Vectrex - Arcade System [Model HP 3000]

It was first released for the North America market in November 1982.

The only Vector display-based ever designed and released for the home market.

The Vectrex was conceived by John Ross of Smith Engineering in late 1980. He, Mike Purvis, Tom Sloper, and Steve Marking had gone to Electro-Mavin, a surplus warehouse in Los Angeles. They found a 1-inch cathode ray tube (CRT) and wondered if a small electronic game could be made of it. A demonstration of a vector-drawing cathode ray tube display was made by connecting the deflection yoke in a standard television to the channels of a stereo amplifier fed with music program material. An auxiliary yoke was used to keep the raster television's horizontal fly-back high-voltage system running. The demo led to a system originally conceived as a handheld called the Mini Arcade but, as Smith Engineering shopped the idea around to developers, it evolved into a tabletop with nine-inch screen.

The system was licensed to General Consumer Electronics in 1981. After a brief hardware and software development period, the Vectrex was unveiled on 7 June 1982 at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. It was publicly released in November, just in time for the holidays. The launch sales were strong enough that Milton Bradley bought out General Consumer Electronics in early 1983.

The computer and vector generator were designed by Gerry Karr. The computer runs the game's computer code, watches the user's inputs, runs the sound generator, and controls the vector generator to make the screen drawings. The vector generator is an all-analog design using two integrators: X and Y. The computer sets the integration rates using a digital-to-analog converter. The computer controls the integration time by momentarily closing electronic analog switches within the operational-amplifier based integrator circuits. Voltage ramps are produced that the monitor uses to steer the electron beam over the face of the phosphor screen of the cathode ray tube. Another signal is generated that controls the brightness of the line.

During development, for a short period of time, the possibility of using the 6502 processor was considered, but later its performance was considered insufficient.

Milton Bradley's greater resources allowed the Vectrex to be released in parts of Europe by mid-1983 and, through a co-branding agreement with Bandai, in Japan as well. However, the video game crash of 1983 turned Milton Bradley's support of the Vectrex into a costly mistake. In May 1984, Milton Bradley merged with Hasbro, and the Vectrex was discontinued a few months after. Over its lifetime, it had cost Milton Bradley tens of millions of dollars.

Prior to the Vectrex's discontinuation, a successor console with a color screen had been planned. After the rights reverted to Smith Engineering, the company made plans to revive the Vectrex as a handheld, but the imminent arrival of Nintendo's Game Boy put an end to those plans. In the mid-1990s, Jay Smith, then head of Smith Engineering, allowed new hardware and software development on a fee- and royalty-free basis. Smith has also allowed duplication of the original Vectrex software on a not-for-profit basis to allow Vectrex owners to obtain the original titles at low cost or for free.