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I don't think you can. From what I can gather, you need to upload to $800000-$802000 in order for the Jaguar BIOS to decrypt the ROM, and the Skunk prevents writing to these memory areas due to the demands of a handful of people trying to control the Jaguar community to prevent piracy of roms. Of course, I may be wrong (I do hope I am) and it is possible. Maybe kskunk can answer this? I think there is no way around the situation. I checked deeper and there is only one memory chip on the board so the Skunk BIOS must reside at those addresses, and they are blocked from writing to prevent the BIOS from being overwritten and bricking the board. Does the Atari Flash Cart allow testing of encrypted code? It appears to have a completely independent ROM for the BIOS. If worst comes to worst I can yank the Skunk Flash Chip and install my own preprogrammed chip as a last resort.

I have not seen this mentioned in the docs so I would like to ask here how I can use the Skunkboard to test out an encrypted program I have created as if it were booting on a regular cartridge. Thankyou.

Those are really good guesses but let's not get too carried away! I made great progress over the weekend but I have been reading the forum and I think it would be wise to incorporate methods to protect developers from misuse of this product. I need to know if there is a way to detect an orphan ROM from a supported ROM if that makes any sense to you. I have found some topics where this is mentioned in passing but cannot find any specifics. If somebody knows how to do this I would be very interested. Tom G.

Holy smokes! I didn't realize that people were still publishing new carts for the Jaguar! Congratulations on the new game! I don't think we want to cause trouble with any developers out there so can anyone out there give me some documentation for the accepted way of detecting supported Jaguar ROM from an "orphaned" Jaguar ROM? I tried searching the forums and didn't come up with anything conclusive. Tom G.

Thanks for the encouragement! This has been a fun project. I have some debugging left to do but in tests it's damn fast! I tried to get them to let me talk about this thing but they want to make the announcement themselves. I wish I had better news! I'm sorry. Tom G.

A new device for the Jaguar? That makes me curious. Can you tell more about it? Robert I don't think I can give away any specifics because I'm just the coder for the guys who did the design. I probably won't get into trouble if I only tell generalizations of what I know. This product is a device many people have asked the producer to build for a long time. They market equivalent devices for several consoles, but since there were no tools to make software for the Jaguar until recently the platform was ignored. When software tools were found, the rest was almost a no-brainer. The hardware was adapted to the Jaguar and I ported the console BIOS in short order. The console software currently uses the 68K but they want me to try and use the coprocessors to improve the speeds of different functions. Not that my 68K code was slow by any means they just wanted some additional speed for insurance against competitors. It should not be long and all will be revealed! Thanks for asking! Tom G.

Thank you guys for all the advice. I too was told that this special encryption code would make the Jaguar boot faster. I will look at the code Tursi has posted and see what is involved. I think it is a lot more work than expected so I will probably have to get the O.K. to proceed. I appreciate all the advice! The Atari community is so cool to me because people always help each other even if they are in the same small niche market! I hope you don't mind answering any other stupid questions I come up with.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this question or not but here goes: A while back I was asked to write some firmware for a Jaguar device and when I finished my work I was paid and I moved on and didn't hear anything for months. I was contacted again to make a few changes to the software and hopefully this time it will be done. One change I am told I must make is to speed up the bootup sequence. I have been using the cartridge encryption tool from the developer kit I received when I took the job. Apparently there is some way people have made this faster using some special binary code at the start of the ROM. I tried to track this down but I don't know what the right keywords are so I get pages of google spam. Can someone tell me if I am being led on a wild goose chase or if this mythical code exists? Thank you. Tom G.