Demon

Rock-Ola · 1982

by Daniel Ferrer

Details

Original hardware

Rock-Ola CCPU

Romset

roms/demon.zip

Controls

The stick left and right turns. Button 1 fires, button 2 thrusts, button 3 is the cabinet's third button, button 4 starts. Buttons 1 and 2 together insert a coin. On the web: Z, X, C, V and the arrow keys.

Analog controls

–

Orientation

Horizontal game: drawn rotated 90°

Last update

2026-11-08

Changelog

1. v1.12026-11-08
   • The romset can live in any folder of the card. The game looks in .roms/, then roms/, then searches the whole card, and remembers where it found it (.conf/<romset>.loc), so the next start goes straight there; if it is moved, it is searched for again.
   • Settings go in .conf/ and romsets in .roms/: the UVMC2's menu hides folders whose name starts with a dot, so the card shows only the games. A card set up before keeps everything: the old config/ and roms/ are still read, and nothing is written to them any more.
   • Without the romset on the card the screen says ROM FILE NOT FOUND and the name of the zip it wants.
2. v1.02026-11-05
   • First release.
   • Sound through the jack, which the game never had here: its sound board emulated whole -- the Z80, its CTC and the three AY-3-8910s -- fed with the game's commands through the board's own FIFO, at MAME's level, measured on the same game.
   • The HUD and the HALL OF FAME no longer flicker. The game draws its text in halves, one half a frame (MAME shows it so); the cabinet's monitor held each half through the other frame, the Vectrex's does not. What alternates and does not move is now drawn every frame, in the same order.
   • Runs at the arcade's own 38 Hz, at 300 MHz: at 150 the sound board's three chips alone took most of the frame.
   • Fire, thrust and the third button on three buttons, START on the fourth, a coin on the first two together.
   • The cabinet's switches as it ships: three lives, one coin a credit. They read six lives.
   • The picture keeps the cabinet's shape and fills the screen, upright and with the console on its side.
   • An options screen at start, after the Vectrex Studio intro: screen vertical or horizontal, refresh, brightness, controls (the buttons can be remapped, and the choice is saved) and calibration.