Old school platformer comes to the jag

[Zerosquare]

Tyrant > Yes, as you say, HDTVs are a mixed bunch when it comes to handling analog video, especially from old consoles - some work fine, some work but the picture is lousy (on the one I have, RGB looks only marginally better than composite, instead of being crisp), some can't display them correctly at all.

 

Thus, some people use CRT TVs/monitors with their Jaguar (even really old ones can give surprisingly good results), and those may not be 50 Hz-compatible.

Edited August 5, 2012 by Zerosquare

[kskunk]

Off topic, but when people say that the Jag is notoriously difficult to program for, what does this mean?...is it that there's no software developer tools to allow easier programming? I'm curious, but something tells me the answer must be a complex one as well.

It's quite easy to program the Jaguar as if it were a 16-bit system, like a Genesis, ST, or Amiga. And this approach can deliver pretty good results! My favorite game, Tempest 2000, is almost entirely programmed the "easy" way.

 

But if you really want to max out the 3D capabilities of the Jaguar, it's horrible. There really are a ton of bugs - but that's not the worst. Past the bugs, there are ridiculous bottlenecks and missing or misdesigned features at every turn. There is a reason we don't have a lot of homebrew 3D for the Jaguar.

 

The 'hard to program myth' comes from Jaguar developers in the 90s. Atari insisted they max out the 3D capabilities, Atari forbid them from using the easy 16-bit portions of the system, and Atari supplied tools that were full of bugs and didn't know/bother to document all the bottlenecks and brokenness in the hardware. For a developer in the critical launch year of the Jaguar, being pressured to make a 3D game, it was a nightmare - especially compared to the 3DO or Playstation.

 

These days, there's no 9-month deadline pressure, everything's documented on the internet, there's no grinches at Atari telling us to put in more texture mapping or avoid the 68K. Look at 2600 programming - it used to be an impossible, dark, art, but with things like Batari it's fairly easy. Meanwhile, the understanding of the hardware is still advancing, making it easier to push than ever before. The Jaguar is going the same direction.

 

- KS

[GroovyBee]

But if you really want to max out the 3D capabilities of the Jaguar, it's horrible. There really are a ton of bugs - but that's not the worst. Past the bugs, there are ridiculous bottlenecks and missing or misdesigned features at every turn. There is a reason we don't have a lot of homebrew 3D for the Jaguar.

 

And that reason has nothing to do with silicon bugs, "missing features" or bottlenecks. Its all to do with the very small pool of active homebrew developers for the console and the poor attitude of some people in the scene. Not everybody is interested in making the jag do 3D stuff. People choose the jag to code on for a whole host of reasons. If somebody wants to do a 3D game then they'd work around the bugs and scale their game ideas to fit any constraints imposed. Just like you would with any other game style.

[+Gemintronic]

Homebrew depends on altrustic developers to make the compilers and libraries need by us more selfish or limited sods. Somehow, even though the Jag scene is relatively small, things like Raptor and U-235 exist. Could the Jag be the first comercial console to have more homebrew than original releases? I think so! =)

Edited August 5, 2012 by theloon

[walter_J64bit]

Could the Jag be the first comercial console to have more homebrew than original releases? I think so! =)

I could live with that!

[+CyranoJ]

But if you really want to max out the 3D capabilities of the Jaguar, it's horrible. There really are a ton of bugs - but that's not the worst. Past the bugs, there are ridiculous bottlenecks and missing or misdesigned features at every turn. There is a reason we don't have a lot of homebrew 3D for the Jaguar!

 

These features would only be missing if the console had been designed for 3D in the first place. It wasn't. What it does have is a more than fully featured 2D render set - without a doubt the best of it's generation, bar none.

 

If people insist on trying to shoehorn things it wasn't designed for or meant to do into the system, that's hardly the fault of it's hardware designers. Flare made a 2D playground. The world moved on around them.

[Tyrant]

if the console had been designed for 3D in the first place. It wasn't.

...

Flare made a 2D playground. The world moved on around them.

 

Not quite true (but almost).

 

The concept for Jaguar started in about 1990 with investigation of 3D rendering pipelines, and colour space. The early design work was all about the graphics engines. The video output path was based on an earlier project called Panther that got cancelled as Jaguar was making such good progress. Panther was the ultimate 2D graphics engine. Jaguar added the GPU and blitter which gave it its 3D graphics capabilities. Later when we wanted a solution for audio we added another GPU for sound, as it is a good general purpose DSP.

source: http://www.landley.n...s/mathieson.htm

 

But while I was over in California in '89, I actually convinced the bosses at Atari that 3D was the way to go, with the experience we'd gained on Flare one - if you didn't just do flat rendering, but shaded rendering you got a 3D appearance.

At the time, I was seeing pictures in magazines where computers were rendering photo realistic 3D wire meshes and I said "these are static images, but they only contain a very few number of polygons - we could take that, animate it and you could produce a game that was a quantum leap away from the current games".

source: http://www.konixmult...&content=martin

 

The Panther design that is a big part of Jaguar was built for 2D and does it very well... Jaguar added extra features and abilities that enhance it's 3D abilities but also add to the 2D power. However Jaguar was never designed for texture mapping, and it is much stronger in 2D than 3D, certainly.

[+CyranoJ]

Jaguar added the GPU and blitter which gave it its 3D graphics capabilities.

 

Any processor can do 3D. The Jaguar, by default, does not have any 3d accelerated hardware features. If you want it, you have to write the render path yourself - just like every other 2D based system with a frame buffer before it. What the Jaguar does have is a set of processors that, when programmed efficiently enough, are capable of rendering 3D at an acceptable frame rate (for the time)

 

Again, you can't blame the designers for people trying to make it work beyond it's capabilities.

[Crazyace]

Any processor can do 3D. The Jaguar, by default, does not have any 3d accelerated hardware features.

 

The 2nd statement isn't correct. The Jaguar has accelerated hardware features to support gourard shading and z buffering of horizontal line segments. These are an important part of the pixel pipeline required to display 3D lit gourard shaded models.

 

If you want it, you have to write the render path yourself - just like every other 2D based system with a frame buffer before it. What the Jaguar does have is a set of processors that, when programmed efficiently enough, are capable of rendering 3D at an acceptable frame rate (for the time)

 

You only have to write part of the render path - and that's not really a problem, the designers placed the gpu there to run the render path. They also made it general purpose enough to support other uses ( such as the 8x8 matrix multiplication designed for video decoding )

 

Again, you can't blame the designers for people trying to make it work beyond it's capabilities.

 

Even when texture mapping ( which isn't the strong point of the system ) you are using the blitter to accelerate the process

[+CyranoJ]

An amiga has a blitter, copro, etc, much the same. But you don't hear anyone claim that has 3d acceleration.

 

The jaguar is inherently NOT three dee, sorry.

[+Gemintronic]

The Saturn and PSX were made for 2D but forced to go 3D. The Jag seems flexible enough to go either way.

[walter_J64bit]

It's a new game!

[JagChris]

Yes we all know if someone is determined they can work through anything but I think he was answering why the Jag was considered hard to program for.

 

But if you really want to max out the 3D capabilities of the Jaguar, it's horrible. There really are a ton of bugs - but that's not the worst. Past the bugs, there are ridiculous bottlenecks and missing or misdesigned features at every turn. There is a reason we don't have a lot of homebrew 3D for the Jaguar.

 

And that reason has nothing to do with silicon bugs, "missing features" or bottlenecks. Its all to do with the very small pool of active homebrew developers for the console and the poor attitude of some people in the scene. Not everybody is interested in making the jag do 3D stuff. People choose the jag to code on for a whole host of reasons. If somebody wants to do a 3D game then they'd work around the bugs and scale their game ideas to fit any constraints imposed. Just like you would with any other game style.

[GroovyBee]

Yes we all know if someone is determined they can work through anything but I think he was answering why the Jag was considered hard to program for.

 

What you also have to consider about that myth is that not all programmers are created equal. What is "hard" to one programmer can be considered as a walk in the park to somebody else. Its all down to a persons ability, knowledge and experience. For example, from the current jag programmers I've talked to none of them consider the jag to be hard to program for (myself included).

 

However, looking back, if you were a relatively new start-up, with graduates fresh from university (as some jag teams were) then I can see where the myth started.

[Chilly Willy]

The Saturn and PSX were made for 2D but forced to go 3D. The Jag seems flexible enough to go either way.

 

Not quite - the Saturn was 2D and forced to go 3D. The PSX was 3D from the start - it has a math coprocessor that does all common 3D math functions, from standard matrix multiplies for rotation to perspective projection. It outputs the results in a format that exactly matches the 3D operations of the GPU, so that was also clearly designed for 3D from the start.

 

The Saturn, on the other hand, had only an extra SH2, a general purpose DSP capable of integer multiplication, and a "warped sprite" mode, which Sega then made a 3D rendering engine around. What's surprising is that it turned out to be so good at 3D, giving the PSX a run for its money.

[+Gemintronic]

Yes we all know if someone is determined they can work through anything but I think he was answering why the Jag was considered hard to program for.

 

What you also have to consider about that myth is that not all programmers are created equal. What is "hard" to one programmer can be considered as a walk in the park to somebody else. Its all down to a persons ability, knowledge and experience. For example, from the current jag programmers I've talked to none of them consider the jag to be hard to program for (myself included).

 

However, looking back, if you were a relatively new start-up, with graduates fresh from university (as some jag teams were) then I can see where the myth started.

 

All keyboards are equal. Some EPROM programmers are manufactured to spec but intermittent. My brain is both irregular and intermittent thus goes offline when it encounters a concept like overloading operators.

Edited August 6, 2012 by theloon

[Crazyace]

An amiga has a blitter, copro, etc, much the same. But you don't hear anyone claim that has 3d acceleration.

 

The jaguar is inherently NOT three dee, sorry.

The Amiga blitter is a different device - please look at the specification, not just the name. The Jaguar blitter has a special mode to draw Z buffered gourard shaded line segments - it is the lowest level of a 3D graphics rendering system.

[+CyranoJ]

The Amiga blitter is a different device - please look at the specification, not just the name. The Jaguar blitter has a special mode to draw Z buffered gourard shaded line segments - it is the lowest level of a 3D graphics rendering system.

 

Fan boy fanaticism and re-reading the tech sheets wont magick up a complete built in 3D render engine with an API, no matter how hard you rub that special coated plastic.

 

The bottom line here is the Jaguar can do 3D because programmers can make it do 3D. Just like programmers can make a zx80, atari8, c64, Atari ST, Amiga, etc, etc, even a NeoGeo (Which isn't designed for it) to do 3D. So it's got a features that can assist? Great. So do quite a few of the other systems. They are not '3d' either. It doesn't have an API, and it certainly doesn't have anything near a complete hardware rendering path. It has far more in common with the older 2D sprite generation than the flashy newer consoles that were about to eclipse it at pretty much everything.

 

PS, if you want to sound 'know it all' the correct spelling is: Gouraud

[Crazyace]

Notmy worst spelling mistake, but it doesnt change the fact that you are incorrect in your argument.

[+CyranoJ]

Notmy worst spelling mistake, but it doesnt change the fact that you are incorrect in your argument.

 

Show me the complete hardware based render path, and the API supplied to use it and I'll buy into your ideal. If I have to make it all myself, including the transform engine, then it may as well be a zx81.

[Tyrant]

I think the problem here is how we're defining what it means to be "made for 2D / 3D"

 

CJ you're arguing that there should be a complete pipeline in hardware, as there has been in many other systems of the late 90's to mid-2000's (I refuse to say naughties). Others (myself included) are arguing that having hardware that can accelerate 3D (matrix multiply units on both GPU and DSP, hardware z-buffering in the Blitter), and that aren't really that useful for 2D, shows that 3D was a design feature, even if the majority of the pipeline was still implemented in software.

 

The interesting thing is, that modern graphics hardware is getting more and more reliant on shader programs, which are basically moving backwards, away from having the entire pipeline in hardware, and putting more and more of it back into the hands of the programmers, to implement tasks in software running on the GPU.

 

Edit: Not that any of it really matters, it's what people do with the hardware that's important, arguments like this can get quite heated and don't really achieve anything.

Edited August 7, 2012 by Tyrant

[Tyrant]

the correct spelling is: Gouraud

 

Ah, but can anyone give a definitive answer on how anyone is supposed to pronounce it?

[walter_J64bit]

Maybe this should part a new topic called "3D capabilities of the Jaguar" ? I'm just saying this has nothing to do with GroovyBee new game.

[sh3-rg]

Chuckie Egg is 2D, it's also legendary! \o/

[GroovyBee]

Chuckie Egg is 2D, it's also legendary! \o/

 

There have been 3D homebrew versions of it