Speed Freak

Vectorbeam · 1979

by Daniel Ferrer

Details

Original hardware

Vectorbeam CCPU

Romset

roms/speedfrk.zip

Controls

The stick steers: how far you push it is how fast the wheel turns. Button 1 is the gas, button 2 shifts down, button 3 shifts up (four gears, first on start), button 4 brakes (gas off, first gear). Pull the stick down for a coin and start. On the web: Z, X, C, V and the arrow keys.

Analog controls

✓

Last update

2026-11-08

Changelog

1. v1.12026-11-08
   • A brake on button 4, which the cabinet does not have: it cuts the gas and drops to first gear, which stays when you let go.
   • Coin and start on the stick pulled down. Buttons 3 and 4 together no longer insert a coin, so shifting up never drops one.
   • The options screen's CONTROLS page also says what the stick does.
   • 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. v1.02026-11-06
   • First release.
   • Sound through the jack, which the game never had here: the board itself, modelled chip by chip from MAME's netlist -- the engine whose pitch the game sets every frame, the crash noise, the beeps -- and checked against that netlist on the same game: the same level and spectrum.
   • The gears on the buttons: the cabinet's four-position shifter as a sequential one, first gear on start. Before, nothing on the pad changed gear and the car would not move.
   • The stick as the wheel: how far it is pushed is how fast the wheel turns, as the cabinet's wheel reads. Before, the car turned only while the stick was moving.
   • The HUD (score, time, high score, and the gear you are in) rewritten in our font from the game's own memory, and moved into the tube's empty edge: above the picture with the screen vertical, beside it horizontal.
   • An options screen at start, after the Vectrex Studio intro: screen vertical or horizontal, refresh, brightness, controls and calibration.