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Koopa64

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  3. Posted · Edited by Koopa64

    3 hours ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

    I thought the Wii U was HD (uses HDMI) and so there is no NTSC anymore... it would be more accurate to say NA region games.


    the Wii U is compatible with composite, S-Video and component video cables, using the same custom connector as the Wii. Those are Still NTSC video standards. 
     

    that said, I do agree using NTSC to mean USA or North America is misleading considering Japan and many other regions of the world also use NTSC. 

    • Like 1

  4. Posted

    On 12/8/2020 at 4:52 PM, Lost Dragon said:

    He's a bit off with his argument for my tastes.. 

     

     

    Sonic the Hedgehog was smooth, colorful, responsive, and performed better than any other 2D platformer. Crash Bandicoot on the PS1 was a debut of real-feel 3D. Medal of Honor: Frontline was an indelible hail of bullets and fear as your stormed Omaha Beach on D-Day. Motorstorm on the PS3 had the most realistic graphics I’d ever seen in a racing game. Even RESOGUN proved how incredible and beautiful the PS4 was.

     

     

    He uses Sonic as an example of an early generation Genesis title, how impressed was he by likes of Super Thunderblade and Altered Beast? 

     

     

    MOH:Frontline i found very disspointing on PS2, loved the original on PS1, but the A. I in particular felt very dumb in Frontline and i was gutted the Xbox recieved Frontline, not Allied Assault. 

     

     

    I went through a stage of buying new platforms on day one, only to find they had their fair share of weak launch titles and I had to wait months for the real killer apps to arrive. 

     

    The Sega Mega CD 

     

    Atari Jaguar

     

    Sony Playstation 2.

     

    The Atari ST didn't tempt me until Dungeon Master and Starglider II.. 

     

    The N64 not until Perfect Dark.. 

     

     

    I don't see this  generation being any different. 

     

    It's very early days for both systems. 

     

     

    The author has been very selective in his argument and the article feels like click bait. 

     


    Sonic 1 was released two years after the genesis launch, I’d hardly call that a launch title. 
     

    you weren’t impressed by anything upon the N64 until 4 years after its launch with Perfect Dark in 2000? Man that’s harsh. 

  6. Posted

    There's a shortlist of SMS games that don't work properly with a Genesis pad, it's recommended you get a real SMS pad. https://www.smspower.org/forums/12093-ListOfIncompatibilitiesAmongSMSGamesHardware

     

    Or, if you want, inside the official Genesis 3-button pad is a grey colored wire that is the select signal. If you disconnect this wire, the controller will behave exactly like a SMS pad, just a D-pad and 2 action buttons. If you connect the grey wire to a small SPST toggle switch and carve a hole in the plastic shell for the switch to mount in, you can have a Genesis and SMS compatible controller. A good place for such a switch is near the cable.

     

    I'm not sure what could be causing unresponsive inputs on the controller ports. It could be the sockets, maybe the soldering is cracked on the PCB, or it's the resistor packs near the controller ports.

     

    You said one of the pins inside the controller connector is bent? It's possible to bend it back, but it will be weaker than before. If you have damaged controller sockets, you should buy new ones and replace the broken ones. You could get new DB9 sockets from eBay, console5, probably tototek or other places.

    • Thanks 1

  9. Posted · Edited by Koopa64

    9 hours ago, Bill Loguidice said:

    And you can just throw the TurboGrafx-16 talk right out in my opinion. While it wasn't exactly a rousing success in North America, it lived a long, fruitful life in Japan with an active commercial lifespan of 7 years in its PC Engine (and variations) form, selling over 5 million units worldwide. I'd say any system that sold under or around 2 million units is probably easy enough to classify a failure, especially post 1985, although that number has obviously crept up over time, with the Wii U's 13 million units (and "just" 782 games versus several thousand for its contemporaries) classifying it as a failure in the modern competitive environment.

     

    Yeah no, TG16 stays in the discussion. The PC Engine has absolutely nothing to do with the failure of the TG16 in the USA. It couldn't even clear 100 Turbo Chip games, with about 20 on CD-ROM2 and another 20 some on Super CD-ROM2. The card games were even region locked so you couldn't easily import games, not that imports have EVER been a major selling point for any console. The vast majority of people don't care about imports at all. The TG16 was its own system and its own failure, it did play a role in the eventual decline of NEC and Hudson Soft's home console effort.

     

    The PC Engine is a success, it even did better than the Japanese Mega Drive. That is true. The TG16 had nothing to do with that success and it ended up costing NEC and Hudson a ton of money.

     

    Also, that Wii U figure is really flawed. That is counting all retail and digital game releases. For most of the past 10 years, retail games remained what people usually buy, digital has only recently come out of niche status.

     

    According to this list (see below), the Wii U had only 162 USA releases on physical disc. That paints a far more accurate picture of the system's 13 million worldwide sales figure. The Wii U is Nintendo's worst selling home console, behind the NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, Wii and Switch. Not counting the tabletop Virtual Boy which isn't strictly a home console as it officially supports batteries and has its own screen and speakers. 13 million puts the Wii U in the neighborhood of the Dreamcast and Saturn.

     

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EqWL5tfSUjJIxrHQFLdPDRaMUhqf0HqydPSVRgcIqmo/edit?usp=sharing

     

    9 hours ago, Bill Loguidice said:

    The good thing for fans of the Jaguar in all of this is that despite its past commercial failings, there ARE a dedicated group of people who still actively support it, with no end in sight. And the fact that we may never see the Jaguar's "full promise/potential" delivered even through homebrew software doesn't really matter to its fans. They're getting regular game releases and that's more than enough to keep them satisfied. And while I'm no longer a particularly active buyer of most homebrews for any video game or computer platform these days, I do appreciate the handful of homebrews I reacquired for the Jaguar, particularly when it comes to the rotary stuff. That combined with a handful of select original releases, that's more than enough for me to justify having it in my collection. I personally don't need to keep chasing/hoping for that mythical finished game software that finally showcases the "raw power" of the Jaguar after 27+ years of attempts. 

     

    It's just a shame the consoles have gotten so overpriced in recent years. Even the CD-i is a hard system to find for under $300. The amount of upfront cost on a system one has never tried before does make a big difference in perception and willingness to give it a try. Going by the 50 some retail games, $300 for a Jaguar is really stiff and many of the games are very underwhelming. 3DOs can still be had around $100 - $150 in some cases, Japanese systems are very affordable and there's over 250 games worldwide for it with many great home computer ports and games that started on the 3DO.

     

    • Like 2

  10. Posted · Edited by Koopa64

    2 hours ago, Sauron said:

    I doubt it really matters considering that sales of most homebrews for old systems average around 200 copies. Where are the other 249,800 consoles, and what are people doing with them other than listing them on eBay for insanely high prices?

     

    That is impossible for 249,800 consoles to still be floating around. In the many years I've hung around here on and off, I've seen a lot of reports of dead Jaguars. Not only that, but rough estimates of sales are often far above what actually sold. 250,000 units could have been how many were shipped to retailers, who knows how many sold. I know one thing for sure, given how rare Jaguar systems are, it must have sold extremely poorly.

     

    By comparison, a common ship/sale figure for the Sega 32X is "500,000", way less than that actually sold. The TG16 shipped 750,000 systems to retailers. According to that gamasutra article "Stalled Engine", the vast majority of that 750,000 did not sell and were exported to south american markets or were possibly destroyed.

  11. Posted · Edited by Koopa64

    Then feel free to talk about a clone Jaguar console, because I'd buy one just to play Doom.

     

    I understand such a thing would be prohibitively expensive, but it's really surprising to me that it seems there's been no efforts to make clone Jaguars. Isn't it hard selling new homebrew to a crowd of well below 250,000 consoles sold?

  12. Posted · Edited by Koopa64

    6 hours ago, Bill Loguidice said:

    On top of that, a lot of the third party support promised and previewed in early catalogs never made it out (no doubt a lot of development was stopped or never started after poor initial console sales), much moreso than what was promised and never came out for the 3DO. While the 3DO can't really be called a success either, it sold many times what the Jaguar sold and had a much larger library that did a better job of showcasing the system's impressive capabilities. Part of that of course was with the lower risk of CD production over cartridges, but a lot of that was also it being a more resource-rich ecosystem.

    The Jaguar and 3DO aren't even in the same league. Just look at these lists of total released software (not counting recent homebrews)

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atari_Jaguar_games

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_3DO_Interactive_Multiplayer_games

     

    50 Jaguar vs 162 3DO USA releases

    50 (?) vs 263 worldwide releases

     

    That figure puts the Jaguar in the league of the 32X, even below the TG16. That is a huge failure of a dedicated home console. 50 some games really puts things into perspective.

     

    The 3DO being somewhere around 162 to 263 games, depending on included markets, puts it pretty close to the Sega Saturn and kinda the N64, which weren't that much of a failure honestly, the consoles are quite easy to come across. It wasn't until recently I took a closer look at the 3DO and honestly it's nowhere near the levels of failure seen in other consoles. The 3DO is a success compared to the Jaguar.

     

    But then, I own a 3DO and a big stack of CD-R games for it and no Jaguar, so I guess my interest is biased there.

     

    And yes I know "50" Jaguar games is probably wrong, depends entirely where you put the goalposts between retail releases while the console was supported by Atari Corp. and homebrew games.

  15. Posted

    9 hours ago, Clint Thompson said:

    That's impossible, unless you're literally not displaying any graphics or playing any sounds, in which case, whatever you are running on the 68k is most likely completely pointless. The 68k does not produce video and/or sound of any kind. Just like the 68k is not responsible for any of the video graphics or sound on the Neo Geo.

    If anything, those "complicated, special custom chips" give the Jaguar its edge and capabilities with flexibility. It seems the hardware has become a scapegoat somehow (instead of the actual issues being addressed like inexperienced coders, budgets and time constraints in almost every scenario which 9 times out of 10, are the Jaguar's actual handicap).

    You misunderstand me, I've been told before that many Jag developers relied on the 68000 as much as possible as the main CPU instead of using primarily the Tom and Jerry chips as intended. By that I mean the other custom chips were used, but not at their full potential because lazy developers just used the 68000 as the main CPU, making the Jaguar more of a 16-bit machine in practice. Is this not true?

  16. Posted

    19 hours ago, agradeneu said:

    I think you are comparing apples and oranges: The Jaguar has much bigger system RAM (2MB), and that should be faster memory than ROM. 

    Still, you can pull packed data from ROM and unpack in RAM on the fly. Needless to say, the Jaguar is much more faster with processing and shifting data, so much that you can juggle 8 bit and 16 bit graphics data. (compared to 4 bit sprites on NEOGEO)

    Ask a programmer for details. 

     

    To be a little bit more specific about graphics data, 16 bit graphics are roughly 4x bigger in memory than 4 bit, and 2x than 8 bit. The system is fast enough to shift big chunks of graphics data, e.g. like a bitmap that is 900 kbytes and 1580x600 while doing other graphics, like 16 bit sprites or scrolling a background bitmap in 16 bit color.

     

    Graphics of NEO GEO games are not only lower color depht, but also tile based.....to save memory bandwidht. And in no realistic scenario the NEOGEO would be capable to handle big 16 bit bitmap graphics like the Jag does.

     

    The reason NEO games look so great are the top notch production values and huge ROM space to minimize processing demands on the hardware (!).

    The downside was expensive hardware  and insane prizes for games, and a very specific library of games, mostly 1vs1 fighting games.

     

    On paper, the Jaguar might be more technically advanced than the Neo Geo, but the Jag is handicapped by its complicated and buggy hardware design with those special custom chips. The Neo Geo was much simpler with just the 68000, Z80 and the few other processors, all specifically designed to quickly throw around sprites on the screen. The Neo Geo has no bitmap mode or anything, it just draws a ton of sprites of varying sizes as needed by the programmer.

     

    I understand the Jag can run code with just the 68000 and ignoring the custom CPU, but that cripples any power advantage the Jag could have had.

  17. Posted

    4 hours ago, pacman000 said:

    I thought Neo-Geo games usually had extra RAM in the cart. Is that not true?

    They don't, Neo Geo games just have a ton of ROM. The Neo Geo graphics and sound hardware is fast enough to pretty much just stream data direct from the cartridge, constantly paging in new data on the fly. The other big advantage in the Neo Geo is every processor has its own data bus on the cartridge slot. One for the 68000, one for the Z80, one for the YM2610 and three for the graphics chipset (16+16+8 bit). Consoles like the SNES, Genesis and Jaguar all have one data bus that everything in the system has to share in one way or another, that makes things slower at the cart slot.

    • Like 5

  18. Posted

    On 12/20/2020 at 5:43 PM, phoboz said:

    To bad that no one is investing time in it :(

     

    However, I do not see any lack of second hand Jaguar consoles in Sweden.

    So I am not afraid it will hard to find in the future.

     

    The system was quite hyped when it came during the 90's, so most video rental shops had them...

    A lot of these consoles are being sold now, as well as games in rental boxes.

    (actually I like the rental boxes more than the ones for the consumer market, as it's much easier to get access to the cartridge inside them)

    Meanwhile in Canada, they are extremely hard to find and very expensive. Even in the USA it seems, Jaguars are very uncommon.

    • Like 2
    • Sad 1

  19. Posted

    So there's quite a thriving homebrew and indie game scene for the Jaguar, lots of cartridge stuff being made, there's even an SD cartridge coming one day.

     

    But the consoles are getting more and more scarce, they're extremely expensive on places like eBay. I haven't been around in forever. Is there going to eventually be a new clone Jaguar system so the rest of us can get one and play some new Jag games? Is there any hope for a Jaguar clone? Is there a legal or technical limitation?

  20. Posted

     

    Yeah I agree, they definitely fan the flames. I do remember some of the big gaming sites posted comparisons themselves to the original tech demos.

     

    Funnily enough I was covering SpaceWorld 2000 for a web site at the time and I just realized I actually have the original tech demo screenshots that people lost their minds over later. These were released along with the announcement of the system. Nintendo said at the time that this was not a game; it was just a tech demo. But some people assumed that the game would look like this, and instead Wind Waker is what we got.

     

    Honestly, that SpaceWorld 2000 tech demo looks more like a promotion for Super Smash Bros. Melee. The models for Link and Ganondorf look practically identical.

     

    Link_SSBM.jpg

     

    Ganondorf_SSBM.jpg

  21. Posted · Edited by Koopa64

    Do you have any other means of using ADTPro? If so, you can build yourself a DOS-based ADT disk to bootstrap with:

    http://adtpro.com/bootstrap.html#Bootstrapping_DOS

     

    Good question. I can't, definitively. Java 6 should be OK, though. I would only expect the rxtx library to run on an NT kernel (i.e. not Win 9x).

     

    To be honest, I'd rather dual boot Windows 2000 and 98SE than use a DOS boot disk.

     

    I'm rather disappointed that ADT Pro for Windows doesn't work on 98SE. One would think that'd be a great task for an older machine, or a retro gaming PC, one that actually has a serial port built-in. It just seems excessive to me to be using a really recent PC for talking to an Apple //e.

  22. Posted

    Regardless of OS - you'll need a fairly recent version of Java on the host. A 32-bit Windows is a base requirement for the serial libraries. Windows 2000 may work - XP is a better bet. If you want to go all the way back to Windows 98, you might want to look at using the old ADT (not ADTPro) server:

    https://github.com/david-schmidt/adt/releases/tag/v2.4

     

    I tried old ADT for DOS and it didn't seem compatible with the ADT Pro disk I have for Apple //e. Can you please tell me what the minimum Java version is needed for Win32 ADT Pro? I think the final Java update for Windows 2000 is Java 6 update 27, will that work?

     

    The problem here is I'd prefer to use my AMD K6-2 based desktop PC for writing to my Apple //e, since they're both right next to each other. The problem is Windows 98SE all that PC has currently. I don't think XP would run very well if at all.

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