oky2000

Well here ends my interest in BigPEMU. I wanted to play World Tour Racing, and Rich didn't see fit to test his emulator with the only ISO out there for everyone to enjoy for free in the collection of Jag CD images at archive.org. Why he chose to use some version nobody will ever find I will never know. It is not on any of the other sites that have Jag CD individual ISO. Disappointed.

I didn't say there was anything wrong with the game, it's a design decision and a game that doesn't hit 15 frames per second most of the time but does have dual parallax layer scrolling mountain range in the background along with horizontal and vertical CPU scrolling is a weird way to waste CPU time. Perhaps it was at the insistence of Activision. Batman the Movie has the same sort of background shenanigans going on but the frame rate of 1989/90 Batman is far superior and the roadside objects 3-4x the size in pixel pushing values for software blitting so that's fine.

So I was looking at Super Hang-on for the ST and I noticed not only is the poor CPU being asked to do software scrolling but also parallax fully overlaid horizontal software scrolling and taking away a notable amount of CPU time that should have been 100% dedicated to his so-so 2.5D scaling bitmap routines. I would have preferred double the framerate and just a plain raster palette switched static skyline of the background colour. I would understand if he had achieved what Ocean did with Batman's driving section, but he didn't. Go figure.

I had a look at some SEUCK games on youtube and the speed of the games was quite impressive so it could be quite a useful tool if you can get the graphics in there easily. Hopefully have a 1 level demo by the Summer.

I found the manual for ST/Amiga release so the tips will be useful after going through the tutorial example in the manual, thanks for the link.

I was checking out some maps of Xevious and I am thinking of doing that on the Amiga, but IIRC SEUCK is only 16 colours on both ST and Amiga. Out of curiosity I ramped down some of my graphics to 16 colours and they look quite nice to me. Gotta love all the site with arcade assets ripped and ready to rock and roll with a bit of effort. So I was wondering if anybody knew of a site or video that did 16bit SEUCK tutorials, preferably ST but 16bit will do

Your Saturn must be b0rked, it's a bit rough around the edges but Saturn Wipeout has no framedrops on YT videos.

Atari as whole must have had some input in this push towards texture mapped 3D games, how much control over the company's focus could the marketing department alone force onto the future prospects of the company. That's a really bad business organisational chart. Ridge Racer was a game changer, jaws dropped when people saw it running on those Japanese PS1 units after the completely underwhelming Saturn titles like VF1 and Virtua Racer. Looking at the Saturn and the PS1 at the start of that battle you would assume the Saturn was utter garbage and overpriced, something much closer to 32X than PS1. It seems odd that a company would try and compete with that system. Not saying it didn't happen but it makes no sense, it would be like Commodore trying to go ahead and rival the Sega SMS graphically with their VIC-II technology, it just makes zero marketing sense or good business in general. I don't doubt that marketing was filled with technically clueless people in all these rival companies with older hardware compared to the new Saturn/PS1, not just Atari Jaguar team, but somebody somewhere high up must have been told this will end in tears. It is just insane that they would do that at Atari considering the cost of CD mastering vs building carts with large ROM sizes you would need to truly take on a 3D CD based console too.

See, before I thought the Jaguar CD-ROM expansion added something to the system to help those CD games as the Mega CD adds to the Mega Drive hardware. So World Tour Racing is simply a triumph of coding and nothing to do with the actual CD-ROM expansion, fascinating.

Slightly off topic but does this mean that World Tour Racing on a large enough cart would run identically to the CD game with CD add-on?

The ROM I downloaded from the planetemu site worked just fine for me.

Totally agree, I love machines that I got a chance to check out regularly back then, not just what I owned. There was only 3 VCS games I borrowed, Asteroids, PAC-MAN and Haunted House. Most of my friends bought the same games as me, me and my best friend both got Defender for the same Xmas

I remember only one other game's FMV around the mid 90s impressing me (Rebel Assualt II on PS1 cutscenes) vs what I was exposed to on my PC up to that point. PC was probably the worst due to lack of ability to change screen modes or do any kind of raster tricks, at least on the CD32 you can render 320x100 videos and use the copper to do a roughcut upscale to 320x200 and keep it full screen, on a portable TV via RF it's not that bad. Of course if you can't manage proper FMV you could always fake it, clean static fixed background with overlaid actors as transparent/green screen videos as animated objects overlaid, useful back when you had single speed CD-ROM drives in machines. I'd love to try that on a CDTV, it's the sort of thing that would have been used for something like CDTV It Came from the Desert had they done it. The actual video content may be tacky as hell on that game but technically it did look impressive to me and it's better than PC games that relied solely on software decoding before the MMX era from what I remember.

Ah well it looks better than stuff on Novastorm for my 486 PC, maybe the excessive Youtube compression makes it hard to tell. Won't be long before I can check it out myself on a 150 inch projected image

I have always noticed that too, sometimes it's easier for example with all the excellent gameplay variations of VCS Space Invaders vs a straight port/knock-off on other systems even if that was a game you missed out back then. Sometimes it's not so easy. You do need to know what it was like in the early eighties to appreciate the games. As a kid before my VCS I was bored A LOT After getting a VCS in 1980 my only problem was the months it took to be able to afford a new game. It's a universal thing, I never got Bruce Lee for my computer back then and today there is no way I could like it as much as some of my friends who played it to death do because graphically there is not much going on compared to other games. People say PS1 games look crap too, and yet they don't remember 3D games before Ridge Racer and Tekken 1. You have to take it all in context I guess.

I joined the Atari club, very much looked forward to the newsletters in the post

Seen Yar's Revenge mentioned a few times, it's one of those games I did want but never had enough pocket money to buy remotely all the games I wanted. Usually I go to the shelf and just randomly pick loads of games and sit down and play through them, some I'd never played and some I had.

Played Enduro for the first time in 2019, awesome game and played it for about an hour when I was supposed to spend 5 minutes each on some loose carts for my channel. Actually that 1 hour sitting turned into a 6 hour marathon. Driving games are probably my fav' genre so I would have loved that back then.

I played Indy 500 for the first time a few years ago with those awesome driving controllers, the handling is brilliant.

I do know about them, hence the cut-off point, but I can't play them on real hardware and/or afford them etc so I have none but it is more about seeing what other people enjoyed playing back then when I had mine. I must have liked it because I got a cheap 2600jr in 1988 or something when my six switch woody failed. The only negative point I ever had about my VCS was the price of the games, so I missed out on a lot of games back then and if you play them now today 4 decades later without nostalgia it's not quite the same. Besides it's always cool to see what other people liked to play back then

Two excellent introductions to the VCS. I remember playing Berzerk all day when I was off sick from school

Interesting, the FMV game American Hero has some impressive full screen FMV going on. Actually looking forward to trying it out on emulator one day.

Not sure why Atari were pushing for textured polygons when in 1992/1993 arcade F1 games were pushing the super sprite scaling hardware and it looks better than most polygon racing games before PS2 sort of era. Looking at Super Burnout I am sure they could have done something similar to F1 Super Lap in the arcade instead. Guess it was a specs war wanted to fight asking teams to texture polygons instead of doing spectacular arcade quality 2.5D which looked better than F1 on Saturn anyway. Oh well.

I thought it added extra features to the existing custom chips Tom and Jerry, is this not the case then? Is the full motion FMV just firmware using the Jaguar console chipset only too?

World Tour Racing!!!!!!