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I've been working on this. First, let me compliment you on getting to round 6. The only way I was able to get there was by cheating. (I modified the code so my cities were never destroyed. I felt like James Kirk reprogramming the Kobayashi Maru test.)

Anyway, I've posted a fix over in the Game Swap forum.

Thanks for finding this.

- Bob

User "Iwantgames:)" found a bug in MissileBreak OutVaders (MBOV). Here's a fix for it. Download MBOV.zip, unzip it, and copy it to your Vectrex32. MBOV requires Vectrex32 version 1.14 or newer.

Thank you, Iwantgames:), for finding this and letting me know about it.

- Bob

Maybe they realized that you were an invincible defender of Earth and they abandoned their attempt to conquer our world and steal our women and/or water.

Or maybe I should I try to debug this.

- Bob

There's a new game in the Game Swap forum, Vector Gunner. It's a Tail Gunner clone written by jbaronp3.

jbaronp3 has won the first V Prize of $500. There's still one more V Prize outstanding.

Here's a Tail Gunner clone called Vector Gunner. It was written by jbaronp3 for the V Prize competition, which he won.

It requires version 1.15 or newer of the Vectrex32 firmware. If you have an older version, go to vectrex32.com/category/downloads to upgrade.

Download the attached file, unzip it, and copy VectorGunner.bas to your Vectrex32.

Here's a video demo: [youtube width=640]https://youtu.be/HPxl5bN7Gkc[/youtube]

but kept running into memory issues because of the large amount of array data required. The file handling that was added in the last firmware made all the difference as I was able to shift some of the data into files and load it as needed.

You're not the only one to run into memory issues. Another V32 owner ran into them too and brought them to my attention. As a result, firmware version 1.17 compiles the BASIC program into a much more compact form. It's almost embarrassing how much memory I was able to free up.

I don't know if this means you'd be able to fold those data files back into the main program - and I'd understand if you don't want to expend the effort to try - but it's something to consider.

- Bob

There's a beta version of a clone of the old Akalabeth RPG game over in the Game Swap forum. Check it out.

Thank you to Pix for writing and posting this!

OK, my head is spinning. It was posted in my own forums and I didn't even know it. I thought I had things set up so I'd be notified of any posts.

But gosh, this is great.

- Bob

What's Vecalebeth? That's not on the Vectrex32 cartridge. Did someone else write it?

- Bob

Glad to hear it's working. I don't think a bad cable counts as "user error" though.

- Bob

Hmm... that's weird. I've never seen the USB fail when the rest of the V32 works. And one of your PCs in Win7, so that should certainly be modern enough. The V32 just shows up as a USB drive and a serial port, so there's nothing unusual about the drivers it needs. I even would've expected it to work on WinXP and Linux.

Maybe it's a bad USB cable?

- Bob

Well, then I don't know what the problem is. I suggest you return it to me - I'll pay return postage - and I can either give you a refund or send you a working V32.

I'll send you the info for returning it by Private Message.

I'm very sorry for the problem.

- Bob

So it sounds like you've got the mini-USB connected into the Vectrex32 and into your PC, right? The only other thing to know is that the Vectrex32 needs to be plugged into the Vectrex and the Vectrex needs to be turned on. The reason is that the V32 doesn't get its power from the USB connection; it gets its power from the Vectrex.

(In one design iteration of the board, I actually tried to have the V32 powered from the USB. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get it to work reliably.)

- Bob

Vectrex32 cartridges include a high end microcontroller and an expensive dual port memory chip. As such, they're much more expensive than traditional ROM cartridges. I don't think it's cost effective to dedicate a V32 to a single game.

- Bob

It appears I messed up by not including a way to convert strings to numbers (e.g. a Val() function). When the V32 didn't support user input or file I/O, converting strings to ints wasn't something that would ever be necessary. And when I added file I/O, it just didn't occur to me to add Val().

Sorry. I'll add it to the list of features for the next release.

- Bob