I might buy a Vectrex, a Vectrex Mini, both, or neither?
I've been obsessing lately about Vectrex, the '80's era home game console that came with a built-in vector graphics screen.
I owned one in the mid-to-late '80's, after Toys R Us had dropped the price to $50, due to it being a discontinued item.
Really a fascinating machine, but the screen on mine eventually stopped working right, so I gave it to a friend who was good at electronics and might have been able to fix it.
Anyway, I've been thinking about getting another one.
I could pay $500 to $600 for an actual Vectrex that's in good working order, and there are now home brew games available, along with something called Pitrex, which I believe is a Raspberry Pi-based gizmo you plug into your Vectrex's cartridge port so you can play homebrews and, hopefully, pirated ROMs of all the other games.
And then there's the forthcoming Vectrex Mini. Getting one of those once they come out would be a lot cheaper than buying an actual vintage Vectrex. It's unfortunate I procrastinated and missed out on being able to participate in the crowdfunding campaign, so I won't be the first person on the block to get one.
Vectrex Mini will have an OLED screen instead of a vector one, but I hear the picture quality is gorgeous.
One thing that gives me pause in all of this, however, is that Vectrex games are HARD. Really, really hard. I've been playing them in an emulator lately, and I had kinda forgotten how hard they are.
I'm kinda obsessed with Scramble, and the Vectrex version is every bit as challenging as the coin op arcade game upon which it's based.
It's really interesting to see a game like Scramble, which was a raster graphics game in the arcade, reinterpreted in minimilast, monochrome vector graphics. Possibly the most interesting thing is how well it works.
Anyway, yeah. I'm feeling tempted to spend Macbook Neo money on an eight-bit game console that uses an oscilloscope for a screen and comes with no warranty.