(Continued from page 11)
out there. All game music and sound is reproduced cor-
rectly. Even the game Spike which contains digitized
speech is handled 100% correctly. In fact the sound from
ParaJVE is better than the real Vectrex – there’s no buzz-
ing in the background – a typical issue on most real Vec-
trex consoles.
At the beginning of the article I mentioned that ParaJVE is
the best emulator for the gamer. However, ParaJVE is also
suited to a developer too. There are a whole lot of options I
haven’t even touched upon that are outside the scope of
this article but worth a mention in case a perspective home
brewer is reading. A couple of years ago some home
brewers developed a PS/2 keyboard interface for the
Vectrex. Well, guess what, this hardware has been emu-
lated as an option in ParaJVE too. For home brewers who
want to develop Vectrex programs ParaJVE can be exe-
cuted from the command line with various options to dis-
able the game selector dialogue window and other options.
This means that ParaJVE can be called directly from other
programs such as Integrated Development Programming
Environments. Actually for those interested, Franck is also
working on a parallel development called ParaJVD. This is
a full debugger for the Vectrex, offering the home brewer
all sorts of features to help them develop new programs.
This is work in progress with no official release date as yet.
There is one fundamental issue that goes against all cur-
rent Vectrex emulators, and ParaJVE is no exception. That
is, the platforms they run on are not Vector based graphics
machines. Therefore with an emulator you will always see
pixilated lines and to appreciate true vector lines requires
an actual Vectrex console. Also display issues on the real Vectrex caused by analogue peculiarities cannot
be 100% emulated by software in ParaJVE. This does
have an advantage: The typical issue of flickering and
shimmering graphics when there are too many graph-
ics on the display of a real Vectrex is not visible with
ParaJVE. However, it means for a home brewer, a real
Vectrex console is still necessary in order to know how
their program really behaves.
ParaJVE is available for free download from
www.vectrex-emu.blogspot.com. This is Franck
Chevassu’s blog so you can communicate with him
about ParaJVE and even make recommendations for
future improvements. From his blog you can discover
that Franck is working on light pen emulation for Para-
JVE. Like many of us, Franck is busy with other
things, but he does eventually find the time to respond
and make further improvements to ParaJVE. All in all,
the ParaJVE emulator is the closest you can get to a
real Vectrex.
- P. Ian Nicholson
13 | Video Game Trader Magazine | #8 |
www.VideoGameTrader.com
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