VecFever documentation
Bad Apple Demo
In 2015 Jeroen Domburg developed a multicart. of his own – “Spritemod’s extreme” multicart. – and developed two special demos for it: a 3D Doom level renderer (Voom) and a video player to run the ‘Bad Apple’ video.
This video demo at heart uses a very specific, small setup: streaming vector and digitized audio data from a media to the 6809 which in turn outputs the data mixing the vector and digitized output carefully to be able to use the Vectrex’s digital audio output capability. The 6809 player is quite tiny, besides this and implementing a loading capability the magic is mostly in a script which generates this data for the 6809 player since it not only has to vectorize a video but also aim to generate audio data for specific 6809 cycle spots in this video stream.
Since I wanted to see this demo myself and this was an excellent, additional test for the ‘v4e’ data loading by the 6809 I had just implemented for the jukebox (back in 2016) – which loads large chunks of data, not streaming small blocks of data – I ported a version of the player to the vf and recreated the data again via these scripts.
Please note: the digitized sound is fine on the earlier Vectrex revisions but not on the original ‘no-buzz’ Vectrex revisions, where the volume is much lower, hardly hearable.
A few years afterwards Malban got interested in playing back digitized audio and video himself and implemented an adapted version of the player into VIDE and converted a few videos, incl. ‘Bad Apple’ again:
