I decided to do something ridiculous for a potential upcoming project… I made a 4-player Vectrex game. I know, four players on a Vectrex sounds strange and very few people have four controllers. I just really wanted to make something that my kids and I could play together on the Vectrex.

Although I have some ideas on how to do a proper multitap I decided to cheat. The interest in something like this is not very high so I don’t feel too bad about going the easy route. Instead of four players having use of all directions and all buttons, each player gets two directions and two buttons.

In this game, “Super Smash Blocks”, each player can go left and right as well as jump and hit. Left and right on player 3 / 4 controller is connected to what is normally up and down for player 1 / 2. Buttons 3 and 4 on player 3 / 4 controller are connected to buttons 1 and 2 on player 1 / 2 controller. Players 1 and 3 plug into port 1. Players 2 and 4 plug into port 2.

Aside from making it easy to design and code for, it is also easy for anyone to wire up their own adapter if they want one.

Since I’ve become interested in designing my own PCBs, I decided to take a crack at making one for this project. Big thanks to Brett W. for helping me with KiCad.

Each board, which I called a “Vectrex 2×2” (2 buttons/directions x 2 controllers), is meant for one joystick port. Either players 1 and 3 or 2 and 4. The idea is to combine two boards in a case to create a “Vectrex 2×4”. If only one board is needed for three player gaming, or just to use the light phaser port, that is okay too.

The test batch of these boards had an issue that I overlooked but it is easily fixed by cutting a trace and adding a jumper. The issue will not be hard to fix for future boards if I decide to make more.

This is just something I felt like doing and will not necessarily be releasing. Sometimes you have to get things out of your system, no matter how silly it is.