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Welcome to the forum, Alex!

Connect the V32 to your PC and bring up a terminal window. I'll bet that when you get a blank screen, there's an error message printing out.

- Bob

I certainly wouldn't expect the Klingons to be self-destructing. Sure, it's always a good day to die, but that's just plain dishonorable.

I would expect you to run out of energy and torpedoes: I've always found ST to be a very difficult game.

And then, powering down your system I suppose just means that game re-starting hasn't been implemented in the program. I said this is beta software, but that's probably too generous. It's not really even at alpha stage yet. It was just posted as a basis for other people to continue development on.

I'm sorry to say that mine freezes up as soon as I launch the game. It's possible that my Vectrex is not supplying enough power to the cartridge. Is it working for anybody else on version 1.27?

I also saw your post on the Vecalabeth thread. Both Star Trex and Vecalabeth are beta software, so I would suspect bugs in their code first, especially if you've been able to play the games included with V32 with no problem.

I'd suggest connecting your PC to the V32, bringing up a terminal window, playing the game until it crashes, and seeing if any error message comes out on the terminal.

- Bob

I'm sorry I didn't respond to this earlier. I usually get notifications when a new thread is posted. I don't know why I didn't this time. Thanks for pinging me with an e-mail.

Currently, there's no way to "peek" at whether there's a character available on stdin. But I might be able to add it as a feature. Can you tell me more about your application?

- Bob

No charge. In fact, I'm sorry this didn't occur to me earlier. I'm not sure if it's mentioned anywhere in the docs, but I just added it to the Quick Start Guide.

Should I return the V32 to the PO box on your return address label?

- Bob

I just got your Vectrex32 and the USB is working fine for me.

I just had a thought: did you have the V32 plugged into a Vectrex and the Vectrex turned on? Because the V32 does not get power from the USB; it only gets power from the Vectrex. So you need to have it plugged into a Vectrex and turned on, for a Mac or PC to see it.

- Bob

Yeah, I just noticed today that the forum was down. Sorry. Next time it happens (which will hopefully be never) send me a message through the Contact link.

This is definitely sounding like a problem with the V32. If you send it back to me, I'll either fix it or replace it (or refund your money, if that's your choice). I'll also refund you $10 for your return shipping.

My address is:
Bob Alexander
398 Bow Lake Road
Northwood, NH 03261

I'm sorry for the trouble.

- Bob

OK, I just tried this on a MacBook Air (2017) running High Sierra (10.13.6) and the Vectrex32 drive shows up fine on the Mac.

My wife has a couple of other Macs (one older, one newer). What are you running?

Have you tried a different cable and a different USB port?

- Bob

There's a new version of the Vectrex32 firmware available, version 1.26. You can download the firmware here.

There is a single bug fix, to the Val() function.

- Bob

I know this has worked in the past, but as a PC user, I don't test it regularly.

My wife is a Mac user (it's a mixed marriage) so I'll try it on her system. But I'm away from home right now, so it will be a day or two.

Of course, if we can't get this working for you, you can return it for a full refund.

- Bob

Thank you!

There's a new version of the Vectrex32 firmware available, version 1.25. You can download the firmware here.

There are new features and bug fixes. See the release notes here.

- Bob

Everyone needs to interpolate, right?

If there are three guys, and the guy on the left needs to interpolate, and the gut on the right needs to interpolate, can we interpolate that the guy in the middle needs to interpolate?

I thought about maybe dropping the speed back if your last game was less than N seconds, which is a possibility, and speed it up if things are the other way. 

Artificial intelligence! I like it!

Alternatively, start slow and speed up as the game progresses. That's certainly a common approach in arcade games.

- Bob

Since there's a speed option, maybe the default speed should be dialed back a bit.

Drawing the cycle in the "attract" screen seems to be too much for the Vectrex. If it can't draw it well, maybe it just shouldn't draw it.