Vectrex Overlay Artwork

mediamogul

Well, much to my disappointment, the images at emumovies are very poorly produced and borderline unusable. However, I had better luck at http://vectrexmuseum.com. The overlay images there are much more natural looking and won't have to be upscaled nearly as much as others I've found. @Threepwood, I'll work on adapting them for use in RetroArch and post a link here when I'm done. @Floob, thanks again for your help. If you look up RetroArch Overlays online, your's is practically the only name that comes up, making you the authority on such things and the reputation is well deserved.

mediamogul

Well, these turned out alright. It's much more appealing to play these games with the intended overlays. I had forgotten how fun 'Armor Attack' is. It's even a step up from the Atari 2600 'Combat' in a few areas (mostly pacing).

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Below is a link to all the pre-configured files. I set it up to where everything inside the 'vectrex' folder here will work when placed inside /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/vectrex/. You'll notice that the initial .cfg files each have the prefix names of the rom files they are referencing. Anyone looking to use this setup will need to change these names to match their own rom names.

https://mega.nz/#!Gk8WSKIS!cGFrmmbL2jcRZHRd92aY-tw_KKACcTqfVQG84ryJtl0

Edit: It should also be noted that I only made overlays for the original 24 Vectrex release titles that can fully be emulated through RetroArch at this time. There are quite a few homebrew titles out there and you can use the files here as a template to include them later if need be.

Threepwood

Thanks @Floob and @mediamogul !

You made my day, everything is working!

Awesome! Thanks alot!

caver01

@mediamogul said in Vectrex Overlay Artwork:

Well, these turned out alright. It's much more appealing to play these games with the intended overlays. I had forgotten how fun 'Armor Attack' is. It's even a step up from the Atari 2600 'Combat' in a few areas.

I like what you are doing here with the overlays, but poor Armor Attack has jaggies on the vector lines. Have you tried the Arcade version in AdvanceMAME? It looks fantastic. Vector really needs to run at the native resolution of your display. The rectilinear shapes look fine (square corners) but anything diagonal is going to benefit from high-res.

EDIT: Maybe there's a way to specify the resolution of the emulation?

mediamogul

@caver01

The arcade version is most certainly superior. Playing the Vectrex version of any arcade title to me is more about the novelty of the experience, in much the same way that I have a lot of fun playing some of the technically inferior raster graphic arcade ports on something like ColecoVision. I've made good use of the vector emulation techniques from your excellent thread and the results are truly spectacular. One of these days, maybe Vecx will recieve a little more development love and a more authentic look can be applied there as well.

caver01

@mediamogul Yeah, I hear ya. That makes sense. I was always fascinated by the whole plastic overlay thing, so I guess this feeds a lot of that curiosity! It definitely has me inspired to mess with overlays. I'd like to try some things with the curvature effect to simulate a bezel. I am not going all out with a fake TV set or anything, just some proper gradients to look like there is a bezel in the corners.

mediamogul

@caver01

I think that would look great.

celly

@mediamogul I can't seem to get these to work. Placed your files in the vectrex folder in the roms folder, I made sure all the .cfg files where named to my rom names, nothing. It's probably just some Monday detail I'm missing...

mediamogul

@celly Could you have possibly left off the one of the extensions? If your rom is name named 'spinball.vec', the config file would then be 'spinball.vec.cfg'.

celly

@mediamogul Yup! That was it. Wow, I knew it was going to be something stupid like that. Thank you for the help!

mediamogul

@celly No problem.

d8thstar

I'll have to give this a try.

Curious if anyone has gotten vectrex overlays to display in mess (which I prefer over vectrex).

Thanks!

Rion

@d8thstar said in Vectrex Overlay Artwork:

I'll have to give this a try.

Curious if anyone has gotten vectrex overlays to display in mess (which I prefer over vectrex).

Thanks!

I like to know this to.

@mediamogul Any insight into this?

mediamogul

@Rion

I can't say for sure, but they should likely display in 'lr-mess' without any trouble.

Rion

@mediamogul

I made a request to John Merrit and my wishes came true

Libretro Arcade Overlays post 163

mediamogul

@Rion

Very nice! Those look fantastic.

d8thstar

Yes they look great but how to implement? Can anyone write up a step be step to get them running in mess?

Rion

@d8thstar said in Vectrex Overlay Artwork:

Yes they look great but how to implement? Can anyone write up a step be step to get them running in mess?

If you are referring to the ones on Libretro then they are not done yet.

If you mean the ones posted by @mediamogul then just read the thread and the explanation is here :)

mediamogul

@d8thstar

Out of curiosity, what are the benefits to emulating the Vectrex in 'lr-mess' rather than 'lr-vecx'?

d8thstar

@mediamogul

I don't think there are any. I was hoping that vec overlays would be easier to implement under mess, the way they are on the pc.

From what I've read on overlays with vecx, each game needs its own config file and to be honest, I don't think I'm that smart :)