Secret trick unlocking 48-bit color vectors on a 1982 Vectrex!

[@TheLEEC]

Me yesterday: There’s no valid excuse ever for filming in portrait mode. Me today: I was wrong.

[@sharesquid]

Haha. Thanks for the watching and glad you enjoyed the portrait mode.

[@TransoceanicOutreach]

There are literally dozens of reasons for filming in portrait, which all boil down to 'the thing I'm recording is more vertical than horizontal'. That's why the cameras in phones are vertical in the first place, they are intended for filming humans, who are vertical (in case you were unaware).

[@TheLEEC]

@@TransoceanicOutreach

[@RaposaCadela]

Amazing, extremely clever use of the 3D imager. Damn, the Vectrex is so cool :>

[@sharesquid]

Thanks! Yep, we still haven't seen the full potential of the Vectrex. So glad developers continue to push the limits of the Veccie!

[@ArcadeJason]

great work!!! i do think you over estimated the amount of colors though. also i have never seen a vectrex that can actually display all intensities. for example even though you can select 128 intensities each vectrex has a different drop out zone where there is nothing displayed even though an intensity is selected.

[@sharesquid]

Thanks for the feedback, Jason! You are probably correct in the amount of perceivable colors being less due to the 'drop out zone'. Will have to do some more tests regarding intensity and let you know!

[@AmaroqStarwind]

@@sharesquid Arcade Jason is a Vectrex hardware god!

[@epremeaux]

Yeah I came to say the same.. First off, AMAZING WORK! Congratulations. REAL color on the Vectrex has been sort of a Holy Grail for a long time. However I too think you over estimate the possible granularity of colors. While things like intensity range, drop outs and human perception are external, "analog-y" imperfections, the REAL issue is simply "how accurately does the hardware keep time?" In particular, I see 2 specific bottlenecks to very high color counts: 1: timing speed of the wheel itself. This alone is a deep topic. The timing speed of the wheel itself must be measured and precise, rotation after rotation. Its a mechanical system, so there will always be some drift. For more than a few hundred colors, speed will need to be quite precise. Additionally, due to the way in which the human eye perceives color intensities, the red, green and blue sections of the disk are each different widths, red on your wheel being the "shortest" time as it passes the eye. Try dividing each one of these segments into 128 or 255 wedges. For the moment, I will assume the red segment is about 15 degrees wide. Assuming the wheel rotates at 60 rpm (360 degrees/s), 100% red = just 42mS. At 255 intensity levels, the vectrex must time displaying objects during the red wedge to just 0.000163 seconds (163 microseconds), and maintain precise intervals of 163 uS per intensity level (+/- 10 uS?). 2: Timing accuracy of the CPU, and it's minimum interval So, I cant find exact figures, as the Vectrex was clocked at 1.5Mhz, but the 6809 is listed as 0.42 MIPS @1Mhz. Being generous, lets say 0.61 MIPS or 1.6 uS per instruction. For 255 red intensity levels, you have less than 102 instructions (assuming single-step instructions), AND some of those instructions need to be used to manage the intensity timing. Obviously, green and blue are a lot more generous here. And, this all depends greatly on the actual RPM of the wheel. I just made a guess of 60 rpm. Slower would of course give you more time (and potentially "room" for more intensity levels), but lead to noticeable flicker. So, RED is your bottleneck. In practice, obviously developers will balance their color pallet based on cpu performance, number of graphical elements, sound, game logic, etc. You may want to investigate (and implement libraries for) color modes often used with microcontrollers and TFT/color LCD screens. For example 16-bit (565): a single 16-bit value with 5 red bits, 6 green and 5 blue bits. There are other variations as well such as 232 (7-bit), 222 (6-bit), 444 (12-bit) . But the key is that they favor colors that the human eye has more "resolution" in detecting shades of intensity (namely, we can detect more shades of green than red or blue). You could make your own n-bit palette, tuned to the Vectrex and color wheel. Why bother with 255 shades of red if you'll only be able to notice 20? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monochrome_and_RGB_color_formatsbetter than a spinning hard disk.

[@Minwah1959]

Pretty cool stuff! I don't have a 3D imager but had no idea it was possible to get 'all' colours like this. Good luck going forward!

[@sharesquid]

Thanks for the encouragement, minsoft! I really have to give a shout-out to your amazing, upcoming Vyrzon game! Everyone who loves Vectrex needs to check that out right away! kzbin.info/www/bejne/baK6qJZ_nbFjkLc

[@SeeJayPlayGames]

@@sharesquid wow, this only took 40 years to figure out! Imagine what would have happened if they knew this at the time and pushed the technology? Ah, the videogame crash of '83 would have probably STILL screwed things up... Vectrex wasn't cheap back in the day not to mention adding the 3D imager... but if only they had this knowledge that it could do color... just imagine. P.S. I want to see Tempest on this. Of course, that's Atari's IP, so it'd have to be a little different... or licensed... Is it still 3D or do we get color instead of 3D with this technique?

[@sharesquid]

Thanks EVERYONE for all the views and great feedback! This video was intended to be watched vertically on a phone since the Vectrex is a vertical system, but I'm very curious if you prefer a horizontal layout for future videos? Also do you tend to watch KZbin on your phone, PC or TV? Definitely let me know in the comments!

[@lasskinn474]

Well this got recommended to me just now, but even on phone i prefer 16:9. If i was watching fullscreen i could just as well turn the phone in my hand.

[@user-yr1uq1qe6y]

iPad. Always prefer horizontal and I instantly uninstall apps that I find only support portrait.

[@doctordapp]

Landscape, always for video's. Portraits are for mugshots. Brilliant knowing this, don't own a vectrex but around 1988 I was sleeping over at my uncle and aunt, their daughter had a friend who had left his vectrex for the weekend for me! Enjoyed it so much, brilliant system!

[@GeorgesChannel]

Big screen Tv.

[@sharesquid]

@@GeorgesChannel Absolutely! I may be making some 4K vids soon, and nothing's better than retro screen captured at 4k. But yep, will try to be more horizontal in the future thanks to the suggestions. :)

[@beez1717]

As soon as you mentioned RGB I knew you had unlocked any color you wanted!

[@Meshamu]

I think you may have over-counted the available perceived colors. I think that, the perceived color, on a spot you're looking at, would be closer to an average of what is seen is by each of the eyes. Meaning you'd get half-steps between the intensities on each color channel, rather than squaring the number of intensity levels.

[@sharesquid]

Makes sense. Definitely a difference between perceived color vs. programmable color possibilities. Thanks for watching and sharing your thoughts!

[@AnthonyFlack]

I agree, you can't really count the combined left eye and right eye as a single colour; it's two separate colours. Otherwise you could rapidly flip between two colours on any system and say that's a new colour too. Still very cool to see the Vectrex doing full colour.

[@playvectrex]

Great video Jon! Looking forward to what you create with this. I think the exact value of color is more like (RED_L+RED_R)/2, (GREEN_L+GREEN_R)/2, (BLUE_L+BLUE_R)/2 yielding about 2 million colors, since the 3D imager averages the left and right eye together, and you have only 21-bit color at most.

[@sharesquid]

You make a good point, BDub. I knew the internet could step in to help me with my math, haha! I'll think a bit more about this and respond again with my revised calculations. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!

[@SeeJayPlayGames]

actually your brain is doing the averaging part. And it should be 24-bit. I think.

[@playvectrex]

@@SeeJayPlayGames right, your brain will do the averaging ;-) I know Jon said the Intensity_a register is 8-bit which is true, but also said the max value was 127. It's 21-bit because intensity values are only 7-bit (0-127), so with three colors (based on the color wheel) 3 x 7 = 21. And 127^3 = 2,048,383

[@SeeJayPlayGames]

@@playvectrex okay, but 0-127 is 128 different values so 128^3=2,097,152. IJS But at this level of granularity, who really cares? At this point it's "oooh pretty colors". And that's just freaking AMAZING to have on a console that 40 years ago was monochrome. I don't have one; I would love to see this in person, but I understand they're very expensive.

[@playvectrex]

@@SeeJayPlayGames thought about that later, but then thought it would be more fun if you found my mistake :D Yeah it's probably a lot less colors, the 125 sounds more plausible. The 3D imager Jon borrowed is a recreation from Madtronix I believe, for $125 ish?

[@jinchoung]

this visualization is called "wiggle 3d". in these vids, when you have the lines going up the screen, the point where the line wiggles from is the depth of the screen. from there, the wiggling going up the screen recedes in depth. the wiggling below the point comes toward the viewer. and the bigger the horizontal distance between the left and right, the more it comes toward or away from you.

[@sharesquid]

Great to know the official term! It's surprisingly effective at providing the illusion of depth. Thanks for watching this video and commenting! I love learning new stuff from my viewers!

[@AdrianFahrenheitTepes]

Thanks for making this little video!

[@sharesquid]

Thanks for watching it, maybe I can make some more technical type Vectrex videos like this in the near future.

[@jbponzi1]

Fantastic lesson. This lesson could be used for DLP too, at least it seems like it would. DLP needs a color wheel too. Awesome what you have done here.

[@sharesquid]

Good point! Yes, to my knowledge DLP projectors use the same concept of spinning color wheel in front of a bright white light to create color. Pretty sure they also just use Red, Green, Blue to create the full cor spectrum.

[@SeeJayPlayGames]

@@sharesquid it's a DLP for your FACE

[@sharesquid]

@@SeeJayPlayGames That's right, electron beam gun blasting that colorful light directly into your eye sockets! Haha.

[@SeeJayPlayGames]

@@sharesquid I actually had a Mitsubishi 65" DLP TV some years back; it actually used a 6-color wheel (edit: as opposed to the RGB system of cheaper brands - so yes, RGB was common for DLP). Not sure of the order, but guessing RCGMBY. It made for purer colors (at least according to the promo spiel). I ended up selling it to a friend. I can't say I miss that TV as it had some issues (chief among them, replacing the bulb was expensive). (new addition follows) Also it was just a tad too damn big. And I couldn't get it to display exactly full 1080p; there was a bit of mandatory overscan. More like 1776*1000. Also, because it was so damn big and it was only 1080p the pixels were kind of huge and you could see them a little more than necessary. I basically had to sit back into the couch for it to look its best. No, the little 9" diagonal tate monochromatic vector display is a different animal entirely. But the color wheel/bright-ass lamp concept is what is similar. I guess the Vectrex can get a little bright. I have had the privilege of seeing one once, and can confirm.

[@epremeaux]

hmm this kind of makes me want to buy two tiny DLP colorwheel assemblies from aliexpress and build a dual eye system now.. but first I suppose I need to buy a vectrex X[

[@cantcit]

Very interesting video, I've had a 3d imager since the early 90s. They never made a 3d pole position wish they did. I have been itching for a decent racing game for the Vectrex for awhile.

[@sharesquid]

Wow! You have an actual original 3D Imager? That's awesome! The Madtronix version provides an authentic experience for me to test my 3D developments with, but would love to test on the original imager. Let me know if you have a multi-cart that allows you to load custom games, and I can send you some of my 3D developments to test. Thanks for taking the time to comment, and for watching my vid!

[@cantcit]

Yeah, I was very lucky to get it back in 1995, I called the company to see what kind of inventory they had left. They had the imager with the 3 games and I bought it for less than $100 us. I have a pitrex but I need the raspberry pi zero, I'm waiting for the prices to come down. Should be able to get one soon. I got my Vectrex from Santa back in 82, right before the game crash, it works just fine.

[@cantcit]

Sure I would love to beta test. Don't know much about Vectrex assembly or hexadecimal yet, but I would like to try programming for it, I'm sure it's a lot of fun.

[@AlexEvans1]

If coulor is taken to be right color+left color, (0,0,0)L/(1,1,1)R is equivalent to (1,1,1)L/(0,0,0)R if we use the sum of right and left to get the net color (a normal way for flickering) you get 9^3 (729) rather than 5^6 (15,625) colors. If you go with the 128 levels, that gives you a total of 255^3 (16,581,375) not 128^6

[@sharesquid]

Excellent point. There certainly is a big difference between "programmable colors" and perceived colors. Thanks for watching and commenting!

[@RetroDawn]

@@sharesquid Their point wasn't about the difference b/t the math and the perceived, but rather just a correction on the math itself. Excellent video, still, tho! I've long been interested in exploring color on my Vectrex with a 3D imager--just have never gotten the 3D imager, but one day in the nearish future I'll splurg.

[@AmaroqStarwind]

What if you moved the color wheel type device over to the Vectrex itself, in the form of a liquid crystal color shutter? (And also, using lasers to make holographic overlays.)

[@sharesquid]

Great idea, Starwind! There's some individuals making smart led frames...I bet it would work, now I need to buy a smart frame to test it out!

[@8bitwidgets]

someone is doing this here already.. works in conjunction with a vecfever or pitrex.. still early, but this is very encouraging for the future.. kzbin.info/www/bejne/f3LFdGZ7iZtme6s

[@MrEdrftgyuji]

You could potentially use an old laptop display, strip out the backlight and get it to display solid red/green/blue. It may not respond that quickly though.

[@Meshamu]

If we're just going to use a regular non-3D display, maybe instead of something mechanical, use some kind of scan converter, to turn the sequential RGB into a standard video signal. Though there would certainly be a little lag.

[@AmaroqStarwind]

@@Meshamu Liquid Crystal isn't mechanical

[@Lightblue2222]

Impressive

[@AaronRose2421]

Holy portrait mode, batman! However, being a vectrex user, I guess it couldn't be any other way. 😉

[@sharesquid]

Haha... yep, portrait mode comes naturally to Vectrekkers, but my future Vectrex videos will be predominately landscape mode (zooming in on key parts of game play) Thanks for watching!

[@FavoritoHJS]

yes, i know you've heard you can't really get all those 48-bits of color (best you can hope for is 24-bit, and only if you find an unicorn that can actually display all 128 intensities!), but there might still be hope. remember, crts (and due to backwards compat shenanigans, even modern computers) have a display gamma -- effectively, it means that the displayed brightness is a power of the input brightness, so small values vary less than larger ones. depending on how your eyes do blending, it might be closer to a linear function or some other power curve, and you can use that slight difference to make one bright color and one dimmer color not equal their expected average, and thus squeak out an extra bit or two per color from that. though good luck weeding the "works in my eyes" bugs from that. misc pedantic ranting: don't worry about the ega/tga mixup, it kinda fixed itself, at least in CGA monitors, as they both can only display 16 colors. with a native ega monitor, though, it can display (more or less) the same colors as the sms! only 16 at a time, though, so it still fixes itself. if you ever wondered why the nes's sprites flicker so much, you can ONLY have 8 sprites per scanline -- anything more will be clipped off! a common trick was to make "things" out of... background tiles! difficult to deal with, though -- thus, the background usually disappears on the scanlines where the object is. the snes is a weird case... it can display a 256 color palette from a 15-bit palette... or direct color, using the 8 bits normally reserved for the pallete to display 3-3-2 RGB image, and can use the pallete index for further color, up to 4-4-3 RGB. the psx can only display 15-bit color... at least while actually rendering stuff. Video decompression can, however, display 24-bit color.

[@sharesquid]

Wow! Thanks for taking the time to detail these different color palettes and hardware capabilities. It's such a fascinating topic to me, but hard to do it justice in a single overview video. Thanks for watching!

[@GeorgesChannel]

Great video! As a 3d-enthusiast myself and Vectrex-fan (i have one with almost all games) your video blew my mind. Tge question maybe if such a 3d imager csn be rebuilt digitally with today tech..like shutter-glasses..Great video!

[@sharesquid]

Exactly! Brandon Yates has already rigged up a transparent lcd screen that serves as a digital overlay which can assign individual colors to specific lines ... he and I worked a bit last year to do the same color mixing trick via his lcd panel instead of the 3D imager, and it looks promising. My latest video (posted today) shows this in action.

[@GeorgesChannel]

@@sharesquid Just watched it. You make great entertaining content!

[@nonsuch]

The 3-D imager is a really simple device and easy to make. All you really need is a CD player motor w/the CD center holder and an adjustable DC motor controller (cheaply bought or simple to make with a 555 timer circuit), "clear" CD spacers that you find on the bottom of every spindle of blank CDRs, a sheet of red, green, and blue cellophane (even Sharpies will work in a pinch), and some way to mount it, like a cheap cell phone VR for instance. Use your mind and be creative... these are not LCD shutters. Anyway, Cool vid! I love the idea of a color vector conversion for the Vectrex. However, coding isn't my thing and will need to wait for a Git project or the like. 🥂

[@sharesquid]

Some great ideas there! I like how you think! Based on my past experiences though, I'm better off sticking to software developer, instead of tinkering with hardware. Haha. :)

[@LimitZer0]

Nice video. I'm also a big SOTN fan. 😄

[@sharesquid]

Thanks for the comment! You are certainly not alone in your love for SOTN. :)

[@vectrexer]

Yum! Excellent video,. Keep up the tech presentations.

[@sharesquid]

Thanks for your consistent support Vectrexer! Seems you've been a long time fan!

[@videmalban4090]

Great Video. Emulating RGB colors would proof challenging... For "simple" vectors this would still be feasable... tracking vectors whether there are drawn with exactly the same coordinates 1-6 times in the timeframe and adjusting color values. But emulating colored "crossings" - one would need to emulate single "vector pixels" (if there is such a thing), and remember if the beam had crossed the "pixel" more than once... I have to ponder over that - ... don't expect any immediate Vide changes :-).

[@sharesquid]

Awesome, Malban! You are my personal hero (and the hero of so many other aspiring Vectrex programmers), so it means a lot that you commented on my video and efforts! Actually it seems your development environment emulator does show certain blended colors like gold and purple, but yeah...I was actually just happy it emulated the 3D imager at all. I wouldn't worry about adding color mixing anytime soon, since you have so many other projects going on. Thanks for all you do, and I can't wait to someday get involved with your pi-trex project!

[@MattMcIrvin]

What is the perceptual effect of presenting different colors to the two eyes? Does the brain average them or is something more complicated going on? I know that with simple color anaglyph 3D glasses, that happens, and it, well, doesn't look great but the eye manages.

[@sharesquid]

Great question, Matt! Vectrex 3D is certainly a bit subjective, and depends on the individual. Speaking for myself, the left and right eye blends. So a full blue left eye vector and full green right eye vector (as long as both my eyes perceive them to be in the same location) will turn a nice steady turquoise, but with a slightly less intense brightness than if I did blue and green on one eye only.

[@peaxoop]

Love the video and the vertical video. Just thought of a flaw in your calculations though. There are only 511 shades of each colour by combining both eyes, 3L and 1R is the same as 3L/1L, 4 is 4 however you get to it. So ‘only’ 133,432,831 colours, although I think there may be more differences because of timings and different wheels, but I need more brain time on that, but first I need to watch more of your videos.

[@sharesquid]

Thanks for your comment, and for putting some thought into it! Let me know if you come up with different numbers after more consideration! :)

[@properjob2311]

great instructional video

[@manuel-xax]

Awesome !

[@gliptitude]

To me color is better prospect than 3D and I wonder if just using the imager for color and not doing 3D effects would allow for more game. Be cool too to do color hacks on existing games.

[@sharesquid]

Absolutely! Half of the 3D imager color wheel is solid black (so eyes see two different images). If someone would make a color wheel without any black, and instead using two reds, two greens and two blues; that could certainly be used to colorize original games. Some re-coding would be required, but quite possible! Great thought, @gliptitude! Will have to look into this myself...exciting times for Vectrex fans!

[@ecernosoft3096]

................ and I thought that 30 bit color was revolutionary...

[@OriginalityDaniel]

really cool, would this mean with a colour vector display you could get colour games without a 3dimager? possibly with Arcade Jasons pcb hack

[@sharesquid]

Great question! Absolutely. I'm actually working with Brandon on testing this method with his lcd monitor Vectrex overlay approach. kzbin.info

[@Ninnuam999]

Now someone needs to convert the vectrex bad apple demo to color

[@sharesquid]

I know I've seen a Veccie version of "Bad Apple" before, probably on a VecFever or something. Same for LA Linea. Both very creative examples of Vector style art. Thanks for your comment!

[@vectrexmad]

very interesting!

[@sharesquid]

Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for watching!

[@e8root]

having separate colors for left and right eyes doesn't make it 48bit color

[@sharesquid]

Well, yes and no. The color is controlled by 48 bits....24 for each eye. For example, if I do light red in right eye and medium blue in left...your two eyes perceive a purplish blue. If you reverse those colors, you perceive the same color, but you used different bits to achieve it. So programmable color variations, yes.... perceived colors, not really. So you are absolutely right in that regard.

[@exidy-yt]

Vanguard was the first game I bought with my Atari VCS when I got it as a 10 year old in 1982. The irony? For the first couple of years I played it hooked up to my father's hand-me-down Sanyo B&W teevee.

[@sharesquid]

What a great memory! Must be like a totally different game in black and white...I'm absolutely gonna try it in b&w this week, just to experience it the way that 10-year old you did back in the 80's!

[@trashlids4592]

Very cool ! hey what is the facebook groupe you mentioned ? :)

[@sharesquid]

Glad you liked it... the Facebook group is "Vectrex fans unite!". Very important to have that exclamation point, because there is another "Vectrex fans unite" group that doesn't have the exclamation mark...which is the wrong group.

[@trashlids4592]

@@sharesquid thanks a lot ! 🔥