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sd32

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Posts posted by sd32


  1. NEC did have the PC-FX though - which probally matched the Jaguar in some ways. ( It had 3D plus a lot of sprite h/w )

     

    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...


  2. 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...


  3. 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.


  4. 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.


  5. PS1 and N64.....I did say Saturn would be the only system to most likely handle the AI of

    BattleSphere, especially becasue the two SH2's. Those are nice processors. They are set up

    such(from memory) that one SH2's can only run external while the other must run internal.

    Not a problem if you carefully code things. The other issue with the Saturn is the quad engine.

    Why not have a bit you can set to eliminate a point so trips were possible? I really do not understand

    what they were thinking. Just about everything 3D I've ever dealt with eventually broke down to trips.

    Go Figure.

    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?


  6. sd32, I really wasn't sure on the 2D thing, especially in terms of traditional "2D" games, I was thinking more in terms of psudo 3D games like Wolfenstein, or games with lots of scaled sprites and a scaling backgound layer. (like many previous arcade systems, the SNES's -simple- Mode 7, or some stuff on the Sega CD) Maybe I'm just remembering things wrong though.

     

     

    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?


  7. The hardware really wasn't up to the PSX (at least in 3D), but they probably could have at least competed and released a lot of the same games (the really polygon intensive ones cut down of course). I think the 3DO may have had some strengths in 2D though.

    Something like Resident Evil shouldn't have been a problem for the 3DO as it's mostly prerendered backrounds with a few polygonal characters/enemies on screen.

    Had it had a successful launch at a more reasonable price point ($400 or less), the head start in the market would put it at an advantage to the Playstation or Saturn.

     

    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.


  8. @Atariowl

     

    I have seen this mans work and I was quite honestly blown away by what I saw at the time. When his game is finally finished and ready to play I can GUARENTEE you all it will be the MOST IMPRESSIVE homebrew you have seen for the console. End of.

     

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


  9. I wonder if Chillw Willy has considered any colaberation for a music engine for his homebrew projects, he's planning on Doom next -he's already working on the Wolf3D music on his own I believe

    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!


  10. The Jaguar was 64 bit, but it should have been 32 bit, because in '93, 32 bit consoles were the most popular consoles, fast forward to 95, however, and 64 bit consoles were the most popular, the Jag should have either been marketed as a 32 bit console in '93 or a 64 bit console in '95. It most be noted that while the Jaguar is more powerful then the cd32, the cd32 is more powerful then the SNES or for that matter any fourth gen console.

     

     

    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.


  11. even in it's currently flawed form it should be able to give the Playstation and Saturn a run for their money. Had the hardware been properly developed for arround another year (...) It may have even competed with the N64 in 3D (at least in some areas) and would have kicked some serious ass in 2D.
    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.


  12. I would say that most 3d games on the Jag, (and a few 2d games) on the Jag compare to CD32 tiltes, however I would say in most cases, the 3do was comparitivly more powerful then the Jaguar, I would say however, in terms of what the Jaguar was capable of and not what the Jaguar games look like, the Jaguar is equal to the 32x, superior to the CD32 and inferior to the 3do

     

    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.


  13. Well, I always thought the Jag had some good 2.5 d muscle, so why could'ent it handle SF 4? I know SF 4 is a Seventh Gen game and the Jag a Fifth Gen console, but still... ya know.

    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!


  14. 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.


  15. I know the Jag is very good at programing 2d games, but Street Fighter 3 third strike came out on the Xbox 1 and ps2, I mean it would be like putting Street Fighter 4 on the Jag, except that is 2.5d.

    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.

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