sd32

Really, the PCFX had 3D capabilities?, i had only heard that it had great sprite and background capabilities and zero support for polygons. And of course it was great at FMV... It had 3.75 MB of RAM in total, but only 256KB for video it seems. Oh, and it was stuck with the PCEngine sound chip!...WTF!! I have wondered for a while why the Graphics Man had a PCFX image on his avatar, a fan maybe? So without the Playstation getting released, i guess the Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar and NEC PCFX would have duked it out for the crown of best 2d hardware, right?, i would have loved to see that, we needed a 2d super consoles war!. I wonder which had the technical edge in pure 2d...

I dont know if it would have been posible, but having NEC support the Jaguar back in the day like you guys are suggesting would be great. Imagine the Jaggy getting "64 Bit" sequels to all the major PC Engine games. Bonk 64, Lords and Gate of Thunder 64, Valis 64, Spriggan 64, Sapphire 64, YS 64, Tengai Makyou 64... i could go on and on. Imagine this games with the Jags 2d capabilities...amazing! Add to this the Atari lineup and well, it still wouldnt have beat PS1 and Saturn but it would have done much better i guess. Man now i have a new wet dream...

Wasnt that DSP used for sound instead of the Yamaha, since the Yamaha was a big RAM or BUS eater or something like that? At least i remember reading something like that a while a go. Most probably i am wrong so dont pay me much attention.

Yikes!, it had to do everything in software? I saw some youtube videos of Super Marathon for Pippin, it runs it really well. Seemed pretty comparable with PS1 FPSs from about the same year.

How about a game like Warioware for the Game Boy Advance. Its like a huge compilation of old schoold type games all tied together one after another. Its really cool. Of course the Jag game would have more of an Atari flavor to the miniames it would include .

Kinda off topic, but another mid 90s console was the Atmark Pippin (now that was a failure Jaguar haters!), where did it rank hardware-wise along with the 3DO, Jaguar, Saturn, Playstation and Nintendo 64? It got ports of the 3DO game Shockwave and great ports of Marathon 1 and 2 (in the Super Marathon compilation), but i have never seen one in action, so i have no idea where it stands among the contemporary system.

It really wasn't designed to be a 3D engine, it just got morphed into one to combat the PSX. VDP1 is really a 2D sprite engine, which is based on quads. I worked on a few Saturn games, and we had to pre-process our textures (i.e. pre-warp the quad texels so it would look correct rendered as a tri), since we were doing multi-SKU development and the models were made up of tris. The duel SH2s were pretty good at the time, as you could split the cache to have one of them work out of that RAM and get them both operating at the same time. One of my 3D graphics engines used both SH2s at the same time, to build the display. --Selgus Hey,, a Sega Saturn coder! Could you tell us what games you worked on, Selgus?

Oh, i see. You mean games like Wolfenstein 3D and FIFA, it sure as hell ran those type of games really well. It would be nice if someone with knowledge of the 3DO hardware could tell us a bit about its 2d capabilities. Any 3DO experts here?. I have never been able to find info on the 2 video processors the 3DO has, what did they call them?, animation engines or something like that?

kool kitty89, correct me if i am wrong, but wasnt the 3DO kinda lacking in 2d capabilities. I even remember in an interview in Game Fan, the creators of the 3DO (or the Opera as they called it), were asked how good the M2 would be in 2d, since the 3DO port of SSF2T was missing all the pharallax that even the 16 bit consoles had, and it was running at a lower frame rate. The creators agreed that 3DO wasnt so good at 2d, but that the M2s great 3d capabilities would also help it with 2d so it wouldnt have the same problems as 3DO. I am going by memory here since i havent read that interview in about a decade... From the games i have played SSF2T is a great port, but quiet short from arcade perfect, the Playstation and Saturn versions are just better, and i was even less impressed with Samurai Showdown, the frame rate is very jerky, and is missing a lot of frames of animation, is it me or do some moves have less animation than in the Megadrive port? Still, my guess is that both the Saturn and the Jag smoke it in 2d, and from the games i have seen, it seems like the Playstation beats it too. kevincal, have you actually played the Jap version of Saturn Doom?, i have read reports that the frame rate improvements it had are being exagerated by Sega Saturn fanboys, and that the game in reality isnt that much better than the american version. So it would be interesting to know your unbiased opinion if you have played the game.

You have seen Owls project!?, i envy you so much! ...all i have ever heard of it is that its really really impressive.

I dont know about Beats of Rage, but Force Design is working on a game called "Not My Hood", wich is in the same genre. Its a shame we missed on Connan, that looked great.

What do you mean? What is he doing with Doom? Chilly Willy said Wolf32x is really his learning experience for working with the 32x, he's said his next project will probably be a proper port of Doom (the shareware version, like Wolf32x to avoid legal issues), and he's expressed that it will not be based on the Jag Doom sourcecode, but rather a newer one (his wolf 32x code is based on a PSP port I beleive he also worked on). After that he's got a variety of things he's expressed intrest in like Duke Nukem 3D (he said he considdered Quake, but thought that the 32x really wasn't up to it), a Sonic game (in a recent discussion he expressed the possibility of a kart style racing game), and possibly a Wolf3D port for the Sega CD, though this one will probably be pretty far off. (It'll take a lot of work to get the most out of the limited hardware, make proper used of the scaling capabilities of the ASIC, and particularly, make use of the limited color palette of the CD -as the original was 256 color VGA and dropping down to 16-color EGA graphics would look awful -so proper use of the Genesis's 4x 16-color palettes is important) Wow, all those projects from Chilly Willy sound amazing and really interesting. I will definitely keep ane ar on all of the. Thanks for the heads up kool kitty89!

No I do understand that thought process but to be 64 bit before anyone else was smart. It was the execution of that plan that was the real blunder here. I have to agree with Gorf. I inmediately feel in love with the Jag due to the 64 bits advertising, and the early screenshots of AVP. In my particular case the "64 bits" campaign worked right, after all, i am still in love with the console 16 years later! I may be a weirdo, but the early mockups of Checkered Flag impressed me more than the screenshots of Crash and Burn although both ended up sucking. I have to disagree with you mcjakeqcool, lets remember that the 32 bit consoles werent the most popular in 93 as you say, the most popular ones were the 16 bit systems, this was until Satunr and PS1 were released in 1995.

Thanks for the description kskunk, now i understand a bit better what makes the PS1 much faster at 3d graphics than the Jaggy. Its always nice to read this kind of stuff from people who know what they are talking about.

You really think it will end up being that bad kevincal?, i think it already seems better than the horrid SNES port.

No. A software-based 3D renderer can't seriously compete with dedicated hardware, unless you have tons of processing power available to compensate. While a hardware-based solution puts a limit on what you can do (e.g., no texture filtering on the Playstation), it offers a polygon drawing speed much higher than a pure software-based one. Even the Jaguar's blitter, while powerful, is no match for a chip that can draw a textured and lighted triangle by itself with a single command. I was wondering, we know that the Jag has trouble keeping up with PS1 when it cmes to polygonal graphics, because the Jag, as Zerosquare says, has no dedicated hardware for it. But i also hear that the Jags graphics hardware is at the same time very flexible. So how good would the Jag be at handling "ellipsoids", wich are used on the game Ecstatica. Here is a link to a review of that game so that you can see what i am talking about, although i am pretty sure a many folks here already knew about the game. http://hg101.classicgaming.gamespy.com/ecs...a/ecstatica.htm By the way, check out the content on that site, its really good.

Lets just use the Fight For Life engine for SF4 and the Double Dragon V engine for SF3, thats all...while we are it, i dont see why we couldn get GTA4 working in the Jag with the Club Dive engine, right?

On a side note, the 32X is getting a homebrew port of Wolfenstein 3D, and its looking really good. It will be nice to compare it with the Jag and 3DO ports if it ever gets finished. Kudos to the coders doing the port, its looking really great. Now if someone would port Marathon to the Jag...

I own most consoles from around the Jag era, and can say that the CD32 cant compare with the Jag in 3d (and 2d for that matter). Having the CD32 do Iron Soldier 2, Sky Hammer, Battlesphere or AVP, would be the equivalent of the Jag doing Super Mario 64 or something like that. The Jag isnt inferior to the 3DO, overall its at least its match...at least. And it is more powerful than the Sega 32X. Just take a look at their ports of Doom. In 2d it is superior to every system released before it, and in the same league as the Sega Saturn, the only thing holding it back is its lack of RAM. I am saying this form experience playing each console, and from coments from some coders.

Well, SF4s graphics are made out of polygons, lets remember that the Jag can probably display around the neighboor of 30 000 polygons at a rez of about 320X240. The current machines that handle SF4 display millions of polygons per second, in super high rez modes with all kinds os special effects. So even though the camera might be restricted to the so called 2.5D angles, it is still throwing around much more stuff than the Jag could ever hope to handle. Now, it could be somehow ported to the Jag, but with Fight For Life quality graphics (maybe even better with the knowledge homebrewers now have on the Jag)... but hey, as long as the gameplay remains good, i would have no ploblem with that!

doctorclu, i have to disagree with you about Primal Rage. Sure it is better than the 16 bit ports and the 32X one, but sadly it is quiet inferior to the 3DO, Saturn and Playstation versions. I was very dissapointed when i compared them side by side. The 3DO port has more animation and overall better graphic quality than the Jag port, and the Saturn and PS1 versions have something neither the 3DO or Jag had, huge arcade quality dinosaurs! I guess this was due to RAM constrains. It suck that the Jag has such awesome 2d power, but that the lack of onboard RAM doesnt allow it to be showcased.

How about NBA JAM TE, it is head and shoulders above the 16 bit conversions in graphics and sounds, and it compares ok againts the Saturn and PS1 ports, both of wich had the benefit of being on CD and had superior budgets.

Haha, i posted the same thing a while ago. Everytime i see Toba 1, i feel like it looks kinda like a state of the art Jag game, with its gouraud shadded untextured polygons.

oops, double post. sorry

The only thing holding back the Jag from delivering a great port of SF3, is the lack of video RAM, otherwise, it has anough 2d muscle to handle the action. Now SF4 is a totally diferent issue.