The Vectrex is a home console launched in late 1982 by General Consumer Electronics, then taken over by Milton Bradley after GCE was bought in 1983. It is the only consumer game console to include its own vector CRT screen: it does not plug into a television and draws glowing lines, in the manner of the Asteroids or Battlezone arcade cabinets, rather than an image made of pixels.
That technical choice gives it an instantly recognisable look, with a sharpness no television of the era could match. The game Mine Storm is burned into the machine's ROM and starts automatically when no cartridge is inserted. The official library, around thirty titles, includes Armor Attack, Scramble, Star Castle, Berzerk and Spike, the first console game with digitised voices.
Since the screen is monochrome, GCE shipped an overlay with every game: a coloured plastic sheet placed in front of the display to tint the image and add a printed backdrop. Accessories rounded out the machine, notably the Light Pen and the 3D Imager, a headset with a rotating disc producing an illusion of depth and colour.
Swept away by the video game crash, the Vectrex was pulled from the market in 1984. Its unusual design and the publication of its technical documentation turned it into a cult machine, still kept alive by an active homebrew scene that regularly releases new cartridges.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro vecx | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
A single emulator is offered on this system: vecx, available on every board, including RPi3 and RPi Zero 2. It supports CRT output. Netplay and softpatching are not available with this core.
RetroAchievements are available on this system; light guns are not supported. A controller is mandatory.
The original colour overlays are not reproduced by the emulation: games are displayed as monochrome vectors, as on the bare screen of the console.
No BIOS is required for this system: the Vectrex internal ROM is built into the core.
This system has a built-in downloader: open its menu and pick DOWNLOAD GAMES so that Recalbox fetches a selection of free games and installs them into the roms folder. A network connection is required.
Put your games in:
/recalbox/share/roms/vectrex/
Supported extensions: .vec .bin .zip .7z
The standard extension is .vec, the one used by No-Intro romsets, but .bin dumps are accepted too. .zip and .7z archives are read directly: leave them compressed.
Recalbox ships with five Vectrex games — Armor Attack, Mine Storm, Scramble Wars, Thrust and VecZ — already present in the roms folder on first boot. See the Included games page.