I am sure you are working fiercely on your indie Vectrex game, maybe even using the Vectrex32? No?! Really? Fair enough. So, maybe you just want to play one of the twenty-nine official games published for the Vectrex? If that’s the case, then you certainly noticed by now that a complete Vectrex game – comprised of the cartridge, the screen overlay, the user guide, and the box – can be quite pricy.
Have a look on eBay to convince yourself. But there is hope, and today, I will describe a few of the options Vectrex owners have to play literally hundreds of games. But wait, hundreds? Yeah! As mentioned earlier, although the Vectrex was sold only during two years (1982-1984), there is a vibrant community of hardware and software developers for the game system. The community is active and many homebrew games were and are still developed today. To solve our problem, several all-in-one cartridges have been developed and improved over the years.
Choose and Buy Wisely
I am using Sean Kelly’s Multi-Cart 3.0 (http://www.vectrexmulti.com/) in the replacement of my older Vectrom 32 game multi-cassette. The later requires to select the game to run using the six dip switches located on the cartridge top. The former uses an on-screen menu to ease the selection of a game among the 101 games crammed onto the ROM. Other multi-card systems exist, but they are harder to source or simply obsolete. Few of these are based upon SD Cards that you can update from your computer over time. But honestly, with a Multi-Cart 3.0, you have all the quality games that matter. At the end of the day, a multi-cartridge is a good solution to save money while we can discover Vectrex games. Once you found a good one, you can focus on hunting down the screen overlay for the game that really does matter to you. Indeed, not all Vectrex games are equal, and the same goes for the Vectrex players. Therefore, and usually, there are only a few games for which you really care for the overlay. Scramble is my preferred classic Vectrex game. And you, which one do you prefer?