The remaining fixes turned out to be something I could knock off in what was left of my lunch break. I tested it all last night, fixed a couple of other bugs I found and did a complete playthrough of the game. Having played through it, I changed my mind about the hit point reward when you leave a dungeon and put them back how it was. The game is definitely beatable anyway so I’m calling it done for now. I may revisit it at some point but I reckon I’ve achieved what I wanted when I set out. I’ll fix issues if anyone reports anything but right now I’m dubious as to whether anyone else will ever even play it. You can grab this latest version is at https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/Vecalabeth.rar as before.
Aside from a Vectrex, you’ll clearly need a Vectrex32 to run it which isn’t cheap and my port certainly isn’t worth that asking price on its own. It undoubtedly makes writing Vectrex games way, way easier than it would be otherwise so if you ever fancied creating a game of your own I’d certainly recommend picking one up. The BASIC variant it uses is still primitive but it’s no doubt a joyful experience compared to the alternative. I had quite a few issues with bugs when I first bought it but the updates since then have improved things no end. My overriding complaint is still the lack of emulation so that I have to load and run my code on real hardware all the time. Aside from the inconvenience, it seems like unnecessary wear and tear on an ever more valuable system. To compensate, I’ve been doing this oldschool and writing the code in a text editor (usually during my lunch) and then only running it when I’ve made decent progress. This isn’t how I prefer to code but it forces me into it.
If anyone does play Vecalabeth, please let me know how you get on. I think it’s a decent approximation of the original but I could do with some other opinions.