A bit like Marty Mc Fly from Back to the Future the male and female students at Pforzheim University are likely to in the course “Vectrex programming” have occurred:
In the summer semester 2016 standing in front of the students to learn the low-level programming is not as in recent years the usual NAO robot model H25 V4, but an over 30 years old, black Vectrex console model 3000 G1-EURO.
How did it happen? For small by its size of only about. 60cm cute acting, humanoid NAO robots college was a prolonged maintenance. An alternative for the robot had to be found and Professor Dr. rer. nat. Johannsen came on an unusual idea: In the attic he had from his childhood still a Vectrex console. After thinking and tinkering Professor Johannsen had put on a development environment, can be written and compiled 6809 assembler or C in the source code in Motorola. The preparations were thus established all, would be interesting, how many students would get involved with the Vectrex programming and select this quite special course.
The antiquity of the Vectrex console and something special registration for the course “Vectrex programming”, for the well-known for his enigmatic based learning Professor Johannsen had set tasks related to Machine-oriented languages as first hurdles, was interested students put off apparently, since the course began with a total of 27 Female students.
About five months later and many, many lectures, internship- and hours worked on are now a total of 21 emerged Vectrexspiele, in the Vectrex-Projektgalerie exhibited are.
The majority of questions the students kindly binaries, the manual and the optional overlay visuals available for download. The results presented in the Project Gallery with description and screenshots Vectrexspiele can therefore be tried directly; a Vectrexemulator as ParaJVE to play on a PC or a VecFlash- provided or VecMulti cartridge to play on the original Vectrexkonsole.
To date, I only came to, to look at the two games Space Assault and traffic Race accurate. Both games are full games with scoring, Control and opponents; in Space Assault started Fabian Pfeifroth even has implemented several levels with different opponents.
Professor Johannsen and the students are very satisfied with the results arising – and manage the:
In addition to learning the machine-oriented programming as well as the careful use of limited resources such as memory and processor time are virtually interesting as a side effect, quite playable Vectrexspiele with instructions and some even came with color film. Therefore, from my side, kudos and thanks to all the students for the creation and deployment of their first films and a lot of success and fun for further study!