PiTrex Wiki - Entry-2020-02-03

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With the beginning of 2020, and great work especially from Chris Salomon (Malban) along with the rest of the PiTrex team, we are ticking off more and more of the goals originally set out in the [Project_Roadmap].

A recent [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EcGAKeHN5A|video] shows the latest developments with arcade emulation, as well as the new PiTrex menu. Also shown are the [Vectrex_Interface] library's new calibration and debugging features. Tailgunner and Asteroids now have sound effects as well as accurate display and gameplay. Other [Arcade_Emulation|6502 and Cinematronics games] are on their way.

Ports of [Software_Ports|vector open source games] have begun by adapting SVGAlib based games "zblast" and "vhyperoid" using a "translation library" that substitutes display instructions used in the original raster graphics library with those for the Vectrex Interface library. By doing the same thing for the Xlib graphics library, it is hoped that a further nine games will be easily ported. At least another six games should be able to be ported later by modifying their internal code more significantly.

The Vectrex Interface library now also has a frame buffering system implemented which allows various performance improvements to be made to the display.

Developer documentation for using the [Vectrex_Interface] library has been begun, so that other developers can chip in to help improve more emulated and ported games after release, and hopefully also program new games to take advantage of the processing power and convenient developing environment that comes from running code on a 1GHz CPU.

Chris now also has [http://vide.malban.de/pitrex|a section on his Vectrex Blog website] detailing his personal notes from working on the PiTrex.

Kevin Koster.