I saw the prototype at gamescom, too. I was there with a friend. When we noticed that it was not a true vector display, we were both bewildered. What's the point?
On the Vectrex you could only draw lines between 256 x 256 grid points, so in theory 800 x 600 with antialiasing would be enough. But dunno if it would have the same contrast, OLED is as good as you can get I guess.
On a tiny screen like that, I suspect 800x600 is probably high enough DPI to fake the lines themselves well enough to the point where the pixels aren't discernable to the eye.
This alone still wouldn't remotely resemble a real vector display...
They would also need to accurately simulate the glow/bloom of the lines, and the phosphor decay rate over time that leads to effects like the "trail" behind the bullets in Asteroids. That is all extremely feasible. In a lot of ways, much easier than emulating a raster CRT display.
However, I have never seen a commercial emulation product do this with any competency.
Presumably because the number of people who would actually care is not large enough to affect the sales figures in any meaningful way.
Not really. One of the advantages of vector displays is the fact that the drawn lines are razor sharp with zero aliasing. Another is the fact that the hardware has very fine control over the brightness, allowing for very bright or very dim lines to be drawn. The bright ones are brighter than could be replicated with raster CRT displays, and combined with slow-decay phosphors made for some beautiful "trail" effects. A pixelated display of any sort can only yield a rough approximation at best.
and combined with slow-decay phosphors made for some beautiful "trail" effects
Thank you. This is such an under-appreciated aspect of vector games' unique look on real hardware.
A pixelated display of any sort can only yield a rough approximation at best.
Why do you feel this way? With sufficient DPI, to me this is fairly easy to achieve. A few examples of emulation that look like they're doing a very good job:
I think they have the bloom dialed up way too high, and maybe the trails aren't prominent enough, but I assume those are easy things to tweak.
Last time I played a well-maintained Asteroids cabinet, bullets had obvious bloom, but I was surprised to not see a trail. There wasn't any noticeable bloom or trails on the other objects. I believe the arcade monitors have fast decay phosphor like in regular TV sets, so any trail would come from persistence of vision, probably due to the brightness of the bullet.
I'm not sure about the Vectrex CRT, it may have longer persistence phosphor.
The Asteroids I've played had a slow-decay phosphor and trails on the bullets (not so much the asteroids, UFOs, etc). If the cabinet you played had its tube replaced with a TV picture tube, its display characteristics may have changed.
The bloom might be all right if they could replicate the intensity. Maybe with an OLED and sufficient HDR color depth, but I'm not seeing that here. It doesn't look like they did much CRT effect processing on the second two. The fireballs in Star Wars should glow the way the bullets in Asteroids do (albeit with quicker phosphor decay so not much in the way of trails).