LinkoVitch

Just had a quick look at the in production screenshots StarCat and it looks shiney. I am about to start developing some new Jag games with local Jag fans. Hopefully they will end up in peoples great games lists. Our aim is to do it for fun, not profit. I have always loved coding on my ST all them years ago, and even though I spend 90% of my time at work writing code in C, it's just not the same as cracking open your 8th can of coke and slaving away over DevPac till 4am Hopefully our games should be quite polished as I am incredibly fussy about such things. Oh, and one game I think shows the Jag off nicely for a scrolling platform stylee game is Pitfall the Mayan adventure. Gorgious graphics, very smooth animation, bit of story and variation. and I find very playable! one of my fave Jag games. Perhaps to help the developer community we could produce a list of people willing to help in Jag devel? Artists, musicians, coders etc. Then people could have a one stop shop of people who are good at what they do (or at least view peoples porfolios and decide who to ask), and make the games that little bit better? Hmmm

The prices of games are likleyto be pretty low now, we are still in the tail end of it all.. But in 50 yrs time (probs less) when no-one has consoles as we call them today and there is something else. THEN the price should go up. Look at original Star Wars figures. They are now worth a fortune in original packaging. Imagine what they will be worth in 20-30 yrs? RE Grandkids. I wouldn't be giving them to them whilst they were kids, more like when they were in their late 20's and could appreciate them better. Maybee able to warp one into being just like me

Cool. M68K assembly is pretty simple to pick up. Just grab a copy of DevPac, and some other peoples source and it's aasy to pick up. I would have thought schools would teach 6502 or x86 assembly. Why wait.. get stuck in now, it's good fun I managed to tech myself M68K by the age of 12-13 so it can't be that hard

heh heh heh. Good skillz snider-man you bad bad man you!

I'm just thinking of 50yrs-60 yrs down the line when I get to pass on my collection to my Grandkids. Be nice to have things in it like that.. wonder what that would be worth??? I think I'll leave it sealed for now.. and keep my eyes open for another copy on ebay.. buy that one and play that one. But.. then again.. AARRRGGGHHHHH anyone got transporter technology yet? I coul djust beam the cart out the box

Well I am planning to develop some games for the Jag, so if I can get hold of the ROM image I can always burn it off to play I guess. Good thinking. Be nice to see whats in the box though maybee secret tresure

Well it's what I call the bit that spins the CD not sure if it's the correct name or not. If you do need to swap the transport it's not very hard. My guide covers replacing the transport, fixing constant clicking and also when the platter has slid down the spindle and become jammed. Good luck.

It's definately fixable (sounds like it anyway). Sometimes you will hear the lens 'click' as the unit tries to reset to zero without checking the zero location switch. If it does this clicking constantly then it's possibly a broken wire/switch which is easy enough to fix (bit of solder). Can you turn the platter yourself with your finger? if you can is it stiff or free turning? At the worst you can replace the transport itself which is easy (it's what I wrote my original guide on).

I'd guess the main things to go on a 2600 system would be the controlers, cart port and switches. But as each are all pretty low tech by todays standards I'd guess that they would be easy to repair replace. I know the sticks are very easy to repair, been fixing them since I was 12 (far too many moons ago ) And you can always recoat word cart connectors. So I guess pretty much indefinately. If the chip did die for some odd reason, you could always download the ROM off Atari Age, and burn it on an eprom and slap that in your cart, and your good as new again.

Depending on the fault obvioulsy there are quite a few fixes that you can do yourself very easily. Could just be that the platter has been pushed down a bit too far and rubbing. Whats the problem you are having? If you fancy having a go yourself I have put together 3 guides on how to fix Jag CD probs (fixed mine recently), have a loot http://www.the-crow.co.uk/jagcdtrans/. If you are in the UK and don't fancy attempting it yourself, then I can have a look for you if you wish. Good luck

I have just obtained a mint copy of Atari Karts. It's so mint that it is still in it's factory shink wrap complete with the hook that the boxes were hung from still folded down and unused. Even though it came through the post there is no damage to the box, not even slight crushing. My dilema.. do I open this great find and get some play time on the game, or leave it as the treasure it is? So far I think I may just keep it and buy an already opened copy, but it's finding another copy that will be the problem :/ ARGH! what do I do! Oh and on another note. In the rare rating section of Atari Age, how about another rarity rating, that of finding the game unopened? anyway I'm off to build an intricate alarm system and booby traps to protect my latest aquisition.. lets see Indian Jones steal this from me HA!

Yeah I am getting on eof each so I can study them and figure out this EPROM malarky. Just the wiring of the address lines that has me stumped. From what I have found on the web, building flash carts should be pretty easy also. And I guess an Alpine board is just a bit more complex than that. Thanks

Hiya have any of the developers on here had much experience with the Atari blank carts that are mentioned in the developer manual? When it comes to coding the ROM onto the 4 chip variety do you spilt the ROM into the alternating four parts and then encode to the chips accordingly? Also has anyone any schematics for building blank carts? Thanks for your help.

I can't remeber them off hand, I know that it a fairly basic process (just rotate the sample by 127 and there you have it ) I think Quartet came with a sample converter. Try and find a copy of that. If you look on www.atari.st there is likley to be a pirate menu with Quartet on it complete with it's various tools, one of which I am sure is a sample converter. You may have to treat the WAV file as a normal SAM file, try switching the 2sComp option in Quartet sample converter to get the encoding the right way round (also knock the wav file down to 8 bit mono).

I heard that the SNES core was a Z80 based CPU.. (well it's housekeeping CPU). so that would be ikky.. I thought the jags GPU was 64 bit?

Perhaps they stopped making the Jag CD before they ran out of copies of it? Probably planned to shift a lot more CD Units than they did. Or perhaps they got a conscious and decided to stop inflicting such dire crap on people

OO I was thinking of makeing a CD/mirror wall in my shed, PERFECT! The lawn mower will be thrilled!

Incase anyone is interested, I have updated my page with 2 more simple short guides relating to the Jag CD transport and other problems.

cheers. I have done more digging and found a few demos that seem to run in a fashion (BadCode4 seems to run). Be nice when version 1.6 is relased of Jagulator

I have just give Jagulator a quick whirl, and am not having much luck, I can get the object test demo to run, and a colour test demo.. but nothing else! be it .bin or .jag Seems to just report "ERROR: Rom is either not supported or not a valid Atari Jaguar ROM". I am using 1.5.1 of Jagulator. Not found any game roms yet , perhaps I'll have more luck with them. Any help would be appreciated tho.

A 520 doesn't necissarily have less ram. has exactly the same ports too. (just make sure you get an FM perhaps you should check out the UK version of eBay? I just did a search and on the first page I counted about 3 or 4 (just in the first 6 lines) 1MB and 2.5MB systems going for arounf £8-10. See if any are willing to ship to you. You just have to swap out the PSU in the one you have for the UK one if necissary and away you go. Good luck

Why not? where are you? Have you tried cleaning off all the various spillage that you described, it may just be something like a short on-or around the shifter/ram Check the ROM's are seated firmly etc etc. Also the CPU if that is socketed.. basically check all socketed chips are well seated and have no crap on them good luck

Congrats then Ah right, with you.. well we just need the key then Bummer. Still it's still possible to find. perhaps launching a Seti Esq shared crack attempt on the key would be worthwhile? Split the keyspace up and then clients connect to a server to report if they found it, and get their next work range of the keyspace to search. If enough people did it, I am sure that the key would be found quite quickly. Not sure where I saw it, possibly in some random blurb somewhere. I just assumed it was true. One less thing to worry about Which explains why when booting the jag CD seeks to the outter edge and then back in again. Amazing what you learn. So is it possible to replace that with a universal block also. (obviously a different one though)

Yup, this is what I read. The test the guy did was to copy a cart to an Alpine board, test it worked on an unmodified Jag (used the Alphine as a flashcart). Then modify 1 bit of the data on the cart, test again. cart failed. Then he copied the universal header (which is the backdoor) over the current hash and the game worked fine, and booted faster as the Jag didn't do the auth check. I didn't realise it had so much in it. Using RSA makes sence as to why the backdoor (I thought symmetric would be used, but then couldn't see the need for a backdoor ). Also explains why it takes so long to generate the digest if it's using RSA. Still if it's not a symmetric key pair it's easier to crack. All wee need is a cray and a week I am sure if you set asside a PC long enough we could get this here key. I am sure once you have the key, writing the software to do the crypt is faily basic in comparison. but it's not impossible! this is the good point! I was assuming that this would be the same key as for the CD's. But then, if the carts have a backdoor, surely the CD's must too have a similar backdoor built in? Or the same universal header may work? I think the problem with CD's would be the bad block protection, but I am sure this could be got around with modern CD writing technology (clone CD etc) Sorry, you misunderstood me. I meant the developer has ONE jag that they use to generate the necissary hash which is the one with the modified ROM. Once this is done, the hash is simply copied onto the carts and works in any other jag. probably not possible

I don't think it's worth dwelling on the fact loads. Why bring yourself and everyone down. Yeah it was a really bad event in time, but things like this happen all over the world all the time, and don't get as much coverage as this. Northern Ireland and England have een gripped by terrorist activities for over a hundred years, I am sure more than 3000 people have died. Hell We almost had my home town wiped off the map when they bombed the central gas works for the town. yet we don't walk on eggshells. I suppose this is because in Europe we are a lot more used to terrorism. It's sole purpose is to bring terror into the hearts of people and disrupt the country. It's gone on so long here we are used to it more, it's still really bad. We have had bombs planted in bins set to go off to produce maximum loss of life of civilians during peak shopping hours on mothersday, and the like. If you let it affect you and disrupt your life, then they have won. If what they do does very little to disrupt the targetted people, they have lost. Don't let one bad ay ruin that date on years to come. The only people I would say have truely lost on these days are the familys of those killed. Crappy things happen every day in every country, there is no place unique or free from this. Just don't let it get you down. ... ok so who's up for a good game of pong?