The Vectrex came with its own screen, because no television could draw what it drew. It has no pixels: a beam traces the lines of the picture, and they glow. It is the only home console that ever worked this way, and it needs no BIOS to emulate.
We have 25 Vectrex games on My Abandonware, which is nearly the whole of the original catalogue — Star Castle, Scramble, Berzerk and the rest.
Emulators
The vecx core is the one to use, in RetroArch, on any system. MAME plays the console just as well. ParaJVE is the odd one, and the only one that draws the coloured overlays by itself.
- vecx: a core for RetroArch, on every system. It has the settings that make the screen look right. Recommended.
- MAME (Windows, Mac, Linux) knows the machine as
vectrex. The hardware is fully emulated. - ParaJVE (Windows, Mac, Linux): a Java emulator, last touched in 2010, which ships with every game and every overlay already inside it. Old, and it wants a Java runtime, but nothing else saves you the work below.
Running the games
There is no BIOS to find and nothing to set up. Open the .vec or .bin file from our zip and the game starts, because the program of the console itself is built into every emulator.
Our files are 4 to 33 KB. That is also why the game that lived inside the machine is already there.
Mine Storm was inside the machine. It is on the screen when the emulator starts with nothing loaded. We list it as a download for the sake of the catalogue; you do not need it.
The company that owns the Vectrex gave its blessing, years ago, to fans copying the games and the manuals for themselves, so long as nobody sells them. That is why emulators of this console can hand you the games with them.
Colour and glow
The Vectrex screen was black and white. Colour came from a plastic sheet clipped over it, a different one per game, and every emulator has to put it back somehow.
ParaJVE draws them by itself: pick a game and its overlay appears. Nothing to fetch, nothing to configure.
In RetroArch it is work. Overlays live in packs, such as libretro's overlay-borders, and each game needs its own image and its own small settings file, saved from Quick Menu > Overrides. Worth doing for the games you keep coming back to, not for a first look.
The glow is a separate matter, and the vecx core does it well. Its options carry line brightness, line width, bloom brightness and bloom width: turn the bloom up and the lines bleed into the black the way the real tube did. It is the difference between a wireframe and a Vectrex.
The 3D games and the light pen
Three of our games want an accessory that plugged into the console. Two need the 3D Imager, a spinning colour wheel you held to your face; one needs the light pen.
3D Mine Storm and 3D Narrow Escape were drawn for the 3D Imager, which turned in front of your eyes and coloured alternate frames. On a flat screen they run, and they look wrong — flickering, half-coloured. ParaJVE is the emulator that has tried hardest at this one.
Lightpen is a drawing program for the Vectrex light pen, not a game. Without the pen there is nothing to do in it.
I need help!
We do not provide support for running abandonware games. The Vectrex has kept a small, busy following, and two sites hold most of it.
The Vectrex Museum covers every cartridge, every overlay and the hardware, and PlayVectrex has the manuals, the scans and the history. The Emulation General Wiki compares the emulators.
Checked in October 2026 against each emulator's own documentation and, where it exists, its source code. Game counts and file sizes come from our own catalogue. These guides were drafted with the help of an AI assistant and checked by hand before publishing. If something here is out of date, tell us.