this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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It's always Vectrex too. I had a customer that was obsessed with getting one emulated, he just refused to understand that, fundamentally, vector graphics are incompatible with raster. No matter how I tried to break it down that a CRT was a necessity, that raster would always look wrong, that nobody develops a good vectrex emulator because you can't emulate the graphics...
Grifters gonna grift I guess.
If the gameplay itself hits your nostalgia feels, then okay, modern gear can make it playable and... fine. But vector CRT games were just so deeply tied to the way the CRT worked that you can never properly capture their spirit in raster form, especially on a tiny and so-so panel. I'm not even much of a purist, but vector is special and this... isn't.
That's kind of it though, the lines being drawn one at a time, in real time, you just can't emulate that. You would need refresh rates in the thousands of hz to make it look even close to right, and that completely ignores the persistence of vision effect.
Believe me, I tried. I explored damn near every possibility on 6 months of salary, it boiled down to an FPGA clone hooked up to a custom CRT driver and that still had issues with how it would look because the Vectrex uses an unhinged aspect ratio. If your tube isn't the right shape all of the graphics get messed up because the system draws on a polar plane. It's a fucking mess, I really wish people would stop trying to emulate it and just put the cash into making a proper tube. Would save actual engineers a lot of headache.
Yeah, it looks like they just slapped an old samsung phone in a plastic shell. Painful.
When I fist saw it I honestly thought it was something you put your phone into. Like those cheap cardboard "vr" headsets.
Well technically yes you can emulate the graphics.
But then they're rasterized so it'll never appear the same.
Technicalities but I couldn't resist. 😁