rdemming

Look at the Duranik website. It seems Matthias is working on a Jaguar version of the Atari Falcon Arkanoid like game called: Impulse I didn't play the Falcon version yet, but it looks great. I suppose, in addition to the rotary controller support, Matthias will add Atari/Amiga mouse support and maybe Atari paddle support for ADC equipped Jaguars? I wonder if it would be possible to add USB mouse support if you have a SkunkBoard, since Atari/Amiga mice are difficult to find. Technically it is possible, but I wonder how difficult it is to read USB mice via the SkunkBoard's USB ports. Robert

I think what he meant though was Neo Geo/arcade quality sprite animations, which requires a LOT of stored frames of animation, hence the RAM expansion on the Saturn. The Neo Geo was a ROM monster above anything else. (RAM monster for the Neo CD) You did mention previously though that (at least for cartridges) you could have the data compressed and use one of the J-RISCs to decompress it on the fly, something like 14x compression being possible. (making a 6 MB cart into something to rival the largest Neo Geo carts) This would still be a problem with CDs though, inless you loaded data compressed into RAM and decompressed that on the fly. Gorf, of course I'm aware that the Jaguar is much more than a sprite pusher and I'm not debating that. The processing power of the Jaguar is much bigger than that of the NEO-GEO. Period. And indeed kool kitty, I'm talking about the elaborate sprite animation and backdrops that make NEO-GEO games stand out at that time. Hi-color graphics & CD quality sound takes up a lot of space. It is great that you have hardware that can move around megabytes of data per frame. But if you don't have the storage space to store all those data..... I'm talking about CD games because creating NEO-GEO sized carts was way too expensive. For games where you can predict what graphics is needed, you can indeed use 'loading on the fly' techniques. E.g. a scrolling shoot-em-up can load background/sprite graphics that is coming further up in the game (SWIV on the Atari ST/AMIGA even uses this). But games like a beat-em-up can't predict what graphics is needed because you can't know what move a player is going to make. So all frames of animation for all moves must be in memory. If you have a beat-em-up with big sprites, lets say 96*96 pixels big, then a single frame in 16-bit color would cost 18KB. With 2048KB RAM, you could store almost 114 frames of animation or 57 frames of animation per player. Not much frames if you have dozens of moves. Of course you can optimize the number of sprites needed by building the player of several parts that can be reused for different moves or on the fly decompression (It would have been great if the OP could display compressed graphics directly). But you can't use all the 2048KB for sprite graphics, you also need space for your code and sound effects/samples. The sound effects must be in RAM as well. CD quality audio (44KHz 16-bit) costs almost 86 KB per second or around 24 seconds if you could use the whole 2MB. Not much so you probably need to settle with lower quality sound samples. So 2MB is certainly not much for the Jaguar's graphics and sound capabilities. Remember that the Native demo is using on the fly graphics decompression and still has not enough space to include sounds. The NEO-GEO CD compensated the lack of ROM by adding lots of RAM: - 2MB dedicated to the 68000 - 4MB dedicated to graphics - 1MB dedicated to sound samples - 512KB VRAM (graphics) - 64KB dedicated to the Z80 PlayStation also had more RAM and also a data decompression engine in hardware that outputs the result via DMA to the GPU: - 2MB main ram - 1MB graphics ram - 512KB sound ram - 32KB CD-ROM buffer ram And the Sega Saturn also had more RAM: - 1MB SDRAM - 1MB DRAM - 1.5MB VRAM (video) - 512KB audio ram - 512KB CD-ROM buffer ram Even the 3DO had a little more RAM: - 2MB main ram - 1MB video ram - 32KB CD-ROM buffer ram I understand adding more RAM was too expensive at that time for a home game system. I'm only saying that to have lots of animation and sound effects in CD games (as used in NEO-GEO games), you need lots of RAM. The lack of RAM can be partly compensated with clever tricks made possible by the Jaguar's processing power but is that enough to replace the 5.5MB extra RAM the NEO-GEO CD had more than the Jaguar? Robert

With the CD, Atari should also have increased the internal RAM. Since the CD is too slow to load data on the fly, graphics/sprite data must be read into ram. With the graphics capabilities of the Jaguar, 2MB is not much. Especially with high/true color graphics. With more RAM, CD games such as Primal Rage could have bigger sprites and more frames of animation resulting is a smoother game. In short, with more ram (and more ROM in case of cart games), Jaguar games could have NEO-GEO quality graphics and animation but then in high/true color. Robert

There is a Mouse Trap from MicroValue for the Atari 8-bit but it is a totally different game Robert

The HxC floppy emulator supports pasti format but is unstable/alpha state. Maybe he (Jeff) can help you. He also reads the HxC Floppy Emulator forum. Robert

It is comforting to know that I won't be alone if the device sucks But I will let you if I can get it to work if it arrives Hias, as a user of the original Turbo Freezer XL, I'm very happy with your improved Turbo Freezer XE. In the old days I was missing memory search functions but thanks to the additional rom space, it now has much more functions including searching . So I don't have to browse through kilobytes of memory anymore to find the memory location with the current number of lives The cartridge emulation is great as well. I only miss the emulation of 128KB XE cards So many thanks for the new Turbo Freezer. Robert

Symmetry of TNG made an interesting test program a few years back, in which he blitted a bitmap several dozen times from cartspace into ram, and then blitted the same image the same number of times from ram to ram. He was using an alpine, and found that actually, the cartspace ram on the alpine was slightly faster than the main systems ram, most likely due to avoiding page misses in main ram. I'm not sure how this compares to cartspace roms, but I would assume its similar. Strange. Since the blitter can blit 64 bits at the time from 64-bits wide ram and only 32 bits at the time from 32-bits wide rom you would expect blits from ram are around twice as fast (if different access times are not taken into account) I believe the docs are wrong on the 2KB page size. The page size is dependent on the RAM chips used. You can imagine the RAM memory as a grid of memory cells. To select a memory cell in a normal DRAM chip is a two step process. First you select the row and then the column. In fast page DRAM, you only have to select the row once when you access multiple columns in the same row. Thats why access in the same page (row) is faster. Now, the Jaguar has 2MByte of ram in four 16-bits wide chips. So each chip has 512KByte (16-bits wide) thus 512*1024/2=262144 16-bit cells. The square root of 262144 = 512 thus there are 512 rows with 512 columns each selecting a 16 bit cell. Thus each page is 512 * 2 byte (16 bits) = 1024 bytes or 1KB per chip. Since there are 4 chips in parallel to give 64-bit wide access, the page size is 4*1KB = 4 KByte Robert

Thanks to all. The GAL-blast looks interesting. But it only works on the printer port. My current old eprom programmer also only works on the printer port. It works great on DOS/Windows98, but under Windows XP it needs UserPort but that still works unreliable. So I prefer a USB version so I don't need DOS anymore. Besides, lots of new computers don't have a printer port anymore. The Chinese programmer David mentioned is very cheap but what about support and quality? I saw that the "English" written in their manual and software is terrible "Chinglish" but understandable. However, the cheapest programmer that supported GAL/PAL that I could find in The Netherlands was more than 300 euro. So for only about 45 euro including shipping I've decided to take the risk and I ordered the Chinese one. It even includes simple DIP to PLCC adapters. Now I only hope it gets delivered and works Robert

Thanks. I also found WinCUPL on the Atmel site. So I will try both. Unfortunately there is no date in WinCUPL so I can't say how old it is, but is is a Windows app so it might be a little more userfriendly than the DOS based PALASM. Now I only have to find a cheap programmer but unfortunately they seem to be very expensive :-( Robert

I suppose you can try to take the jedec file to your local electronics shop to ask if they can burn a GAL for you. Hias, what software do you use to create the jedec file? I'm looking into a way to turn a simple schematic with 7400 logic into a GAL listing but I can't find a place to start. You know any reference on the web to get started. Thanks. Robert

Its amazing to see the original SMB NES code being used for an Atari version. I'm hoping that this will indeed turn out to be a "playable" SMB but I understand that the graphics capabilities of the Atari make it quite a challenge. An interesting idea would be to make a VBXE version of SMB. The VBXE graphics capabilities would make a near prefect conversion possible and possibly easier to convert. But of course, only few people will get a VBXE but you can always hope Robert

pag3z3r0, Any news on your project?

The output looks very good That the VBXE outputs regular graphics as a crisp RGB signal was one of the main reasons for me to order the VBXE board. That additional graphics abilities and blitter are a bonus Robert

I've a question about the VBXE horizontal display resolution. It is said that it 320 pixels wide. The original Atari graphics (gr. 0 or gr. 8 ) is also 320 pixels wide. But there you have a border at the left and right of the screen. On the screenshots I've seen, the VBXE graphics doesn't have a border. Does this mean that VBXE pixels are wider than gr. 8 pixels? I would have expected that the pixel size would be the same. Is the VBXE limited to 320 display pixels per line? The Atari native graphics have a wide playfield mode of 384 pixels that displays graphics in the borders and narrow playfield mode of 256 pixels where the borders are bigger. I would have expected that the VBXE screenshots without a border are 384 pixels wide. Regards, Robert Edit: This video shows that the VBXE logo is displayed in the borders of a normal gr. 0 screen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blpeNPgY668

MyPicoDOS is interesting because it supports MyDOS subdirectories and long descriptions for the files in the menu. Robert

A device made for other consoles, adapted for the Jaguar? Is it a GameGenie device to poke unlimited lives? Then can I finally finish some Jaguar games Robert

A new device for the Jaguar? That makes me curious. Can you tell more about it? Robert

I believe it is more like the connector/adapter on the left of the picture below. In the adapter you will put a band cable and press the two halfs together to fix the cable. The band cable will go to the VBXE board. Then you remove the ANTIC and plug this thing in the ANTIC socket. Finally you put the ANTIC on top of the connector/adapter. Robert

It sounds like a very interesting upgrade. From what I understand ANTIC/GTIA graphics is combined with the VBXE graphics but it is not clear to me how the graphics is combined. Is the video output of the GTIA chip combined with the VBXE video output? Or is the GTIA chip shadowed/emulated in the VBXE boards and is the ANTIC output processed by the VBXE board and combined with the VBXE video output? What is a DIP2IDC connector? Does it mean you have to de-solder the ANTIC chip first or is it put on top of the ANTIC? Robert

SatanDisk and UltraSatan are great devices but they are harddisk replacements and not floppy replacements. Many games/demo run only from floppy and can't be put and run from a harddisk device (like UltraSatan) unless they are hacked/modified to run from harddisk. The guys from D-Bug, Klapauzius and P.Putnik are working hard to make lots of games runnable from harddisk but lots of games/demos are still not converted. So for those you still need a floppy drive emulator. Luckilly there is floppy emulator that works for various computers like Amiga and Atari ST: HxC Floppy Emulator HxC Floppy Emulator forum Look in the forum for Peter Sieg. He made a few more boards in february. Maybe he still have some left. Easiest is to replace the internal floppy with this board but it can be attached to external floppy port as well if you make the right cable. But to make the external drive act as drive A so you can boot from it, you will need to add a drive A<>B exchange switch to the ST as well. Robert

From a post long ago: I know Amy was the ill-fated soundchip but I never heard about the "Silver & Gold" and "Rainbow" chips. Is there some more info on that? Thanks. Robert

Yes, the original Turbo Freezer XL was a PBI device that optionally came with extra memory. It shadowed writes to PORTB to implement 130XE style bank-switching. But to make it compatible with the Antic/CPU mode, you needed to solder an extra wire (I believe the HALT line) to the PBI bus. Robert

From what I understand from the documentation and other discussions is that the cart space normally used for the encrypted cart header, is now used for the SkunkBoard firmware. This area ($800000-$801FFFF) is only 8KB and I understand it is already quite full. So the 2MB flash space that is normally not available to carts could be used for extended SkunkBoard firmware, like a BIOS for communicating with USB memory sticks, hard disks, mice, keyboards, etc. Just an idea though Robert

Here is a list with memory locations I compiled many years ago when I was cheating in games using the hardware freezer: Freezer codes Robert

Sorry for the late reply. It took a while to scan the AdSpeed manual but I've put it finally online. The 13 scanned pages can be found here Robert