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Vectrex Support

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ChadsArcade edited this page Aug 28, 2020 · 5 revisions

Vectrex support was added to VMMenu in v1.6.1

Vectrex Support

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. This is the text displayed on the copyright screen, just after the Vectrex startup logo. The output of cartlist 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 the game name in the ROM at this location, 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 the cartlist output!

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. You can change the description as you wish, but should keep the length below 32 characters.

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. For example, this would group Mine Storm and Mine Storm II together as clones of one another:

Vectrex|Mine Storm|vmines|mstorm.bin
Vectrex|Mine Storm II|vmines|mstorm2.bin

It is not critically important what you set field 3 to, provided it is unique within the vmmenu.ini file other than for your grouped games.

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