Jaguar 2

[neo_rg]

This thread from 3 years ago has some interesting info.

http://ataricommunity.com/forums/showthread.php?t=556251

Post 16 just about sums it up tho, no libs = no fpga.

[+Stephen]

We don't even have a working Atari 8-bit in FPGA, and that's with schematics and decapped chips to work from. The closest is the replicated GTIA which forms the core of the VBXE upgrade. ANTIC and PoKey haven't been done, and these chips are made up of roughly 6000 transistors IIRC. Am I to believe that within a few months, a working Jag 2 was done in FPGA? Anyone have a bridge to sell me?

[The_Laird]

We don't even have a working Atari 8-bit in FPGA, and that's with schematics and decapped chips to work from. The closest is the replicated GTIA which forms the core of the VBXE upgrade. ANTIC and PoKey haven't been done, and these chips are made up of roughly 6000 transistors IIRC. Am I to believe that within a few months, a working Jag 2 was done in FPGA? Anyone have a bridge to sell me?

 

I don't anymore about it other than Gorf and some other people from JS2 had been working on it usuing the orginal Jag 2 schematics that Jay had got hold of. This was a few years ago now and there was topics about it they were updating about every month or so but they may be/have been in a Super Secret Special™ area of the forum as I said. You are better of asking people who are members there.

[wozencl]

Your usual fantasies then? We've gone from definite statements: "Gorf and a friend created one a few years ago.", "A guy did the FPGA and Gorf did the testing" and "It's on JSII, how could you have missed it?" to "I don't really know anything; my memory is hazy; the posts must have been hidden!".

 

If you're not sure whether you've made something up or not check first before you post.

[ggn]

Not meaning to pry or anything but...

[The_Laird]

Your usual fantasies then? We've gone from definite statements: "Gorf and a friend created one a few years ago.", "A guy did the FPGA and Gorf did the testing" and "It's on JSII, how could you have missed it?" to "I don't really know anything; my memory is hazy; the posts must have been hidden!".

 

If you're not sure whether you've made something up or not check first before you post.

 

I think something must be up with your comprehension as its already been confirmed there was topics about it on JS2. I already told you and Remo to go search for it if you care that much and you, as an active user there, more than anyone should know that all the best stuff on JS2 is in a Super Secret Special™ area. So as I already suggested you people who are members can search for this information while people who are not members cannot.

[+Sauron]

Your usual fantasies then?

 

Undoubtedly. I can't read anything written by the member in question here without having an extremely high degree of skepticism. And that's putting it mildly.

 

BTW Liard, don't you talk to Gorf on a daily basis anyway? I'm sure you could clear up this "hazy memory" in a manner of minutes. I don't think any of us are holding our breath, though.

[+remowilliams]

I've searched already on a few occasions and found nothing.

 

I've also looked before and found nothing except the usual Gorf 'woulda coulda shoulda' talk and nothing actually happening. Maybe Liard could go and ask Gorf for direct proof on his Super Secret Special Forum...

 

Your usual fantasies then? We've gone from definite statements: "Gorf and a friend created one a few years ago.", "A guy did the FPGA and Gorf did the testing" and "It's on JSII, how could you have missed it?" to "I don't really know anything; my memory is hazy; the posts must have been hidden!".

 

Exactly. Just throw it on top of the monumental pile of bullshit that's already been spewed by everyone's favorite 'author' and 'gaming historian'

 

Or maybe this super FPGA project has been covered up on Bullshit Mountain by other stuff. Maybe if you dig under all the super secret proto information (i.e. games nobody was ever working on, or even planned to, but I think I heard someone read it in a magazine once somewhere, so it's true!), or all the Spectrum games you could find it. Who knows you might even find that 100% version of Soulstar that's in there that nobody has ever seen or heard of before!

[The_Laird]

BTW Laird, don't you talk to Gorf on a daily basis anyway? I'm sure you could clear up this "hazy memory" in a manner of minutes. I don't think any of us are holding our breath, though.

 

Nope, what makes you think that?

 

A quick Google search pulled up THIS

[+Sauron]

[Nope, what makes you think that?

 

A quick Google search pulled up THIS

 

A quote by someone saying they are "working" on something is far different than them having actually done it. I can quite easily say that I'm working on programming the next big Spectrum game, or even say that I've already done so, but just saying that I have is a far cry from actually accomplishing it. You need to learn the difference between fantasy and reality.

[wozencl]

I think something must be up with your comprehension as its already been confirmed there was topics about it on JS2.

 

My comprehension is fine, focus on your own for the time being.

 

You seem to be contradicting your own source...

 

Weren't the CPU schematics kicking about somewhere? You could always get them and program up an FPGA or some such. Have another working Jag 2.. with absolutely no software to run on it

 

Gorf and somebody else did that a few years ago just to see what kind of performance it had.

 

From June 2008

 

Gorf: If I ever get these libs Im sure we can get this working and my FPGA guy says

we can possibly get it running at very high speed like hunderds of MHZ.

 

CrazyAce: How did this go? Did you find your libs Gorf?

 

--- Missing Gorf post ---

 

CrazyAce: That's a pity - it would have been interesting to see.

Edited March 19, 2011 by wozencl

[The_Laird]

Not really, I am pretty sure its still being worked on. But seems you did as I suggested and went searching on JS2

 

Maybe you could ask your friends there for more information on it

[wozencl]

Just a quick recap then...

 

Gorf and somebody else did that a few years ago just to see what kind of performance it had.

 

X

 

Somebody else did the FPGA, Gorf assisted and did all the testing.

And it happened a few years ago and now and was posted on JS2 so not sure how you missed it as I know you are a member there.

 

X

 

The whole chip set was done in FPGA from what I remember. The nets were taken from the original blueprints and design documents.

 

X

 

Your usual High Score, I commend you. Next time, just say "Ooops, I could've sworn they managed to finish it." or "Sorry it seems I got that wrong." and spare us the BS.

 

P.S. - You've mentioned JSII five times today alone.

[+Sauron]

Not really, I am pretty sure its still being worked on. But seems you did as I suggested and went searching on JS2

 

Maybe you could ask your friends there for more information on it

 

Why any of us need to research this is beyond me. You are the one making the claim, hence it is up to you to provide the evidence to back it up, which you have yet to do. That you are unable to pull up the pertinent information on JSII because you managed to get yourself banned from there is your problem, not ours.

[The_Laird]

If you think I was banned then you are clearly unaware of the facts.

 

I don't need to prove anything, I know what I need to know. If you want to know more then that your choice whether or not you want to search for it. I am sure there are plenty of folks who can provide you with more info, maybe you can contact the guy from that FPGA arcade site. Best of luck

[+Sauron]

If you think I was banned then you are clearly unaware of the facts.

 

Then please enlighten us to the facts. Just be prepared for a very healthy dose of skepticism, considering that you appear to be a complete stranger to the truth.

 

I don't need to prove anything, I know what I need to know. If you want to know more then that your choice whether or not you want to search for it. I am sure there are plenty of folks who can provide you with more info, maybe you can contact the guy from that FPGA arcade site. Best of luck

 

I'll state this again since reading comprehension is obviously not one of your talents. Those who make claims are the ones responsible for providing evidence of said claims. It is not up to everyone else to research it. You in particular should be aware of this considering that virtually everything you post on here is a blatant lie.

[+CyranoJ]

Maybe he'll review this FPGA Jaguar 2 in Atari User next month... and then he can claim it was in a magazine!

[kool kitty89]

The fundamental chipset (namely Oberon/Tom II) totalyl kicked the PSX's ass (specifically the GPU) and had advantages over the N64's RSP as well, but like the orignal Jag, it would have had to switch to a higher cost bracket (like Sony or Sega pushed) and dropped backwards compatibility to truly meet those goals.

 

I think I'll have to disagree on that point - Although the jaguar ii chipset was better than the first it would still barely match the PSX or even the Saturn.

Bilinear filtering was there but it ran at 1/4 the rate of normal texturing , and there was no perspective correct texturing in hardware.

It would have been fun to program though

It certainly maintained and extended the flexibility advantages of the original Jaguar, but by "higher cost bracket" I mean building it out into a high-end configuration with no concern for backwards compatibility and with 33 MHz EDO DRAM (assuming the chips were bumped to 33 MHz) and Oberon on a dedicated bus (say 2 MB of 33 MHz 64-bit EDO DRAM) and a separate bus for the CPU (either shared with audio or keeping a separate slow bus for audio as well).

That, and goign a step further and just talking about Oberon as the graphics ASIC, you could configure it in a REAL high-end arcade system or console and drop in a high performance off the shelf CPU on a dedicated bus. (forget the likes of an R3000 or SH2, more like an R4300, R3900, PPC 602, SH3, or maybe a fast 486 -or going further and dropping in a full PPC 603, R4600, Pentium/K-5/6x86, etc -technically the 603 and 4600 WERE intended for embedded markets and were designed to be lower cost, but really were lower cost in the high-end bracket) And have any of those on equally fast EDO DRAM.

In the case of the high-powered CPU, no need to finish the design for TOM II/puck either, just the old TOM (probably with a fixed UART and maybe a couple other tweaks) on a dedicated slow DRAM bus.

 

Still, even on a dedicated bus, at 33 (or 33.33) MHz at 64-bits, that's still only 266 MB/s peak bandwidth (about 1/2 that of the N64) though perhaps with advantages over the latency issues of the N64's RDRAM. (I'm not sure on the details of that though and some things I've read indicate more of an issue with the CPU's DMA connection having high latency -like the DSP in the Jag- and possibly not being directly related to the use of RDRAM and not affecting the RSP in the same way as the CPU)

 

Though if you talk about pure performance potential as such, you'd want to consider the N64's RSP also configured on a dedicated bus. (hmm, actually, I wonder if it actually could have been more cost effective in some respects if they'd used only 2 MB of RDRAM for the RSP on a dedicated bus and 2 MB of commodity EDO DRAM for the CPU/IO/sound side of things at 1/3 the CPU's clock speed -more cost from the dual bus design, but savings on component costs and performance gains of separate buses -especially savings after 512kx32-bit EDO DRAM chips became available) Then again, it WAS SGI developed/licensed, so they'd have had a better deal on RDRAM in general than on the mass market. (and the RSP was specifically designed -or at least configured- around using the 9-bit RDRAM)

 

The PSX already has a dedicated video bus clocked as fast as the GPU (I think it may be VRAM too, but maybe just EDO DRAM -a lot of references to "VRAM" are actually just talking about video memory regardless of it being DRAM, SRAM, etc), and the Saturn is using multiple video buses and separate source and destination to get reasonable performance out of the unbuffered VDP1. (they also oddly used SDRAM rather than EDO even though nothing in the system is faster than 28.7 MHz -presumably done to cut R&D costs and time to develop a fully asynchronous interface, seems like a pretty bad move in hindsight -and oddly they DID have both FMP DRAM and SDRAM interfaced to CPUs and audio though, so they had some asynchronous interfacing)

 

 

Then again, it's the same thing with the Jaguar I. Take Jerry and give it a decent MB of EDO DRAM with 2 banks (1 256kx16 and 4 64kx16 chips) of EDO DRAM running as fast as TOM and allowing double the bandwidth for all buffered operations and roughly 4.66x faster texture mapping (26.6 MHz, separate source and destination) and a 2nd bus with Jerry and a decent 32-bit CPU using FPM or EDO DRAM (possibly faster JERRY accesses since it doesn't have to deal with TOM handshaking) or maybe a dedicated sound bus for Jerry. (and whatever capacity of RAM you wanted depending on the exact cost parameters)

Hell, it still probably would have been cheaper to manufacture (at similar volumes) than the 3DO even with 3 MB of EDO DRAM and a SH2, R3000, or ARM610 (let alone lower performing/cheaper options), or at very least significantly cheaper to manufacture than the Saturn. (possibly not the PSX unless you remove the context of Sony's vertical integration, in-house licenses and patents, etc)

 

But that's not really surprising once you realize how high the cost to performance ratio is for the base Jaguar chipset is. (actually, it makes me wonder why TWI/Atari Games stopped at the only moderately enhanced CoJag -still a single bus, main block of FMP DRAM, added 1 MB of 32-bit VRAM and an '020 or R3000 when they could have pushed it much further in the context of an arcade budget -even for a relatively lower-cost arcade system, then again they hardly pushed the CoJag as it was -it doesn't really look like they did anything the stock Jag couldn't if hooked up to a HDD)

 

Well, except with the Jaguar's blitter, you don't have any support for 16 color textures, so RAM use is a bit tighter than the Saturn's VDP1. (hell, it might have actually been faster than the Saturn at a true triangle rasterizer using the blitter+GPU as such vs using an SH2+VDP1 with line filling or "pinched" quads with 50% overdraw -and there's quite a few Saturn games using pinched quads or software assisted triangle rasterizers . . . maybe the SCU DSP in the Saturn could have been more competitive with the Jag's GPU at assisting line by line rasterization on VDP1)

 

 

Hmm, actually I wonder how cost effective it would have been for Atari to configure the Jag with pure EDO DRAM if they cut total RAM to just 1 MB (512k 16-bit bank and 512k 64-bit bank). Less RAM is limiting, but the sheer bandwidth advantages would have been extremely substantial for the time and the price of EDO DRAM would have been dropping significantly at a time when common low-end FPM DRAM prices were stagnating (so that 1 MB of EDO DRAM would have been getting cheaper and cheaper while the historical Jag's FPM DRAM was barely changing in price). Keeping JERRY and the 68k in that 16-bit bank all the time would also reduce performance hits a good bit (especially if they could have implemented Amiga-like interleaving but in fast page mode for the separate bank).

Maybe they could even have switched to a 386SX on top of that, or even a Cyrix 486SLC. (both would use a similar number of traces as the 68k -more pins, but just redundant VCC/gnd/NC lines- and a 386SX, or maybe even the SLC may have been cheaper on the mass market than an EC020 due to the higher demand/volume for x86 CPUs and more competitive market -vs 68k which only had the original 68000 being produced competitively by multiple manufacturers, then there's the surge of high profile PC games being developed in x86 assembly language in the early 90s before the switch to mainly high-level programming; that and there were no 26.6 or 39.9 MHz 68000s available in mass production from those competitive licensed manufacturers -technically a fast 286 would have had better performance than a 68k too, but then you don't get the flat 32-bit address model of 386 protected mode and 286 production was declining in the early/mid 90s -had Atari corp kept pushing their PC line, they might have already had a high volume supplier for 386SXs and stockpiles -maybe even Cyrix SLCs in use: that 1k cache and the added 486 instructions are pretty nice)

 

And, of course, Atari had many more problems than hardware or even software difficulties with the state they were in in 1993. (management, cash flow/funding, marketing, etc) Though at least with more foolproof hardware they'd have had more of a chance to get enough momentum to dig into a niche on the market and have a better chance of rectifying their various management/marketing/etc problems. (but as Kskunk said, they were pretty much doomed after 1991 -not having any new home console from the 7800 to Jag was a big part of that, but screw ups with the computers and other things certainly were major factors as well -more so for their European market than the US- and even having the sub-par Panther out in 1990 probably would have been a lot better than what they did -which was nothing until the Jag and the Lynx and ST had failed to make anywhere near the impression in the US as in Europe)

Edited March 19, 2011 by kool kitty89

[+remowilliams]

I'll state this again since reading comprehension is obviously not one of your talents. Those who make claims are the ones responsible for providing evidence of said claims. It is not up to everyone else to research it. You in particular should be aware of this considering that virtually everything you post on here is a blatant lie.

 

Precisely. Nobody with a shred of credibility should believe anything he has to say at this point. To paraphrase Sard from World of Spectrum calling out Liard/Mr. Kizza for his ridiculous Spectrum programming lies:

 

'he may very well have a right to live in a world of illusions, but he has never had the right to make other people unknowingly live in it with him'

 

 

Your usual High Score, I commend you. Next time, just say "Ooops, I could've sworn they managed to finish it." or "Sorry it seems I got that wrong." and spare us the BS.

 

Yes, and so yet once again, the usual game over for Liard/Mr. Kizza.

 

[svenski]

Maybe he'll review this FPGA Jaguar 2 in Atari User next month... and then he can claim it was in a magazine!

 

I hope you're not trying to drag me into this endless round of childish bullshit?

[+Sauron]

I hope you're not trying to drag me into this endless round of childish bullshit?

 

I'm pretty sure the post in question wasn't directed towards you, just towards the one individual who has extreme difficulty in telling the truth about anything. It's a mere unfortunate circumstance that said individual happens to write for your magazine.

[Crazyace]

The fundamental chipset (namely Oberon/Tom II) totalyl kicked the PSX's ass (specifically the GPU) and had advantages over the N64's RSP as well, but like the orignal Jag, it would have had to switch to a higher cost bracket (like Sony or Sega pushed) and dropped backwards compatibility to truly meet those goals.

 

I think I'll have to disagree on that point - Although the jaguar ii chipset was better than the first it would still barely match the PSX or even the Saturn.

Bilinear filtering was there but it ran at 1/4 the rate of normal texturing , and there was no perspective correct texturing in hardware.

It would have been fun to program though

It certainly maintained and extended the flexibility advantages of the original Jaguar, but by "higher cost bracket" I mean building it out into a high-end configuration with no concern for backwards compatibility and with 33 MHz EDO DRAM (assuming the chips were bumped to 33 MHz) and Oberon on a dedicated bus (say 2 MB of 33 MHz 64-bit EDO DRAM) and a separate bus for the CPU (either shared with audio or keeping a separate slow bus for audio as well).

Ah - so you're not talking about the Atari Jaguar 2 , but a new imaginary chipset with no design for cost

Even with 2x ram b/w though you wouldn't speed up the theoretical performance of the blitter - 4 pixels in 2 cycles is aimed at 64 bit fast page memory. EDO/SD ram would be better used to reduce the component count by only needing 32 bit wide memory.

 

 

Then again, it's the same thing with the Jaguar I. Take Jerry and give it a decent MB of EDO DRAM with 2 banks (1 256kx16 and 4 64kx16 chips) of EDO DRAM running as fast as TOM and allowing double the bandwidth for all buffered operations and roughly 4.66x faster texture mapping (26.6 MHz, separate source and destination) and a 2nd bus with Jerry and a decent 32-bit CPU using FPM or EDO DRAM (possibly faster JERRY accesses since it doesn't have to deal with TOM handshaking) or maybe a dedicated sound bus for Jerry. (and whatever capacity of RAM you wanted depending on the exact cost parameters)

A pretty major reimagining of the Jaguar - why not just fix the h/w bugs, drop the 68k and release a CD only machine in 93

[Christos]

The irony of arguing against something once promoted doesn't elude me but people change their minds, I guess sometimes very often.

 

On a related fpga note, the suska board is now available, as well as the ACP.

 

On an unrelated note, I've stopped expecting consistency. One would need infinite memory to maintain that and the human brain just doesn't work like that. Plus if you take chaos theory into account, a small inconsistency leads to much larger ones given time and iterations

[Punisher5.0]

Alright, I think the Jaguar 2 FPGA/JS2 portion of this topic has run it's course.

[LinkoVitch]

Alright, I think the Jaguar 2 FPGA/JS2 portion of this topic has run it's course.

 

Just as an asside (kinda) didn't someone produce an entire 2600 in a single FPGA? I think Atari should have planned to add this to the Jag 2 for backwards compatibility, giving the Jag access to all that huge back catalog