Brett Walach's Compact SAO Brings a Playable Vectrex Homage to Any Compatible Badge
With a charlieplexed LED matrix, this Scramble-playing handheld doesn't replicate the vectors of the original — but it's a delight anyway.
Embedded hardware and software engineer Brett Walach has brought back a classic of early home video gaming, in Simple Add-On (SAO) form, with the playable though sadly no-longer-vector Vectrex SAO.
"My first SAO," Walach writes of his creation, "a mini playable Vectrex! Features include [a] mini playable low res version of Scramble, 7×10 white LED xharlieplexed display (placed in a slight perspective to match the Vectrex artwork!), [and the] joystick is a one-button capacitive touch controller."
The Vectrex was developed by Smith Engineering's John Ross and colleagues and launched by General Consumer Electronics in 1982 before being taken over by the Milton Bradley Company. While it would only last until early 1984 before being discontinued, it remains an iconic piece of video game history — largely thanks to being the only mass-produced home console to feature a vector, rather than bitmapped, display.
Walach's compact homage to the Vectrex does not, for reasons of scale, include the cathode-ray tube display of the original, and as a result swaps the vector graphics for a low-resolution bitmap — displayed on a 7×10 LED matrix, cleverly angled to match the perspective of the silkscreened Vectrex on the PCB. A Microchip PIC16F886 drives the hardware, which runs a demake of the Vectrex game Scramble, while a dangling control pad acts as a single-button input.
"Coily cord," Walach explains of how the control pad connects to the main PCB. "This is made of a solid core silicone wire, and stranded core silicone wire. These were an absolute pain to make." A small speaker, meanwhile, plays back the game's sound effects — muting automatically if there's no player input, with a solder bridge to disable it permanently.
More information on the project is available on Hackaday.io, with design files and source code available on GitHub under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license.