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Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

I got to play on a Vectrex back in the day, it was super-fun -- especially because I had worked at Cinematronix before that. I really wish Vectrex was more successful, but vector displays were just super-limited. The positive of being pseudo-high-res wasn't enough to overcome the fact that you literally couldn't draw more than about 40-80 lines (depending on how long the lines were and how far apart they were).

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It’s hard to believe it would work as a word processor, if you wanted 80x25 you’d have up to 2000 characters on the screen maybe with a few curves or move lines. No matter how you slice it it’s a lot of data and the electronics strike me as crazier than a raster text display and it’s still crazy for a home computer which is more like 40x20 — do you have a huge display list of lines and curves or a character array which indexes display lists for each character?

My experience with vector displays is <that> years old, but as far as I know it was functionally impossible. Granted Cinematronics was using even older hardware, but literally the refresh rate became a consideration doing the equivalent of boss-death/cut scenes. The more (length of) lines you draw the more the display begins to look like an old-timey submarine radar display.

That's the physical limit -- the length of the line you can draw; probably you can sweep the voltage faster when you are moving from one line to the next.

Here's the best example of text display I've ever seen on a vector display

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJv94FPRddA

where you see about 60 "words" on the screen albeit with variable size and other effects you wouldn't see on computer displays at the time. The lines would be short on a full screen of word processing text but the total length would add up to more line than you'd see in those kind of games.

I'd imagine you'd need a huge display list though for large amounts of text, 10 points per char and probably more like 10 bits than 8 bits worth of coordinate though you could probably store deltas to get it down to 8 bits in the display list. That gives you a 40kb long display list for 2000 which is most of the address space of an "8-bit" computer though you could fit BASIC in the remainder of one. Thus it's interesting to think of something like the character generator ROM or something that could draw circles or Bezier curves. Sorry, but I like to geek out about old-school display controllers which have an astonishingly high parts count like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco_Dazzler

unless they include an ASIC. People making retrocomputers today struggle to build display controllers that don't live on an FPGA or a microcontroller (ESP32 is fast enough to do something like "cheap video"

https://archive.org/details/Cheap_Video_Cookbook_Don_Lancast...

with high end performance for a 1980s home computer.)

Yep, Atari was always a challenge to us on the vector front. I think the most drawing we ever did was the center of the Cosmic Chasm, about 2 minutes in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ0Szz8gpiE

Fun fact: at the end of that video, the default high score list includes me! I'd forgotten this, so thanks for the bump to find this.

Now that I think about it I remember these things which used a storage tube and really could show a whole screenful of text

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010

which I think you could have made a word processor for even though it couldn’t scroll. I remember drawing charts on it though, not looking at a lot of text. I think the one I used was side-by-side with a WYSE terminal that was VT-something compatible.

I've also heard (not sure if true or not) that General Consumer Electronics got a really good deal on the 9in vector displays for the first batch run which made production a lot less economically viable later.

I recall reading that the design kicked off because of some stock of surplus CRTs but that didn't ultimately end up used.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/a-history-of-gaming-pla...

> The system got its start in late 1980, when one of the hardware designers at Western Technologies (Smith Engineering), John Ross, had a light bulb go off -- or, to be more precise, a surplus one-inch Cathode Ray Tube (CRT).

> Western Technologies redesigned the system as a tabletop, and later that year General Consumer Electronics (GCE) licensed it for production -- though now with a nine-inch screen.

More of that history here https://www.vectrex.be/vectrex_jay_smith.html

Good lord, you'd think I could remember how to spell Cinematronics since I worked there. Hell, I created the wikipedia article on it! <grumble>

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cinematronics&old...

My uncle had one and he wouldn't let anyone touch it.

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