For those of you who might not know, the GCE Vectrex (1983) was a unique game system that had a built in black and white vector graphics display. Vector graphics are composed of lines drawn point-to-point on a specially-driven CRT rather than through a bit-mapped pixel graphics method on a raster scan display (like an ordinary TV set). That may be a bit too technical for you, but the least you need to know is that vector graphics are different than usual and, in the case of the Vectrex, consisted of white lines on black backgrounds only.

In order to spice up the system’s monochrome gameplay, each Vectrex game came with its own custom translucent colored overlay that snapped in place over the Vectrex’s built-in monitor. The white vector lines on the monitor underneath shone through and gave the illusion of a color display for certain parts of the screen. The one you see above is for Flipper Pinball. Notice the different regions of the play field which have different colors to add more life and variety to the game.

It should be noted that colored overlays were not a new idea to the Vectrex. Their use in video games spans back to the medium’s very genesis, from the days of Ralph Baer experimenting in his lab at Sanders, and later on the first video game system ever, the Magnavox Odyssey. Also, most early arcade games used black and white displays with colored overlays to keep production costs down, as the components needed to generate and the monitors needed to display colored graphics were expensive at the time.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of overlays — I find them a chintzy substitute for a true color display, and instead prefer to play my Vectrex games without them. Monochrome ain’t so bad.

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This week’s pixel challenge is our first to have a theme. This week’s theme is “Sega Systems,” which means that all three of these pixel blocks came from video game systems produced by Sega. That should help you pin them down. The first block is to the right, the other two are below. As always, post your guesses in the comments section of this entry, and don’t be bashful. Good luck!

    

The answers to last week’s challenge are after the break.

[ Continue reading Name Those Pixels: Challenge #7 » ]

Instead of simply letting their classic machines collect dust on a shelf as display pieces, vintage computing enthusiasts regularly struggle to find modern uses for their equipment that also double as good excuses to keep them “around” and active. I know this because I’ve been looking for novel ways to use my obsolete computers since I started collecting them. Thankfully, a new Internet service just popped up that will give us all a reason to pull that old terminal out of the closet again. It’s called StarTTY.

StarTTY, created by Dorian Garson, is an information “push” service designed for old serial terminals and computers than can run terminal emulators. It turns your old computer or terminal into an “information kiosk” by displaying live, up-to-the-minute weather, news, date/time, and other features directly on your terminal’s screen. It accomplishes this feat through the ancient-but-perennially-useful protocol known as telnet, which is commonly used for remote server administration, MUDs, and Internet BBSes these days.

[ Continue reading StarTTY: Turn Your Vintage Computer Into an Information Appliance » ]