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Atari ST Games Ported to the Jaguar


CyranoJ

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What about your thoughts on the NHS here in England?

 

The UK is more than England, not that the BBC would tell anyone that.

 

The NHS is amazing. People moaning about it costing too much will miss it when they need it. The staff are underpaid (especially the nurses) and overworked (especially the doctors) and while some of it is badly managed financially, it is chronically underfunded, compared against, say, b(w)ankers and politicians.

 

Hows that?

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I will have to release another set of 'locked to SainT' ROMs as it is almost 100% certain the recent -skunk versions will not work. But fear not, because that is something I will get done quite quickly (Hopefully before the SainT board is available)

Hooray. Hooray. Thank you for giving.

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With all of these great ST games being ported to Jaguar, I'm starting to wonder if I should just buy an ST. :D

 

 

Why wouldn't you get an ST anyway? :)

 

But if you settle for just an ST for those games, you generally won't have:

 

*Enhanced audio in the form of selecting TIA, POKEY, SID, PAULA, YM2151 options for a lot of the ports. Cyrano has added those options to several of the releases for the Jag since he knows how to get the Jag's DSP to play back those audio versions.

 

*Support for STe Power Pads/Jag Pads. Patching the games to use them isn't a high priority on the STe/Falcon030 compared to getting the games running in different resolutions, different TOS versions, working on other 680x0 CPUs, and making the games installable on hard drives.

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@Aminor:Thinking back, i am sure i saw reports at the time of the STE from Sam Tramiel that Steel Talons was among the list of games he had ordered to showcade the STE computers...

 

Another was Road Riot 4 Wheel Drive.

 

 

Atari claiming they had found a way to get 48 colors on screen instead of the normal 16...hardware scrolling and DMA sound would also be used.

 

 

Have you found documentation on this? Was this a legit Atari [uS] Corp claim - about 48 colors on-screen at 320x200 resolution on an STe - or an Atari UK claim?

 

Seems to me if this would've been possible, Atari Corp would've informed all of the software publishers about it and would've bragged about it in their marketing since it would've [finally] been a leg-up against the Amiga and its 32 colo(u)rs.

 

Colo(u)r me intrigued...

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The UK is more than England, not that the BBC would tell anyone that.

 

The NHS is amazing. People moaning about it costing too much will miss it when they need it. The staff are underpaid (especially the nurses) and overworked (especially the doctors) and while some of it is badly managed financially, it is chronically underfunded, compared against, say, b(w)ankers and politicians.

 

Hows that?

 

 

Wait... the BBC does something else besides complain about muh Brexit all while killing off the international golden goose that was Doctor Who in favo(u)r of their atrocious DoctorWoke pet project?

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Have you found documentation on this? Was this a legit Atari [uS] Corp claim - about 48 colors on-screen at 320x200 resolution on an STe - or an Atari UK claim?

 

Seems to me if this would've been possible, Atari Corp would've informed all of the software publishers about it and would've bragged about it in their marketing since it would've [finally] been a leg-up against the Amiga and its 32 colo(u)rs.

 

Colo(u)r me intrigued...

:-)) I'm sure the claim came from 1 of the supposed bastions of UK journalism at the time.

 

 

The UK Games Press, around the time they were building hype for the STE..you know, same magazines which had previously claimed the STE was going to be Amiga Beating hardware..

 

Claim went Sam Tramiel was said to of ordered a series of games for the STE, which would take full advantage of the hardware and this series included Road Riot and Steel Talons.

 

Atari had found a way to place 48 colours on screen instead of 16..but no further details given..

 

Hell that could of simply meant static screens like title screens, not in game.

 

The DMA soundchip and hardware scrolling would also be used for these supposed flagship series.

 

 

The only time i ever saw Sam Tramiel officially talk about Steel Talons and Road Riot was regarding the Falcon versions.

 

He said he had contracted about a dozen games and had personally seen demos of:

 

Raiden, Road Riot, Cyber Assault, Steel Talons and a great spaceship game from Eclipse.

 

 

Looking back, i am honestly not sure who put out more misleading information between them..The Tramiels or the UK Press.

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Atari had found a way to place 48 colours on screen instead of 16..but no further details given..

This is really nothing special. By rewriting the palette during HBLANK, you can easily display more than 16 colors on screen ; plenty of ST games and demos do that.

 

For static screens, you can even display the whole 512 (on ST) or 4,096 (on STE):

http://doudoroff.com/atari/spectrum.html

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This is really nothing special. By rewriting the palette during HBLANK, you can easily display more than 16 colors on screen ; plenty of ST games and demos do that.

 

For static screens, you can even display the whole 512 (on ST) or 4,096 (on STE):

http://doudoroff.com/atari/spectrum.html

 

I was going to say, i remember reviews mentioning Bio Challenge on the standard ST featured more colours on screen than your normal ST screen, so getting 48 out of the STE hardware didn't seem like that big an achievement, but as the 48 colour statement was so vague, it was hard to what to make of it.

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The UK is more than England.

 

Whoa now hold on old son.

 

England is more than the UK, official policy is to make the work England and has been for at least 500 years, we're just having a period of r & r at the mo for tea and biscuits.

 

Next thing i know you'll be sending men in white over here trying to retain the ashes. bloody cheek.

 

Now get back in your darkened cave and crack on with the requested numberwang.

 

:grin: :P :grin: ;)

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I have a great idea to engage the community. How about a vote, an auction, or just sell the next ST game that gets the port treatment. Donate the money to charity, or to CJ.

 

Hard pass. I like the way things are :)

 

But thank you for the thought.

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I feel a bit bad making a "request" post since I generally don't like sounding like entitled and belittling the hard work done porting these games over, but I'm too curious not to ask so please forgive me if it's sounds lame of me to ask.

 

While the Atari ST generally has rather bad sound, the work done by Chris Hülsbeck and Jochen Hippel is pretty amazing for the system. So, has there been any thoughts on porting their games such as Turrican II or Jim Power to the JAG? I believe Piko has the license for Jim Power at least. The soundtracks to those games are beastly.

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I was going to say, i remember reviews mentioning Bio Challenge on the standard ST featured more colours on screen than your normal ST screen, so getting 48 out of the STE hardware didn't seem like that big an achievement, but as the 48 colour statement was so vague, it was hard to what to make of it.

 

 

If it was easy to do, then why didn't they? I mean, if not doing 48 colo(u)rs, the publishers could've at least matched the 32 colo(u)rs of their Amiga versions. Can't the STE do more on-screen sprites and hardware scrolling than the non-AGA Amiga chipset?

 

Granted, even the "standard" STE features barely were supported by the publishers, let alone special hacks like 48 colo(u)rs. *Cough* Enhanced Joystick Port support *cough*.

 

Now I'm wondering if 61 colo(u)rs - like the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive would've been possible...

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Changing colours on a scanline is simple, that gives you a different 16 colours in one row of 320 pixels. If you want more than 16 within a single scanline then you need to swap colours partway along a scanline rendering.. That's another timer, and occurring at a higher frequency, and with more precision needed. Each palette swap is CPU resource used up, and if the CPU is meant to be busy doing everything else, it's going to impact you elsewhere.

 

When porting a game to the ST, I'd imagine a lot of the teams working on it were on tight deadlines, they would have been working toward a specific launch date and maintaining a specific amount of playability. If they are not being paid to make the game achieve specific goals why would they bother? So no one is going to strive to push the best out of a target platform for free (back in the day of getting paid to do this :) ) I am sure there are the odd edge cases where someone has, but on the most part I'd imagine not.

 

I often heard that the STe was too little too late. If the STe had been released instead of the ST, or a year or two after the initial ST launch, maybe it would have mattered.

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You can find examples of Tiertex paying coders and artists the same to port ST code etc to the Amiga as they would writing a game from ground up for the Amiga, hence so many ST ports by them, despite the superior hardware.

 

HMS software saying that whilst development was underway on Awesome Golf on Lynx, price of 2 Meg carts fell, so Atari gave them a bigger cartridge and thus they improved the game in terms of graphics and presentation, but Atari was not going to pay for the extra coding.

 

If your paid to produce a game within set parameters (deadlines espically) and getting more from hardware offers no extra fincial reward, then there is little to no incentive to do so.

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Changing colours on a scanline is simple, that gives you a different 16 colours in one row of 320 pixels. If you want more than 16 within a single scanline then you need to swap colours partway along a scanline rendering.. That's another timer, and occurring at a higher frequency, and with more precision needed. Each palette swap is CPU resource used up, and if the CPU is meant to be busy doing everything else, it's going to impact you elsewhere.

 

When porting a game to the ST, I'd imagine a lot of the teams working on it were on tight deadlines, they would have been working toward a specific launch date and maintaining a specific amount of playability. If they are not being paid to make the game achieve specific goals why would they bother? So no one is going to strive to push the best out of a target platform for free (back in the day of getting paid to do this :) ) I am sure there are the odd edge cases where someone has, but on the most part I'd imagine not.

 

I often heard that the STe was too little too late. If the STe had been released instead of the ST, or a year or two after the initial ST launch, maybe it would have mattered.

 

It's the most common answer you get when you bring the issue up with coders and artists who either continued to work on the ST or had abandoned it in favour of the Amiga.

 

The STE simply arrived far too late to have any meaningful impact, Amiga was lead format, had the bigger user base at this point, Amiga games outselling ST versions by ratios of 5-1 if not more and the STE hardware itself wasn't even what Atari had promised.

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Sorry if this is sidetracking this thread to chit-chat about Atari ST things, but was Arachnophobia any good on Atari ST? I know I liked it on DOS way back when, but I only have 5 1/4" disks now and no way to install them on my modern setup.

 

Review here:

https://www.atarilegend.com/games/games_reviews_detail.php?game_id=6380&review_id=129

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