[Peer]

Today I sent your copies of VB!

What a thing of beauty!!! Yesterday, I returned from my trip to Munich and finally opened your packet which my neighbours had kept meanwhile. In reality, the whole box, cartridge, overlay and diary look even better than on the pictures you posted.

Many thanks for this, and for letting me be a part in this endeavor!

I am surely going to miss the updates and discussions we all had here…

Hope you are all well and safe! Have a great time!

I am off now, playing…

🙂

[Peer]

Honestly, I am really looking forward to seeing people play Vectorblade!

I don’t think Vectorblade can be played “endlessly”.

Sorry, if that might have come across the wrong way. I certainly do not think that Vectorblade can be played endlessly. On the contrary. I think that the difficulty and the ramping up of the difficulty by now are really well designed, and that the game poses a true challenge to any player, regardless of how skilled they are.

I am always in awe when you guys write about how many hundreds of levels and how many hours you played. I am still having trouble at many stages of the game. So when I used the term marathon I was more trying to be a bit ironic. Meaning: I strongly believe that neither the sane nor the insane players will ever stumble across this bug.

So if you want to know – you must either hexdump or recreate the “bug” situation – good luck!

Haha, if it wasn’t for the labelling of the cartridges, that would make it even more mysterious. Just knowing that there are 31 special cartridges among the 100, but not knowing which ones…

Cheers,
Peer

PS:

I don’t think Vectorblade can be played “endlessly”.

Take an educated guess about Vec-Man… 😉

[Peer]

I even think that you should stick to VB v1.00 for all other copies #32-#100.

Na, collector’s value! Think of it this way: Of the 100 lucky Vectorblade owners, only a minority of 31 even luckier guys will have the rare and special v1.00 version, while the others just get the ordinary bugfree (fingers crossed!) v1.01 version.

Every true Vectrex game must hide at least one infamous bug! A good developer’s choice is level 13, but why not after a couple of hundred levels? 😉

… players might have a small disadvantage when playing Vectorblade in a tournament like the Vector War…

Hehe, in last year’s Vector War, Vec-Man was flamed for being a long-run game. I am looking forward to seeing the Vectorblade marathons 🙂

Cheers,
Peer

[Peer]

My sincere congratulations! Nice picture of the boxes 🙂

You probably won’t have the time to answer, but out of curiosity:

– Is the limit of 100 orders already reached?
– What are the crooked things of your crooked Vectrex? Is there some way/utility to assert the crookedness of ones own Vectrex?
– Did you get more insight on the taxation aspect of selling Vectorblade?

Many Cheers from Munich,
Peer

[Peer]

I am starting a “builder” page…

… cool! Thanks, that is very helpful and interesting!

[Peer]

Hi guys,

just wanted to let you know that I am still with you. Just once again too many things happening at once over here. I am reading the posts, and I am also playing. I did not find any bugs or anything worth mentioning. I just played and enjoyed the game. Which actually is worth mentioning! 🙂

Yes, David from Packrat is a nice and reliable person. After all, he also did the physical release of Vec-Man 😉

But as far as I know Packrat does standard PCBs. At one point they planned a compilation release of some classroom games, but they seemed to have a bit trouble bringing everything on one cartridge, so the whole thing was put on hold.

Actually I think it is perfectly fine that there will be just 100 official Vectorblade cartridges. Just 100? I think 100 is quite a lot, and since all material will be public domain, I think this is indeed more than fair.

Cheers,
Peer

[Peer]

drunken only above level 75

What? Prohibition?

That completely disrupts my current playing strategy to quickly get some cash 🙁

At least you could have set it to 18 or 21, as depending on where you live one is legally entitled to buy alcohol from 18 or 21 onwards!

Cheers, and enjoy your roadtrip,
Peer

[Peer]

Tststs (*shaking head and throwing arms in the air*), you all – why didn’t you find that???

Who on Earth decides to hide a crash in such a cornercase? Haven’t they taught you some decent and easy bugs back in programming school?

You Voldemort!

[Peer]

That is very kind of you and highly appreciated. But please note that I consider being among the beta testers, and thus having had the opportunity to closely follow the complete development of the game, as enough privilege already. I really feel a bit bad that I did not manage to play as much as all the other testers did. And trying to help in the big Voldemort bug hunt in that sense was rather a nice intellectual challenge and thus a whole lot of “fun” for me, so that doesn’t count. Especially because I was chasing in all the wrong directions…

I only have a layman’s knowledge of the sales things, but I agree with Helmut, the regulations regarding “kleinunternehmerische Tätigkeiten” seem to be applicable here.

As far as I understand that means that you have to pay taxes for the “financial profits” you made. The profits are what is left from the money you charge for the games, after deducting all the production costs. If you still have the bills, then prodcution costs could include all hardware parts for the cartridges themselves, the eprom burners and the eprom chips used for development and testing, the soldering iron, the overlay and box production costs, including those costs for the “bad prototypes” you did not use. Maybe also the price you paid for yet another used Vectrex console? And probably more.

If you do not explicitly charge postage on top, then you can also deduct the shipping costs. If you let the buyers explicitly pay for postage on top of the price for the game, then you cannot deduct postage as your own costs. And now the maths kick in…

If you want to minimize the taxes you have to pay, then (on paper) you should reduce the profit margin. But when it comes to determining the price of the game and whether or not to charge postage, that might be in conflict with trying to maximize the amount of “pocket money” you have left over for yourself in the end.

For me, the very fact that “tax counselling” exists as a profession indicates that there might me some flaws and overcomplication in the tax systems itself…

Cheers,
Peer

[Peer]

Thanks a lot for adding the booze money 🙂 That is fun!

Also LOVE the scifi references/citations! If you want someone to check all of them for spelling mistakes etc. then please send me the ascii source code and I wil gladly go through them 🙂

[Peer]

One question/afterthought, as I couldn’t get this out of my mind:

How many points/coins (if any) are scored when collecting the bottle? I have to admit I never really paid attention to this, and right now I cannot check. A fun thing could be if collecting the booze would be rewarded with a rather large amount of money. Yeah, not setting a good ethical example in real life, but in the game, for the player the bottle bonus then would be some kind of nice gamble: risk reversed control in order to quickly get a huge sum of money…

Btw. do you others also deal with the drunken bonus by flipping your controller upside down (rotating 180 degrees clockwise)?

The joystick and the buttons face downwards, so you have to push upwards for firing, but joystick to the “now left”/”now right” results in “ship left”/”right” without any confusion. I wouldn’t mind if this strategy “pays” off 🙂

[Peer]

I was merely being curious. I did not want to raise any new feature discussions.

But since you asked (and because it is fun to think about it), the consequences of “drinking too much” could be (in no particular order)

– immunity to booze for the rest of the current life
– immunity to booze for the rest of the current game
– immunity to booze for the rest of all eternity
– the title of “drunken master”

or on the bad side

– shaky hands (ship jittering all the time)
– reduced reflexes (ship getting really slow, or reacting really slow)
– blurred vision (flickering enemies)
– impaired motion control (analog left-right control instead of digital)
– total loss of motion control
– reduction in rank due to improper conduct
– instant death
– cartridge reset to factory settings

😉

[Peer]

Curious: I tried, but I haven’t been able to figure this out so far, due to lack of enough playing time. Is there an achievement/reward/secret for catching x drunken bonuses (boni) in a row? Like some super-intoxication-bonus for FUI (flying/fighting under the influence)? 🙂

[Peer]

Everything vtk wrote sounds great and very professional. Just keep in mind that there are some oldtimers (like me, for example) who are not on facebook.

[Peer]

Hi again!

I have never done such a SALE before, any pointers or thoughts?

Neither have I. Nor do I have any good suggestion at hand. My pessimistic guess is that no matter which way you will do it, there will be some people who will complain and who will cry unfair.

Should I just let them email me, and date/time sorted the first fifty win?

You would have to define some UTC point of time as start of sales. Which means that it will be in the middle of the night for some people around the world, and noon for others, giving certain global regions an advantage. Then there can be mail server delays. Though probably tiny, those will have an effect on the time point of arrival at your mailbox and thus on the order of incoming mails. Also, emails sent from the same provider which hosts your account should reach you “faster” than emails sent from outside domains due to technical reasons.

The whole process is a bit of a lottery.

I do think very highly of the Vectrex community, so it is unlikely that someone would do such a thing, but it is not that difficult to prepare a script that will just run automatically on a laptop and start exactly at UTC start-of-sales (or a fraction earlier) and then send some 50 emails within a few milliseconds to your account, significantly increasing the chances of being among the “first” incoming emails. And “Hey, I have no idea why you got that many emails from me, I just pressed send once” 😉

A true lottery could be a fun thing. Set a window of time (an hour or so) for registering by email (complete name and address). Then print all names on paper slips and put them inside a hat and let your nephew draw the “winners” in a live stream event. Helmut did something similar at the last Vector War, and that was fun.

Vectorblade_B58.bin – 7th July 2020

Thanks a lot! I will definitely play and test. Sorry that in the past I could not play nearly as much as the others did. You should probably remove me from the “beta testers” section and rather add a “weird and unlikely theories providers” section, or an “innocent-stack accusers” section…

Cheers,
Peer

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