Vectrex Support

Vectrex support was added to VMMenu in v1.6.1

AdvMess supports the USB-DVG board and allows the playing of emulated Vectrex games on a vector monitor.

Unlike MAME, it's not so easy to get a list of supported games for the Vectrex with which to populate the vmmenu.ini file. Mario Montminy came up with a very neat solution in the form of a program which will parse your Vectrex ROMs directory, and attempt to read the game name from each ROM. The output is in a format suitable for adding to the vmmenu.ini file, so can be redirected to the end of the file by running:

cartlist rom_directory >>vmmenu.ini

Unfortunately, not all games hold their name in the ROM, home-brew ROMs in particular tend to populate this area of the ROM with messages rather than the game name, so you will need to do some manual editing.

To compile cartlist, simply type:

gcc cartlist.c -o cartlist

then to run it, execute:

cartlist rom_directory

where "rom_directory" is the path to your Vectrex Roms. If this is omitted, the path /usr/local/share/advance/image/vectrex will be tried. If this fails, then a message will be printed to screen.

Example output follows:

Vectrex|Ronen's Games Cart|vronensg|Ronens Game Cart.vec
Vectrex|----------- Vexperience -------|vvexperi|Vexperience.vec
Vectrex|Tour De France|vtourdf|Tour De France.vec
Vectrex|Mine Storm Ii|vminesi|mstorm2.bin
Vectrex|John Dondzila Proudly Presents.|vjohndpp|All Good Things.vec
Vectrex|Cosmic Chasm|vcosmicc|Cosmic Chasm.vec

As you can see, the game names (field 2, between the first two | characters) need some editing.

If you wish to group games together as "clones", then change field 3 so it is the same for the games you want to group together.