Since I have nothing better to do as I get over an annoying head cold, I've been lying in bed today downloading every issue of Electronic Games magazine and converting each one into OCR searchable text. For decades I've had this nagging memory of a Vectrex computer announcement that never made it to production, and I was convinced it was from that publication. I owned a Vectrex at the time and would scour the game magazines for any tiny shred of news they might provide about my system. To their credit they seemed to bend over backwards to mention when a new Vectrex game hit store shelves, it just didn't happen that often enough for the Vectrex. I was usually lucky to find a couple inches of text per issue, and these were over 100 pages long each month.
But I remember reading about this supposed computer "add-on" and that the article was actually more than just a blurb and had some images. I never forgot about it. But, all these decades later I was never able to find that announcement. Every few years I'd look around and give up. I honestly started to wonder recently if I'd invented the memory.
Some of the magazine scans on Archive.org are giant unsearchable image-based PDFs so not even Google could see inside them. So, today I started to download issues one at a time, convert them to 600 dpi for OCR scanning in Adobe Acrobat and started searching for "vectrex". Over, and over, and over. Amazing what illness can spawn sometimes.
After a few hours I FOUND IT. AFTER ALL THESE YEARS!!!
Behold (in text) - the mythological Vectrex Computer. Supposedly it even had 5 titles ready to ship in early 1984!
- Both the light pen and goggles mentioned in the article were in fact produced and sold for a brief time.
Since not everyone can see images, here is the text that matters from the article:
A 65-key keyboard would have been one less key than a Commodore 64. I have no idea what "wafer-tape" storage is, but 128K storage sounds pretty interesting for the timeframe. A typical 5.25" floppy disk could hold ~170KB per side and a datasette cassette could hold about 100KB per side.Believe it or not, the Vectrex stand-alone unit can now be transformed into a home computer!
With the assistance of a new keyboard developed by General Consumer Electronics, the plug-in adds 16K ROM and 16K RAM to the unit, and even incorporates a 65-key typewriter-style keyboard. Software for the computer is made on wafer-tapes, providing for 128K bytes of storage. BASIC's built into the system, and the keyboard is just the first step toward a word processor that'll be introduced in early 1984.Five cartridges for the 1983 computer include:
The Sound Studio, a music composition aid
Exploring the Solar System
Create-A-Game/Maze, which teaches the user to program his very own video-entertainment
Basic Animation Domination
Basic Science, a game teaching the fundamental concepts of physics
The Vectrex has 1KB of RAM and 8KB of ROM. So this computer would have beefed it up to a knee-buckling 17KB of RAM. That seems a little light given the fact the C64 and Atari 800xl were already on the market with 64KB. Regardless, the games the Vectrex had already had impressive visuals and sound even with such meager system stats thanks to cartridge storage, so who knows what may have been possible?
I remember being so excited as a kid when I read that news. Sad it never came to pass, but I'm really glad I finally rediscovered the article and it wasn't a human intelligence (HI) hallucination!