LanDi

AtariOwl, no hard feelings from me anyhow! There are a lot of comments made about these things(coding), and many have to be taken to a degree with a pinch of salt. One of the advantages of assembly language is that you can do things taht are restricted in say C, and who knows ?? To be honest, I was a little rude and I hold my hand up to that- I had suspected for a while that RISC code could be run from main RAM under certain conditions, but rather than state that - thought a little dig would be more appropriate but whats done is done. So I publicly apologise! Abouit my alledged work. I will not show anything whatsoever thats the hard reality of life. I have'nt shouted my mouth off(apart from a slip up about an adventurre when I stated that my first Jaguar project will be an adventure to someone on the forum) and have only posted updates on the development of my website which I am considering delaying until christmas. I could shout my mouth off -what for? Till somethings ready or very nearly ready NO COMMENT. Because you never know. I have done no Jaguar work for four months due to personal reasons, it has looked like it may be that it will all be on hold till January - but then maybe you never get started, which is why until you reach the 85 percent stage or whatever you keep quiet!! I would like to become a player in the Jaguar community in the future despite the many problems I am encountering. I will say however, I have a project that doesn't actually exist (apart from rough mental notes about routines) - which I am very excited about and am looking forward to running updates on that ONLY - but until the right time I have nothing to say on that either, but boy am I excited!! But then again. You never know. Look forwards a year and a half, where will we all be??? Finally, StarCat. Let's get one thing clear. No one insulted anyones work. That would be heinous!!! I'm going away for a few months so wish you all well, and hopefully we'll see one of the mystery projects from Songbird!!!

Alright mate let's not fall out here! This is a hobby - its fun. I never said the Jag could do 500,000 polys a second, merely repeated what was said, bearing in mind as he said the system would be doing absolutely nothing else and no doubt they would be so small as to be worthless. I myself was thinking of the smallest rectangles possible and they would all be in one colour. Playstation was according to Sony capable of 1,500,000 polygons and we never saw anything close. Saturn also was stated to be able to do 500,000. On the subject of a website, I have not anyplans to register for at least a couple of months because lets face it its all a little samey, and as I mention on JI2 I wiped the lot off my harddrive and had to start again. Less of the 'games in development' as I mentioned one , an adventure. Had you not got my back up, I would have discussed my progress or lack thereof. All of my comments on coding that you replied to bar one were not actually mine, but those of experienced accomplished Jaguar developers who have done great things , I just didn't name names and say well so and so said this and so and so said that. Everyone makes mistakes in what they do and everyone hopefully has a different way of doing things. But, there you go they've done an ace job and their work has been well received so why not listen to their words of wisdom. Take Andrew Whittaker - was he wrong on a couple of technical points? Maybe but it doesn't matter. I was thinking last week if I am coding in say two and a half months I will need to ask for help again which I will probably do on this forum as a new topic and some people will say 'wow, you stuck on that?' But to me it doesn't matter, because its a hobby and its fun and may coders have come and gone, and some have been around for ages and never produced anything, probably because they dont want to(and why should they) but hey the people I am thinking of give great advice on subjects when you ask them. You have to see how things pan out - and that's just the way things are. Thanks for your time anyhow!!!

I have played the PAL version and the NTSC version surely cant be much worse? I love sensible soccer but the JAG version? Buy an Amiga instead

Well I do not have much to say other that Iron SOldier played WAY better than any other mech game I played at that time. Are you talking about graphics only? And BAttlemorph blew Starfighter 3000 away. Sorry I just bought a Saturn again and it had that game and it is so slow, looks ugly and is terrible to control. Don't know how it can eclipse Battlemorph. Peter I am ta;lking about graphics only, the explosions were great and I loved the little car on level seven? Well, I never played Starfighter 3000 on Saturn because I doubted it would actually be anygood, as Saturn isn't suited to that kind of game. I hear the PSX version is near identical to the 3D0 which is the one I fell in love with. I haven't seen Battlemorph, so I cant really comment but I hear it is slower than CyberMorph. It is the only game on the CD that appeals to me, as Baldies is on the Amiga anyhow.

I didnt think i ws going to post for a while, but nonsense like this called me back. Seriously LanDi, until you actually know something about how the Jag works, please don't post nonsense like this about it technically. For the last time: Extra RAM is not necessary to use Z buffering, the Z buffering works anyway with the current RAM. The problems with it are: a) extra memory reads/writes slow plotting down b) can't use text shading and Z buffer at the same time 500,000 polys/sec! Bollocks! The Jag isn't even remotely capable of 500,000 arbitrary (even very small) polys a second (maybe tiny repeated 1phrase wide flat shaded squares. But not any kind of useful polygon). And i seriously doubt even any of the Atari management would have made a ridiculous claim like that. "probably using the blitter as much as possible"? Well of COURSE, what else would you use to draw the pixels with? Do you even have the slightest idea how slow it would be to write them to RAM with the GPU or DSP alone? Oh and you can run some DSP or GPU code from main ram if you're careful about some things. But its slow, so why bother? For the record. I dont think you're seriously attempting to develop anything Jaguar wise. I think these posts are to attempt to look knowledgable, instead they are merely foolish. And worse, may confuse anybody who may be honestly interested in starting development. Well, well. I love a good roasting. You come here giving it all attitude, what can I say? First of all,the 500,000 polys issue. It's impossible to define poly count, as there is no standard benchmark, and that has been an industry wide problem. And you obviously havent done your research because Atari head of 3rd party development did say that quote " If anyone says anything about it [the performance] they'd be lying, because it depends wahat you're doing with the software." And he went on to say that to quote that number (500,000) is ridiculous because the software must do other things. So there basically. I'm not going to get into an argument. I don't know anything about Jaguar 3D, I'll hold my hands up right now. I don't know how it works. Which is why I asked where you would store your textures. Please read properly before replying. Z buffering. The process is very memory intensive and the Jaguar does not have enough. No Jaguar title uses it, but it is a very nice feature to have available and unlike you, I probably know what it does. Using main ram for DSP and GPU is possible is it? So basically, you know more than Atari themselves, the developers many of whom were immensely talented must pale in comparison to you. I must say you're exceptional. " For the record " I have not made an official announcement about developing anything for the Jaguar, other than mentioning on the forum once that my first Jaguar project was going to be an adventure, which was really a slip up. I will not comment on anything, because thats the way things are. I could come out and say, "I'm developing this and its going to be great" but so many people have with the best of intentions done that, and nothing materialized so why contribute to the situation. I can be a dreamer and I freely admit that I am one, or I can be a doer. So if I did have anything, which I may or may not have when would I reveal it, a year before completion, oh that would make alot of sense wouldn't it? If I have something to show, do I show it? Thats a very big dilemma. Because there's so much happenning this year, why take attention away from where it is deserved? And incidentally I have previously stated and discussed that I am an amateur programmer , so there. And finally, I wont point out your technical mistakes.

Well, Bubsy was one of the first Jag games I ever tried. Its hugely stripped down visually and graphically from the 16 bit versions, with poor animation and little and low quality samples. But at seven dollars its worth it!! Level one is ok, and I thought I'd rate it at 76 percent when I reached the boss, but its all downhill from there. Later on in the game the backkdrops are almost ST quality, one of the bosses in the castle level consists of a pair of legs!!! But for the price you cant go wrong. Your kids might enjoy it, till you get them a MegaDrive

Did we see the best of the Jaguar? Definately not! Machines don't really come on until the third or fourth generation of titles when programmers learn the intricacies of the hardware. The closest we came to that was that space shooter from Rebellion, Skyhammer. Duranik did an excellent job with Native, and it would be interesting to see what they could do now, a look at their Lynx work shows that it was not a one off fluke. I have to say that Dactyl Joust looked the business. But most Jaguar titles were simply pure lazyness, look at Bubsy for example, stripped down to the bare bones. But due to the hardware bugs and complexity of the Jaguar we may never see what it can do. 4kb of graphics ram in the GPU, no buffer in the blitter and 8kb or Ram in the DSP which must include drivers (bear in mind hardware bugs stop you using main ram) so everything has to be done in swaps, very difficult and time consuming. The head of Ataris third party software developmetn stated that the very limit of the Jaguar provided the software was doing nothing else( ie calcualating game rythems or reading the joypad) was half a million polygons, probably using the blitter as much as possible(although being on a stepby value instead of stepstep it was practivcally useless for the job) Where would you store your textures without swaps? Maybe we could have a cartridge with extra ram so we could see the Z buffering of the Jag put to effect, then we could see what the Jag can really do. So in a word, NO!!!

It's pretty fair to say most of the Software on the Jaguar sucked big style. It was and is fairly dire. I like Rayman very much but it is only one game. Missile Command 3D is also one of my favourites but it is always crashing on me! I was never too bowled over by AVP(which 84% of Jag owners purchased) Before trying AVP I purchased SpaceHulk on the 3DO( the equilevent Saturn PSX versions are tripe) and it is terrifying and gorgeous! AVP is spooky and even a little frightening in places, but is really just a corridor game, and full of flaws. But with so little to choose from, even the average games on Jaguar get elevated to heavy heights. Iron Soldier never stood up to its equilevents on the other 32bit systems - although the explosions were great. BattleMorph is a huge improvement on Cybermorph but still is eclipsed by Starfighter 3000, which is available on the other 3 main 32 bit systems, although weakest on the Saturn. The Jaguar was still until the arrival of PS2 and Dreamcast, still theoretically hugely impressive, the only system till the unreleased M2 to have hardware Z buffering although it didn't have the Ram to use it. Even 16 bit conversions and equilevents were poor, Bubsy on the Jaguar had vastly reduced animations and sounds. Lets face it, we would never see beauty like XMen on the Sega Saturn. The later generation Jaguar games which we never saw looked rather cool, especially in my opinion Dactyl Joust. But the Jaguar in my opinion will never reach its potential becasue of Ataris shortcomings ion the machine design. The resolution is very low, due to the CPU(300 * 200 is easily accessible to the 680000 and lack of memory resources in all the important places. But now we are looking at some great software looming. The Jaguar would definately be my favourite console were it not for the hardware bugs in the two RISC chips. 54 MIPS with only 12kb of Nonwait Static ram. Its always going to be a dreamers console. We can discuss for hours,weeks even months of what might have been. So in conclusion the Jaguar is and always will be , a legend.

Well, I love Klax, unlike Tetris however it gets literally impossible later on diue to its speed, but sure a colour rival to Tetris could have worked. Didn't SEGA use columns as a packin game with the GameGear though/ Scrapyard Dog was a decent enough game, but was never a Mario contender, however it would have appealled to the Kids. Personally I would have liked to have seen Stun Runner or Ninja Gaiden which were both awesome, as Ninja Gaiden unlike the GameGear version was a carbon copy of the arcade original, a few more games like that would have been swell.

Cool! It makes me want to own a Lynx again, (I've had about nine!!) The Lynx along with the NeoGeo Pocket was always my favourite(although the NeoGeo only had 8kb of Ram, with 8Kb of graphics ram) I even prefered the Lynx toi the much technologically superior Gameboy Advance for some reason. Its great to see a system pushed to its limit

And jolly good they did too. Fever Pitch and Ruiner Pinball are like amny Jag games too 16 bit. I dont know why Atari didn't manage to get more games out at the start. The programmer of Trevor Mcfur( who admits hes a little ashamed of that title) also worked on Club Drive, now it doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure out the titles could have been out soon had they been better organized.

I am quite dissapointed nobody has mentoined Shenmue 2. Sure, it is a little linear, but the story is beautifully crafted with pure love and attention to detail and it has voiceovers which are essential in any adventure??? Personally, I'd like to mention my biggest dssapointment. BattleFront II. The original is easily my favourite game, and I dreamt of being able to fight in space, but your ship just explodes suddenly ( youve been killed) and it feels a lot like Mechwarrior 2. No, I was bitterly brought down to earth with a thud.

Is there a plus version in the package and do you get bonuses? Ever played Batty on the Speccy,now thats addictive.

I've tried but I cant get on with this game. Where do I get the dogs food from and how do I plant seeds? Thanks

Well it depends massively on the project and the skills of the people involved. How big is a project going to be and how varied. Code can be written fairly quickly, piecing it together can take ages. If you take the infamous ET on the 2600 it was actually coded in two weeks. The SNES would take longer than the NES obviously, I reckon a team of six could knock something out in around six months, but again it depends what the software is doing and how complex the code is.