SubQMod

I hope Curt does not leave the source code to bitrot as he says. I for one have appreciated the releases that Curt has made and have made as best use of them as I can. Regarding Curt's comments regarding openess and working together. As Owl has already mentioned, a lot of people helped me to get SMAC/SLN into a state for release and as I promised at that release point I also released the source. I'm working on other projects for the Jaguar now and these will be released also. Some of the people I have worked with are classed as Pariah's in the community, others sit quitely in the background only posting occassionaly in community forums - my view of these people is as friends and for the most part genuine fans of the Jaguar system. I may not always agree with their politics or how they approach issues but I will support them if required. I'm rambling and not really sure what I am trying to say - Basically, there are a core of genuine fans and developers out there trying to push the system and keep its profile high by good promotion (although recent events have damaged this). This for me is a fantastic hobby providing hours of enjoyment. I just hope it continues in the community and we do not lose Curt's support.....

Message from the Organiser of JagFest UK 2009..... "Thanks to all the people who paid up in the last week! I have been re-negotiating with the hotel and I am a very happy man now, this years event will definately go ahead!!!!" The organiser of the event also would like to inform all individuals interested in the event that he cannot be contacted by PM on this site as he ahs been banned so if you need information then I am happy to forward on your requests, just PM me. pp SubQMod

For me, personally, and right now I am working on the free model. However, I have pcbs, shells, eeprom programmer etc ready for future "paid for" releases. Cost for me will be to cover the hardware, shipping and a very small amount on top for the effort of preperation. I code for fun, nothing more. However, as a collector and fan of Jaguar I am greatly disappointed in the behaviour of some in the community. Whether you like it or not, Starcat, Owl, Gorf and others are respected members of the Jaguar community with the skills to back up their status. If there was more coding and less aggrivation then we could enjoy many new releases....

It was either ill advised, a joke, or the recent comments about you not releasing some GPU code. Not trying to stir the pot here, that's the just what popped in my head when I read that. Politics aside, good luck to the new team, and ALL coders of the Jag. After reading Gorf's posts over the last few months, it's clear coding for the Jaguar is a daunting task! I think Gorf deserves a little more credit here regarding GPU code (and I am assuming that you are referring to GPU main code, as this has been a promoted discussion of Gorf's for some time). Although he has not personally released information on achieving it, which is entirely his perogative, he has in fact been instrumental in instructing me how to do it which is why it is now a primary feature of SMAC. Writing GPU RISC code in main memory is available to *ALL* devs now which would not be so if Gorf had not been kind enough to make this information available. Gorf's approach to some arguments can make me cry and laugh at the same time (with the occasional grimace ). But fundamentally he his an excellent coder with a love of the Jaguar. He has released software, some of it excellent, over the years, and he has written and published tutorials and supported new coders in getting going. Many of the statements made by Gorf are based on fact. You may or may not like his approach but he is funamentally a great guy. P.S. Gorf - I know you can speak for yourself but needed to say this....

I thought you guys drank it warn across the pond? .... oh no, only the good ales... Spent a few years living in Toronto, Canada, so kinda got into the cold beer deal. Plus working for a US company, cold beer is the only way to do business

Fixed for you Thanks, its been one of those evenings. Suffice to say I now have a cold beer in my hand so normal service will resume...

Thanks for the input, I know you mean well, but this thread needs to stay on target & it keeps getting derailed. The policies of restrictions of certain topics in this sub forum. JSII are actively discussing their own policies in their own topics on their own board, that's the way it should be & I wish them well with that. btw, just a personal msg while you're here, I'm not saying what you said isn't helpful in any way. "This is knowledge that anyone with a small amount of Jaguar knowledge should know", fair enough, but you can't instalearn everything jaguar in a matter of weeks & expect to get everything right first go, until you read it, until you find out, you are on your own pretty much. Some of the people who don't know everything yet are the very same people who have been helping you fix your utils. Ok, maybe I didn't word that correctly and I apologise if it came across the wrong way. In a way I was referring to when I first started working on the Jaguar. Before I did anything I researched the hardware which is an approach I have used for nearly 20 years in the computer/IT industry and before that, nearly 10 years as a hobby/enthusiast programmer (yes, I did indeed start playing with computers from the age of around seven - god I feel old). I realise that not everyone has the same approach as I do to this kind of project work. You are right that promethea has been assisting with the development of SMAC and helping remove some annoying little bugs. As with your team, SMAC, SLN and the upcoming tools are all done in my spare time so every bit of help is always appreciated. Fitting in this kind of development around a career, and more importantly, family is hard. I do it as a hobby and something that I enjoy.

So a skunkboard may be able to run all commercial software, except those that authors have specifically ask for a protection (and the upcoming one that will detect Skunkboard and don't want to run on it of course) ? I thought Skunkboard didn't provide commercial rom support and that every commercial running on it would be a kind of "luck" (I don't know if luck is the best term,but my english vocabulary doesn't have the term I have in mind)... Interesting... Before this kicks off into a piracy flame war (which I can see that it might) I would like to state the following from Page 2 of the Skunkboard manual "Skunkboard is not authorized to be used in a manner that violates any local laws". kSkunk and Boz condone piracy and would never promote SkunkBoards for this use. I mearly pointed out that stripping the header would remove the problem highlighted by the reboot team member in relation to their own .rom file.

I'm a very occasional visitor to AA but after reading this thread I though I would add a few notes: (1) As a regular, and lifetime VIP, at JS2 I can tell you that most of the downloads available can be found elsewhere, for example; the Atari HQ CD from myatari, Jaguar Source Code Collection from Jaysmith etc. So the exclusivity of these roms is not a rigid as it seems. If Jason wants to set limits on posts before download then that is his perogative as the site admin. The downloads that are not *easily* obtainable, such as Tinytoons for example, are posted with the permission of the person who has the rights to them. (2) Following on from my last point, that of posting/hosting Jaguar roms. I personally have not problem with hosted roms *IF* the rights owner of the software has given permission or the individual owns the rights to the software. (3) I think belobnoz has already covered this but legacy roms can be run on Skunkboard as long as you cut off the first $2000 bytes of encryption and load to $802000. This is knowledge that anyone with a small amount of Jaguar knowledge should know. (4) The Jaguar toolset is not great. I'm hoping to improved this over time and have already released, and continue to improve, SMAC and SLN. There are other replacements for the legacy tools in the pipeline and I am always open to requests for other tools. I *WANT* the Jaguar to be developed on and will help as much as I can. (5) Authors charging for software. I believe this should be down to the individual who wrote the software. I chose not to charge for development tools as I want to support the community and push further development. As far as hombrew/commercial dev's go this is down to personal choice. If they spent a lot of time working on it and want some pay back then so be it. To release and half decent packaged Cart or CD costs money so if profit is to be made for time spent then go right ahead. On the flip side if a homebrew dev wants to write software and release it free, then great. There is no right or wrong here, just personal choice. Just my two cents....

Move along, nothing to see here..... [Just my little attempt at moving this little 'discussion' on ] So how about them Jets ! LOL

Just a quick note to let you know that I have released SLN (SubQMod's Linker for the Atari Jaguar) v0.1.5 today. It is available from my site (www.subqmod.com) or the JS-II Downloads section. Both the source code and Win32 binaries are available for download. Enjoy

Just a quick note to let you know that I have released SMAC (SubQMod's Macro Assembler for the Atari Jaguar) v1.0.13 today. It is available from my site (www.subqmod.com) or the JS-II Downloads section. Both the source code and Win32 binaries are available for download. Enjoy ......... P.S. [Omf] I finally fixed that bug you e-mailed me about a while ago (well a long while ago - oops )....

SubQMod is doing a Donkey Kong clone already. Gradius type of shooter acn be cool but I never really liked the side scroller shooters much. I do think I can change the typicals of such a shooter to make even myself happy. Donkey Kong! Walter, its coming....I promise Its taking a little longer than expected but as this is my first Jaguar program thats expected. I am not using the 68000 myself for several reasons; a) 68000 is not my first 'assembler' language, I'm more familiar with MIPS/RISC and Intel, b) being familiar with RISC coding in MIPS (e.g. R4400i (N64)) I am using GPU RISC assembler in main memory as c) its quicker to code for me personally and d) it produces smaller binaires. I use my SMAC assembler to build the object files as the .gpumain directive helps me get the code set correctly. However, I do still use ALN as SLN still has short coming as mentioned previously. Once I have a little more time I will tidy SLN up to make it stable enough for all to use.

SLN does still have a few bugs to iron out and is not as consistent as SMAC. I'll try to get some time to work on this soon but have a few personal issues to sort first. Cool that someone is actually using this

All, Following on from my release in early January of the SMAC Assembler and SLN Linker, and as promised to all at the time, I am pleased to annouce the release of the source code to these tools. You can find the source on the download page of my dev site http://www.subqmod.com . Enjoy and, if you do nothing else, please use this software to further the development of new games and tools for the Jaguar. Regards, SubQMod

FYI: I've reduced the "Buy it Now" price on my Jaguar Cart Shells, PCBs and White Box Inserts by 25%. I've also turned off the auto-decline on offers AND reduced the offer threshold. So if you want these rare items then bid now http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie...em=120362537229 Be aware that these are collection only *OR* you arrange your own courier to pickup from me and deliver to you. Large and Heavy Box.

The BSD/COFF format used by SMAC/SLN is not different from that of MADMAC/ALN. What I was referring to is that this is the primary supported file format. Interestingly, during development I actually fixed a couple of MADMAC bugs

In my view 2008 has been a pretty good year for the Jaguar despite the rising prices on eBay for Jaguar items . We've seen several previously unreleased protos released to us and then of course there is the absolutely fantastic SkunkBoard. The community seems to be stronger and I think I am right in saying that conflict between groups and individuals over various topics have reduced (well I think so anyway, although a 'strong' discussion always makes me think and occasionally lmao ). With Christmas nearly upon us I thought it a good time to release a small gift to the community, so what is it.......? For a long time now one of the most frequent issues brought up in the Jaguar forums on various boards and within seperate groups of Jaguar developers is that of development tools. Most developers are stuck with the original tool set distributed by Atari way back in the day. These tools are, on the whole, pretty efficient with one major drawback.....execution on more recent operating systems is, at best, a challenge The core tools I am referring to are Atari's MADMAC and ALN. Several of you have contacted, or are aware of the efforts to contact Brainstorm for the source to MADMAC so that it could be recompiled to work on current operating systems. These efforts have not born fruit, not through lack of effort but the lack of response or even acknowledgement from this group. There is also the matter of of BSD object and COFF executable file formats and how they work under the Jaguar. The information for this is hard to find and can be harder to related to Jaguar based output. Without an updated MADMAC there was not even any point at working for an updated ALN. We know all this I hear you say, get to the point already... There are a collection of developers out there who want new tools to create new software. I am sure you have seen the requests, information and hints throughout the forums for a long time now. During 2007 I was introduced to a key contributor to many forums and fellow developer, 'Gorf'. Although I was not a Jaguar developer (but a big Jaguar fan) I saw the requirement for current tools and set out on a project to try and bring some of these tools up to date. One of the key considerations for any new toolset should be the ability to assist in coding GPU RISC code for main memory. What followed the initial meeting was many, many long hours of research into the existing toolset, formats and long hours of developing ideas and approaches. During this time, I have spoken to many key developers and figures in the Jaguar community who have contributed and supported these efforts and I believe in these people I have made many new and good friends. The result of these efforts are that I can announce, on behalf of myself and all who contributed, and release the first public beta of the first two replacement tools; SMAC - SubQMod's Macro Assembler for Atari Jaguar SLN - SubQMod's Linker for Atari Jaguar These two tools are replacements for Atari's MADMAC and ALN. Any developer using them will see that they have been designed to work as closely as possible to the original tools. In fact, the original core code base is that of MADMAC and ALN (prior to customisations or even the release of the Jaguar) and used with the kind permission of the original authors. So why release now. Well, as I have already mentioned, its nearly christmas and I wanted to end the year for the Jaguar in a positive direction (and I can't afford to buy everyone in the Jaguar community a present ). Also, I wanted to get feedback from a much wider Jaguar developer base so that I can finalise the code and remove any outstanding bugs. There are many improvements built into the code, one of the most significant being that SMAC can guide developers when writing GPU code for main. There are still a few (and only a very few) features that have not be enabled when comparing to MADMAC, ALN but these will come shortly. The key thing for me is that I can get as many bug-reports and feedback about how these tools perform so that they become a new base for development and allow me to continue with other Jaguar tool projects in the pipeline. There is so much I could say about SMAC and SLN as it has been an amazing journey to get even this far. What I must absolutely say is a massive thank you to those who have been involved for their support and information and without whom I wouldn't be writing this post; Gorf for staring me out on this path and his support throughout the project. Also for provding direction, support, insight and information into main code execution. belboz for his testing and feedback and gratefully received assistance in porting the code to other platforms (also for introducing me to the fab Mac OS/X). JagMod for his sterling work during the testing and finding all sorts of weird and wonderful issues Thunderbird and Tursi for testing and providing great insight into Jaguar development. JagChris, and Downix who have been involved at varying levels. Atari_Owl whom I was independantly introduced to during this project and provided me with vital information for main code execution as well level headed guidance. I hope that I didn't miss anyone out as everyone who has been involved and helped get this project off the ground and to this point have proved great individuals and friends. I nearly forget JaySmith2000 whose JSII forum is a regular stomping ground for me and has proved to be a great friend. Before I leave you to download and start testing I thought I would do a mini-FAQ here to answer some of the questions I think *may* be asked; Q: Is SMAC and SLN fully functional? A: Barring a few command line switches they should work as you would expect MADMAC and ALN to work. One key difference to note is that these two tools are directly focused at creating BSD/COFF output. Q: Why is it only a beta release? A: SMAC and SLN have been tested as much as humanly possible within the small group of developers who have worked with me. A much wider base of testing is needed to ensure that all expectations, functionality and coding styles have been accomodated. Also, to highlight any outstanding bugs that have not yet been picked up. Q: How much main code execution functionality is present? A: In this release, GPU code assembled under the <b>.gpumain</b> directive is checked against the rules of main code execution and warnings are issued as appropriate. Future releases will also modify the code to reduce the amount of work on the developer. Q: Is there a project website? A: Not as yet. I wanted to see what volumes of interest and feedback I got before embarking on a specific download or project site. Q: So what is actually available to download? A: The two download packages include Win32 binaries of SMAC and SLN as well as a brief manual and revision history. Q: The manual states that this is multi-platform, why only a Win32 download? A: SMAC and SLN have been succesfully compiled on MAC OS/X, Linux and Cygwin but further testing is required to ensure they work as advertised. Binary distributions for these platforms (where applicable and possible) will be available in the future. Q: Will the project be open sourced? A: Unlike Brainstorm, for example, I intend that SMAC and SLN will ultimately be open sourced. There are various targets that must be met first though such as; having a full and stable release that is no longer in beta state; further testing and development of multi-platform compilation; clarification of release of any proprietory information and other such factors. Q: What do I need to do differently to use these tools? A: Other than the difference in executable names and some missing command line switches only minor changes to your makefiles will be needed. The other key difference is that MACPATH and ALNPATH environment variables need to be changed to SMACPATH and SLNPATH. Well, thats all I can really say about this release at this point. I hope you find that this is a positive move and will provide me with any and all feedback regarding the performance and issues you may find. I intend that development of these tools continues so I am looking to perform updates to the software as issues are fixed and requests are implemented. At this stage you can contact me via Private Message at JS-II (www.jaguarsector.com). I will look to setup a support e-mail address in the near future. Many thanks for reading my ramblings and I hope you enjoy this christmas gift. smac_1.0.12_win32.zip sln_0.1.4_win32.zip

Just to highlight something that was mentioned earlier in the thread. In relation to the older 'dumpster' and similar sources; even though I bought various items off people like Jaysmith I still tracked down the original authors and asked permission to use them. Its simple, I'm a developer and want people to respect my work so conversly I WILL respect their work be it source, roms or whatever format. Its not rocket science to track these people down and in my experience 90% of them will give you the ok (even in writing). If you want to release something then at least do the decent thing and ask the author first.

All, Regretfully I am having to sell my Alpine development system :( This is a necessary evil due to circumstances beyond my control. For more details, you van view item number : 120247535786 on www.ebay.co.uk UK Shipping Only. This is a sad day indeed for me..... SQM

I'd certainly be interested if it was held in Sussex. This would also give any european visitors a chance to come over also.

I would have liked to have seen StarForce on the Jag. Additive arcade scroller game that the Jag would not have broken a sweat on. Other favorites would have been Joust (I know Dactyl Joust was in progress but I like the original sprite version). OutRun (the original) would just have been doable I believe (especially with main code RISC execution). Gorf was already done (exceptionally well) by 3DSSS, PacLand was a childhood favorite.... Ok, so all of my choice are arcade classics but I believe the Jag could have cruised doing these with the right coding team

Lets face it. From a programmers point of view the fundamental architecture of the JagII is exciting with a load of potential. If I'd had the choice of coding for the JagII at the time or say the N64 I would have chosen JagII with a C interface. Just my 2 pence (well, it can't be cents as I am british don't you know )

Well, it wouldn't take much digging to figure out a lot of them. Right, but that is for US to know and for THEM to find out. I'd be curious if they could figure it out. I could drop a hint, but would do them no good. Hmm, thinks........... Who else could possibly have a vested interest in this

CF ???????? I seek it here and there and cannot find it anywhere