional display. It worked by spinning a shutter/filter disc in front of the user's eyes (it was in the form of a headband and goggles) and synchronisation signals were fed to the program running on the Vectrex to allow separate images to be fed to the left and right eye. Unfortunately, I don't have one of these.

Nintendo Entertainment System

The Nintendo Zapper was an add-on for the Nintendo Entertainment System of the early 1980s. Only two games were released for it (in PAL), Duck Hunt and Wild Gunman. For greater accuracy, you could get an add-on sight which was made by Quick Shot, the joystick company.

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

The Super Nintendo is another of the classic video game systems. My example is shown here with the Super Mario Paint cartridge and its associated two-button mouse. The game is a fairly good graphical paint package, along with a fly-swatting game and a music sequencer. The SNES is based on the 65816, a 16-bit extension of the 6502 architecture.

Atari 2600 Video Game System

The basic 2600 was a 6502 processor in a small console. Unlike the Vectrex, there was no built-in game.

The Nintendo Game Boy

The Z80-based Game Boy was first produced in 1989 and was the machine that popularised the game of Tetris. It has the same controls as the NES, namely a four-way joypad, two fire buttons and two game-control buttons. It's powered by four AA-size cells (the Game Boy Pocket only needed two AAA-size cells). My example is one of the brightly-coloured versions that were produced.

The Nintendo Game Boy Color

Cybiko Wireless Handheld Game System