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Starcat

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Posts posted by Starcat

  4. Posted

    Hi !

     

    I think overclocking the Jag is not a good idea, as it messes up the whole timing. Maybe first some games might run faster and it might not be a problem if you don't care about sound and use a good monitor. But who knows the side effects ? Will it reduce the Jag's lifetime ?

    And I bet that more complex games that need a lot of timing like IS 2 and BS, won't work properly, either.

     

    About the 3DO:

    The main advantage of the 3DO is the texture mapping hardware, but also the more RAM (3DO has 1 MB video RAM, 2 MB main ram and a cd buffer of 32 k). The CPU (ARM 60) is also newer than the 68k and better overall.

    In addition to that the 3DO has two custom 32-Bit GPUs that always run in parallel and a custom DSP.

    IIRC the maximum rate the 68k can run at is already used in the Jag.

     

    You should also not forget that the GPU of the Jag is 32-Bit.

    However it can do 64-Bit load and stores, but no other 64-bit instructions.

    The DSP of the Jag is similar to the GPU, but it has only 16-bit bus access.

     

    Regards, Lars.

  5. Posted

    Hi !

     

    Yes, as I said, a stripped down (like using bitmaps instead of 3d graphic) GTA clone could be possible.

     

    But still it's not going to happen, unless the Jag emulator brings some new Jag coders who do it.

     

     

     

    Regards, Lars.

  6. Posted

    Hi !

     

    If you just want to imagine how it could be, say that clearly, otherwise people might think you actually plan something and later be disappointed.

     

    Besides, there are almost 300 announced Jag games that were never made/finished, I think that's more than enough to imagine how these games could have been...

     

    Regards, Lars.

  7. Posted

    Hi Guys !

     

    Just to remind you of something, that some of you might have forgotten...

    Syndicate and also Theme Park (at leats in later stages of the game) is quite slow.

    You also forgot that GTA uses a 3D environment. Unless you change it to flat 2D or remove texturemapping, you'll get some big problems.

     

    Another interesting thing might be the question, how long will it take for an experienced Jag developer to do something like a stripped down GTA clone on the Jag ?

     

    As projects like Gorf Pluz took already several years and protector as well, I guess most jag fans wouldn't even see a GTA clone, because:

    1) Who is good enough to do it ?

    2) Who is willing to do it if you can pick it up together with a DC for $30 ? I loved that argument by Clint on JI2 :D

    3) If a game like protector takes over a year to finish (although it was already quite far in development by then), what do you think a project like GTA would take ? If it is a stripped down version that would actually run on the Jag, it might take several years (I would guess 3-4) for a one great really Jag coder who spends all his freetime on the project.

     

    But as there is no experienced Jag coder who would spend time on such a project it is not even worth to talk about it.

     

    To sum it up shortly, why are we even talking about this ?

    I mean, of course we can all open topics about porting PSX, and maybe even PS2 games to the Jag... But that doesn't help at all, it's just unrealistic and is never going to happen.

     

    I think IF somebody actually wants to program something new for the Jag, it should be more that is simple, fun to play and much more important something that actually has a chance to be finished one day.

     

    Regards, Lars.

  9. Posted

    Hi Guys !

     

    I'm thinking about putting my Flash Cartridge on ebay.

    Of course I'm also giving away a CD with tons of cool stuff (docs, tools, demos, phase zero rom, cd bypass binary and lots of other surprises. :-)

    The parallel port cable is of course also included.

     

    If you are interested make me an offer by e-mail.

     

    All money that I get by selling this item will be used to support www.atari-jaguar64.de and the Starcat Developments projects.

     

     

    Regards, Lars.

  11. Posted

    Hi Guys !

     

    I have great news. :D

    www.atari-jaguar64.de is now finally on a new, better server.

    Of course that's not everything. I also updated the site and added lots of new cool stuff, especially for everybody who is interested in Jaguar development.

     

    Lots of new Jaguar development downloads were added to the download section. I'm sure you'll like what you see :D

     

    I have also uploaded a new project, that was created to help new Jag coders getting started and make it easier to create some simple Jaguar games.

    It's called the "Starcat Developments Jaguar Library".

    Programming knowledge is still needed, but the new coders get a good base for their programs and a lot of useful routines that they can use immediately without having to write them themselves.

     

    It should make getting started in Jag coding much easier. :D Of course it's not perfect yet, but I'm sure with some good feedback I can improve the things that are still lacking a bit.

     

    So feedback is very important and welcome.

     

    For more details, check out the Library Page: http://www.atari-jaguar64.de/prog_info/library

     

    Have fun ! :)

     

     

    Regards, Lars.

  12. Posted

    Hi !

     

    If they keep updating it this often then we'll have a version that works full speed and runs almost every game in a few months.  Just so everybody knows, I would say Raiden runs better than any other game.  I'm so glad that there's finally a somewhat working Jaguar Emulator.

     

    Cannon Fodder works fine as well. And I have also seen in-game shots of flashback, but I haven't tried it yet.

     

    However I think the coder of PT did really great work.

     

     

    Regards, Lars.

  13. Posted

    Hi Guys !

     

    I don't know what many other Jag fans have against Cybermorph...

    It was teh first Jag game I ever played and it is one of the few games always gives me the same great feeling that I had when I first saw and played the Jag.

     

    However Battlemorph is of course much cooler. For me it's one of my Top 5 Jag games.

     

    Regards, Lars

  15. Posted

    Just had a quick look at the in production screenshots StarCat and it looks shiney.  

     

    Thanks a lot :-)

     

    I am about to start developing some new Jag games with local Jag fans.  Hopefully they will end up in peoples great games lists.  Our aim is to do it for fun, not profit.

     

    That is for sure the right reason to start coding Jag. I think if all Jag coders would agree to work on freeware games and not sell anything, the Jag would already have much more and better games, because there would be much more support between the developers...

     

    Just imagine bug free network games due to Scatoligic's network code etc. But because they all spend a lot of time and effort into that stuff they protect it. Which is just normal for comercial products.

     

    I have always loved coding on my ST all them years ago, and even though I spend 90% of my time at work writing code in C, it's just not the same as cracking open your 8th can of coke and slaving away over DevPac till 4am :)

     

    Hopefully our games should be quite polished as I am incredibly fussy about such things.

     

    Oh, and one game I think shows the Jag off nicely for a scrolling platform stylee game is Pitfall the Mayan adventure.  Gorgious graphics, very smooth animation, bit of story and variation.  and I find very playable!  one of my fave Jag games.

     

    Yes, that is a kind of game, that suits the Jag well. Rayman is cool as well.

     

    Perhaps to help the developer community we could produce a list of people willing to help in Jag devel? Artists, musicians, coders etc.  Then people could have a one stop shop of people who are good at what they do (or at least view peoples porfolios and decide who to ask), and make the games that little bit better?

    Hmmm

     

    The problem with that is simply, that there are no people who have free time to work on more projects.

     

    All remaining Jag developers either have projects or already lost interest in the Jag and its scene, exactly because so many are just interested in money.

     

    Although I can understand that... Comercial systems can be found everywhere... A good freeware comminuty is something really rare.

     

     

    Regards, Lars.

  16. Posted

    Hi !

     

    From what I have heard from a PSX developer friend of mine the PSX is not an easy system to work with either.  But it did have the might of SOny's PR backing it, which obvioulsy helped it along.  Atari are rekown for not having very good Marketing.

     

    PSX coding is for sure underestimated by many Jag fans. I think there is NO system that is easy to code. And if you want to push a system to its limits it is always difficult, not important whats system.

     

    RE John Carmac, I think because he wrote one of the first 1st person shooters that people listen to him far too much.  Perhaps if he had written his code differently Doom on the Jag would have been better?  And how many hardware systems has he designed? what he said may be true for some aspects of games, but I doubt all.  I am sure dropping developers into a completely alien system would turn a lot away instantly.

     

    I think John Carmac knows what he is talking about, but maybe he simply didn't say it excactly that way... or maybe he meant something else.

    One thing is for sure, Hardware wise the PSX is far ahead of the Jag.

     

    Personaly Mr Carmac winds me up :) to me he is the bill gates of the gaming world.  Completely unfounded, just my personal opinion.

     

    And I think most hardware has bugs in it.  The 68K CPU in the ST had bugs in it, one reason some stuff failed on other Atari machines with later revisions like the 030, Motorola fixed the bug which some software was using.

     

    Don't be too sure about that... I have looked a bit into other systems dev environments as well and I have not found any Bug lists for example for PSX or SNES. If there are bugs, they are for sure not big, otherwise there would be docs about it.

    Also keep in mind that Intel called back their first pentium series, because it had a tiny bug when doing divisions at several numbers behind 0...(not exactly sure if it was division... and maybe this sounds strange, because I don't know how to translate this ;-)

    However the bug was tiny and they called it back to release a fixed version.

     

    The Jag was the first console launch for Atari for a long time, it was also on a budget so it's bound to have a few cockups in there.  End of the day the games are what make a system succesful, not how many MIPS it's core runs at, or how many polygons it can draw, but it's games.

     

    Yes. That is true. That is the reason why systems like SNES, Genesis, Neo Geo but also PSX and Game Cube are some of my very favorite systems... There are so many great games on them.

     

    But as Atari didn't really have a quality control on their games, they released a lot of bad games. I'm sure a lot more people would respect and like the Jaguar if atari didn't release games like supercross 3d...

     

    Well, that can't be changed anymore. But what we can do is creating new high quality games :-)

     

    And I'm working hard to make Star Alliance - Battle for Earth one of those high quality games.

     

     

    Regards, Lars.

  17. Posted

    However the big problem with the Jag was that there was no real quality control. Nintendo for example had a great quality control (you'll never find a nintendo game with the quality seal that is bad).

     

    However Atari just cared about a high game count, that made them release also those bad ports and crappy 3d games like supercross 3d.

    Obviously they didn't understand that it is better to have few good games than many of crap games.

     

    As one who has programmed the Jaguar, wouldn't you say another reason not all Jaguar games are not A++ games is because the programming tools were not up to snuff? Or that the hardware was buggy? Or that just a few small additions to the hardware would have helped a lot?

     

    John Carmac wrote: If the Jaguar had dumped the 68k and offered a dynamic cache on the risc processors and had a tiny bit of buffering on the blitter, it could have put up a reasonable fight against Sony.

     

    Hi !

     

    Of course the Jaguar hardware itself and the dev tools were are a reason why it failed. But I said that often already and didn't want to start another flame war, so I guess I just mentioned the other things.

     

    John Matthieson admitted in that interview that was posted here a week ago or so that not including texture mapping hardware was a huge mistake.

    I think if they had fixed the biggest bugs, added texture mapping hardware and maybe fixed a few other problems it would have been much more powerful.

     

    Some better dev tools would have been helpful as well. Although the tools aren't too bad. They could be better, but are acceptable.

     

    But I'm sure that in the early Jag years, dev tools were a big problem.

     

     

    Regards, Lars.

  18. Posted

    I know programming takes skill... and money is required.  Do you think people would start playing their jags more if there were some better releases?

     

    Like Neo-Geo.... There is a company making some decent games for it now... and some are new/current designs....... not just older designs released now.

     

    IF you could get someone making some REALLY killer games, and publishing them (With Good sound..... story and GREAT gameplay), wouldn't you think that people would start playing the Jaguar more?

    Which, would lead to some decent sales, which would lead to more GREAT games from these more skilled programmers... maybe?

     

     

    Honestly, since the new neogeo games are coming out, more people are playing and buying the system up.

     

    What Songbird does is really cool.  I really respect them for what they do.   I buy/sell their stuff because I beleive in what they do, but we need some new designs and concepts (of which I know they are working on).

     

     

    IMO  I would like to see more side scroll shooters.  I would like to see games that could have a better sound quality (or at least recorded at a higher volume).  The Jaguar has some great potential in that.  It has the best ORIGINAL console port of doom.  It runs pretty good compared to the 32x, 3d0, snes, etc..

     

    †B†V†

     

     

    Hi !

     

    Maybe I can answer some of your questions....

     

    The reason why there are quite some crap jaguar games are atari's fault.

    They did a lot of mistakes on the Jaguar. They didn't manage to make the system popular to developers. (All really important game developers at that time like capcom, square, electronic arts etc. etc. were focused on the other systems and didn't really care about the Jaguar.

     

    However the big problem with the Jag was that there was no real quality control. Nintendo for example had a great quality control (you'll never find a nintendo game with the quality seal that is bad).

     

    However Atari just cared about a high game count, that made them release also those bad ports and crappy 3d games like supercross 3d.

    Obviously they didn't understand that it is better to have few good games than many of crap games.

     

    However I feel the same way as you: I would love to see more good shooters on the Jag as well. That is why I started developing a new 2D shooter for the Jaguar.

     

    It is called "Star Alliance - Battle for Earth" and will have sidescrolling levels and also some vertical scrolling levels.

     

    You can find more infos here: http://www.atari-jaguar64.de/jdc/jdc_inv/index.html

     

    Or on http://www.starcat-dev.de

     

     

    Regards, Lars.

  21. Posted

    Hi !

     

    JagDoom has some bugs.

    Like the one your described or you can also just into a level that doesn't exist (with the level cheat... level 25 if I remember correctly)

    and the network also hangs often.

    And on the map, the bottom part of the status display is cut off...

     

    However the bug that you saw is quite rare I think. It only happened to me once, but never again.

     

    The other bugs don't really affect the normal gameplay. Only network gameplay can be quite frustrating if you have bad luck and it crashes often.

     

    Regards, Lars.

  22. Posted

    Hi !

     

    What I meant was the OP has no instruction set as the GPU for example and can't be programmed like that.  

     

    You can not write a program for the OP to tell him to calculate numbers for example. You can only tell the OP what settings to use for the objects that should be displayed and you can tell him to branch to objects.

     

    But that is not really what I would call programmable. The GPU/DSP/68k are what I would call programmable, because you can write programs to do whatever you want (within the systems limits of course). The Blitter and OP can only be fed with data to do things it was designed for.

     

    Regards, Lars.

     

     

    Too bad that your description of a generalized processor is far too broad to be used to disqualify the many fine programmable processors out there which perform specific and highly useful tasks.

     

    Just because a fellow cannot add two numbers doesn't mean he cannot compose music, or decompress data or encrypt packets or draw bitmaps. If it follows instructions and has branching and conditionals it's a processor. No doubt about it.

     

    Of course it's a processor as well.

    The OP is simply a specialized procesor that is responsible for the display.

    But it can not be used for other tasks.

     

     

    However, the question was: What porocessors are 64-Bit ?

    I answered that question. And I though it might be interesting for him to know what processors have instructions sets that need to be learned, if you want to code the Jag.

     

    The OP is not programmable like the 68k/gpu/dsp. And that is all I said.

    And even you have to admit that it is true.

     

    You can continue turning around the words I said as long as you want, but you can't change facts.

     

     

    Regards, Lars.

  23. Posted

    Hi !

     

    What I meant was the OP has no instruction set as the GPU for example and can't be programmed like that.

     

    You can not write a program for the OP to tell him to calculate numbers for example. You can only tell the OP what settings to use for the objects that should be displayed and you can tell him to branch to objects.

     

    But that is not really what I would call programmable. The GPU/DSP/68k are what I would call programmable, because you can write programs to do whatever you want (within the systems limits of course). The Blitter and OP can only be fed with data to do things it was designed for.

     

    Regards, Lars.

  25. Posted

    Hi !

     

    Yes, would have been cool... Wasn't PR2 also a CoJag game ?

    (Maybe a cut-down version would have been possible on the Jag in that case)

     

    There were tons of games that I'd like to see ported on the Jag, however they never will be ported, because the licenses would be too expensive/you wouldn't get a license or simply because nobody cares to port them.

     

    For example there are tons of great "classic" PC games, tons of great genesis games, tons of great snes games etc. that could be ported (at least from a technical point of view).

     

     

    Regarsds, Lars.

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