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Vectrex Doom [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2026-10-09  

Doom running on toothbrushes is old news. The new thing is porting Doom to ancient systems. Few offer a more starkly-different experience to the original's low-res pseudo-3D than the vectorbeam Vectrex, already a vintage curiosity by the time Id software's 1993 FPS came out.

Created by Jason Kopp, the key upgrade (the Vectrex's 1.5Mhz CPU and 1kb of RAM would not be up to the job) is the Ultimate Vectrex Multicart 2, also by Kopp and Ralf Kornmann. The UVM2's Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller runs the game's logic and feeds ready-to-display output to the old machine. Here's video of it in action:

some graphics were hand traced and other were auto traced. fully playable with sound coming from the audio jack on the cart its self. to play you need to buy the .wad file from steam or copy it from a copy of doom you already own. this was made using Dani Ferrer Guerrero's SDK for the uvmc2

As dead-end technology goes, nothing lives quite like vectorbeam. Scramble was perhaps the best game that runs on the original hardware alone; Vector Patrol is among the most famous homebrew titles. Vectorbeam arcade classic Star Wars was never released for it in its day, but it's been ported since using the similar Vecfever cart; here's another game Jason created for his upgraded system:





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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2026/10/09/vectrex-doom.html

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