Gorf

Um no......I think it was because Atari sat on their arrogant arses while Nintendo signed up all the developers exclusively. The 7800 is techinically superior in just about every way. Had they actually gave a damn about the system and released it right after its development with a strong effort to grab up devlopers before Nintedo could make them sign exclusive NES clauses, we might not be seeing Sony, MS and Nitendo rule the market with the same four typical genres. I might have added the POKEY and 16k RAM to the 7800 but out side of that it's a great system all around. The NES is a headache inducing flicker fest with weak color and a very badly thought out cartridge slot.

Warlords, Circus Atari, Enduro and Night Driver.

I would like to see this. I like multiplaver games on the Jaguar. So is this a team tap game? Right now, it should handle 2 team taps and 8 players (jagpad or rotaries), but we tested it only with 5 players (including one rotary). I guess there would have some slowdown with 8 players as there is a lot of optimizing to do (I don't know why, but usually, code written between 2 and 5 AM is usually not really optimized ). If you are using the 68k to read all those rotaries you are going to have a hard time getting any kind of decent frame rate performance. Use the DSP. I have 8 rotaries running in my 3D Paddle Baddles games and they work fine and at full frame rate. Set up an interrupt in the DSP to read them a bunch of times per frame. If you are only using the DSP to play sounds and music, you should have a ton more horsepower left to read 8 rotaries with no problems.

That sounds really cool and shows that your idea of using the Jaguar hardware (with twice the clock speed) is a very doable idea. The Jaguar hardware seems to be a very robust system, I just hope Atari takes notice. I wont and you should not hold your breath on it. I doubt very much you will see anything in the way of hardware coming from what is not even really Atari anymore... Not to worry, I'm not holding my breath on this. For Atari it's a shame really, to have that technology right there and not even use it. And we are not even talking about the Jaguar II technology that they could have done more with. What a shame. Ah yes the Jaguar II...now that would be killer. That would be able to handle anything emulation wise. If only I could get Downix to finish up his rework of the Midsummer chipset. He actually took the JagII nets and started from scratch to re-code(VHDL) them for todays faster more efficient silicon. I beleive he said it would be possible to get the Midsummer running in at the several hundred MHZ instead of the 66 mhz they were shooting for back in the day. The Jag II was a MAJOR improvement in many ways to Jag I. The blitter alone was a giant leap in advancment. The old Blitter was capable of about 1000-1500 g-shaded polygons per frame with seriously hard work coding. The Jag II blitter at its original speed was to obtain something ridiculos like 900k polies textured, shaded. lighted and bilinear filtering per second or 15000 per frame and non textured was something like 2.5 million per second or 42k, per frame. Now compare that to the PSUX of 180,000 per second textured and shaded or 360,000 flat shaded polies per frame. The big difference in the blitter is its about ten times the silicon of the original blitter, it has a very large texture RAM cache and a blitter command cache as well as a blitter texture ROM( ie built in common textures like bricks, asphalt and such.) However, the big fix in the Jag II was the no nonsense main code RAM execution. All three riscs cores were capable of main RAM code execution without using a workaround. The Jerry II held two of the cores, the DSP core and now the new RGPU core which was fine tuned for high level languages instead of tedious assembler. It would have been the perfect classic emulation system. It would have handled anything with ease up to and including the Jag I(which is was supposed to be 100% backward compatible with.) A Shame indeed.

That's all fine and dandy but why limit the Jag to older 8 bit and 16 bit games when it can do a lot more? Im all for good games, whatever the bit's or how ever many dimensions but make use of what the Jaguar has. Of course not every game needs to do this andI have a few games that are simple old school shooters. I'd much rather release the 3D classic updates I was working on but I need to rely on someone not very reliable for a fast renderer to handle them....looks likeIm going to have to start looking into coding my own renderer or try to further optimize the one I have.

This is just bad business all around....d Buddies points out only some of the cost. Now you need to have someone make new PCB's and the chipsets to stuff them with. Adding a skunk circuit will further increase the cost. So now you have spent $10k probably $12k to retool the case back to a normal Jag case instead of a dental tool. So for $12k you have a living room or storage unit full of empty cases. Now you need PCB's stuff with newly manufactured Jag chipsets and support componets(resistors, caps, logic and connectors.) You now want to add a skunk? First of all that might not even be necessary. There is the possiblity of adding a communications protocal into the boot ROM to use the DSP for high speed communication to a PC....of course since you need to make new Tom and Jerry's, you might as well fix the chipset. Fix the DSP bugs and the main ram execution bugs while you are at it. Downix, could be of help here but I doubt he would do that for nothing, nor should he have to. He could 'simply' add a control bit in one of the unused registers in Tom and in Jerry to switch from buggy Jaguar to fixed Jaguar..not really that simply I bet. Since you are going to make new chips to make this useful you might as well add a command cache to the blitter, fixed the OPL interrupts and one or two other things as well....of course today's VHDL and FPGA's could go a long way in making this a much simpler task than Atari had back in the day. Lets say you will spend around $100k for all of this to start. God only knows how much it will really cost. My guess is you will be spending at least $100 bucks per unit just to build them and that is being conservative Im sure. So now to make this worth your while, you will need to sell the units at $200 bucks a piece which means 500 units to sell.....problem....to have this many units made at $100 a piece will probably be close to impossible. You are looking at a lot more than this and then you need to find a market for several thousands of newly made albiet bug fixed) Jaguars. You MIGHT(unlikely) move that many eventually but you are talking years and years to get back your initial investment only....no profit. In todays economy and the forseeable future economy, it's just a bad investment all around. Now if you offered something like software emulation using cart port adapters of all the Atari classic systems you might entice enough people. I would even add in a good deal of other non Atari systems like NES, SNES, Colecovisio, INTV, SMS and Genny. Still, even if I were a rich man I would not do it. You'd have to port a bunch of emulators over to the RISC's and the 68k and then find a way to add software support in the future. I dont see it happening and is one of the big reasons I dont see Atari bothering with hardware anymore, Bushnell or not.

That sounds really cool and shows that your idea of using the Jaguar hardware (with twice the clock speed) is a very doable idea. The Jaguar hardware seems to be a very robust system, I just hope Atari takes notice. I wont and you should not hold your breath on it. I doubt very much you will see anything in the way of hardware coming from what is not even really Atari anymore. However, a few small CPLD chips on cart adapters would go along way in emulating the needed signals that the Jaguar cart may or may not have. Atari could make a killing on the adapters and still sell them at a decent price. I mean how cool would it be to plug an exsisting Coleco, NES, or even an SMS cart in to your Jaguar's cart port? Pretty sweet I think. Even the current Jaguar with someone with enough balls to code it properly could handle any of the older systems. For instance, a Genny or an ST could theorectically run at full speed since they already use a 68k and just a nice wrapper to handle the different vectors and such would allow those games to probably run full bore. The 68k in the Jaguar is almost twice as fast as that in the ST or genny. The Z-80 in the Genny could be emulated by either the GPU or DSP at full speed for instance. The Jag RISC's as they stand could easily emulate a 6502, Z-80, 8048 or whatever at full bore. The Blitter and the OPL are more than versatile enough to emulate any support chips from even the 8 or 16 bit arcade boards. I could see the OPL be dead wringer for a MARIA chip as it is. MARIA and the OPL are very similar. Using the GPU as the Sally(and to handle some differences between MARIA and the OPL) and the DSP as the POKEY and the TIA could be doable. THe GPU would have to interpret the MARIA list into an OPL object list...not that hard.

Good luck with that. STOS will give you more of the same 16 bit like games. If you really want to see games that actually take advantage of the Jaguar's REAL power, you need to learn RISC assembly. You also need to realize that the 68k will do nothing more than allow simple 2D games so use it only to set up the machine and then kill it once the main loop starts, employing only the RISC's, Blitter and OPL. Run the RISC's in their localsfor time critical stuff and let the Blitter and OPL have the bus during rendering. Im not just talking about 3D games, but 2D games as well. Use the GPU out in main( the info is now public and there are a few tools that incorporate main GPU code, SMAC and SLN). You will be able to not only get more bang for your cycles every frame, but for those that still want to port of the ST based and 16 bit stuff, you will now be able to add more to the game as you will have much more power. Ports are fine, but ports that take advantage of the extra power they have in the Jaguar are always a plus. STOS is kind of a waste of time unless you want straight ports of older STOS games. Now if someone indeed moved STOS to the Jag.....calling it JOS(appropriately) and add some feature like RISC main code in-line assembly and you might have something.

IF you go to Radio Shack, you can get a plastic pot tool to turn those with. But as Curt said do not use a metal tool as this can mess with the value of the pot/coil/whathaveyou.

I like the way that sounds. I would still leave out the cart port. More money can be made using the virtual console model. With a cart port, Atari would be only making money on the console and cart adaptors. With the virtual console model, they would be making money on the console and the sale of each and every game (a lot more money to make there) and hopefully that would mean better support for the console itself. Either way, it sure looks doable. Just my two cents. You of all folks probably would be interested to know(based on your current avatar) that we(3DSSS) have a working Coleco emulator already for the Jaguar. It's running slow but that is because its a quick port in C on the 68k only.

Which goes to my point actually. The ULS does not trivialize anything but the encryption process.

This seems like a pretty damn good idea to me... not that I'm a business guy, but... Half my friends repurchased their entire classic Nintendo library on Wii virtual console. Some of them had the original carts still, most had emulators, but all of them were more than happy to buy it again just so they could play it on a TV set on their couch the way it was meant to be played. Atari could release a system capable of playing the entire Atari library in emulation for $50. No need to support classic carts if you can resell people their favorites again for a few dollars each. Use some of Curt's bitchin' 2600 joystick recreations and you've got another Flashback-sized market at least, with a lot more juicy profit selling all those games -- re-releasing more games on a regular basis, etc. - KS The Jaguar chipset at a double clock rate could easily handle anything Atari before it....including the ST and maybe even a few in that line. So essentially , all that would need to do is release a twice the clock Jag with cart port adapters(seperately to help make a profit of course) and write a bit of software to emulate the various systems. Im sure they could pay each of the popular emu writers for Atari systems out there a handsome fee to port them over. I'd fix the GPU main bug first and add a nice C compiler to the dev package for the RISC's to make it less of a chore.

Thats starting to change though and we are getting more to play on the Jag CD as of late... Do the Same, Beebris, Superfly DX are all new cd titles for the Jaguar CD and many more are in the works Lets not forget Robinson's Requiem and Impulse X All of those new titles can fit on ONE Cd along with many more Im sure. The skunk would be just as good at handling any of these games.....even RR with the coding system between the PC and Jag as I had mentioned. where have you been buddy? Does that mean you are still excited about playing Impulse X ? I've been around. I have an arcade Arkanoid but it's good to see Matthias coding away.

Why would you use a 65C816? Its a 6502 with a few 16 bit instructions, when you can have a 68k? If you are going to bother at that time with a 16 bit console, you might as well go for the balls and use a REAL 16/32 bit chip like the 68k. Long Data, short data and byte data, a true 24 bit address space not requiring the data bus for the upper 8 bits of the address. A far more robust instruction set and not nearly as much decoding to accomodate the mux addressing. AS much as I love the 6502, I'd take the 68k over the 65C816 anyday....espcially for a 16 bit 7800.

Thats starting to change though and we are getting more to play on the Jag CD as of late... Do the Same, Beebris, Superfly DX are all new cd titles for the Jaguar CD and many more are in the works Lets not forget Robinson's Requiem and Impulse X All of those new titles can fit on ONE Cd along with many more Im sure. The skunk would be just as good at handling any of these games.....even RR with the coding system between the PC and Jag as I had mentioned.

From the specs I've seen of the Panther, the Lynx is by far a superior unit. The 7800 should have been a lynx in console form. Maria is the only thing techically superior in the 7800. Also, removing the 2600 parts of the 7800 would mean to remove 7800 compatibility as well as 2600 compatibility. the 7800 games in pat still rely on the older 2600 hardware for a few things. Had the 7800 been released at the same time as the NES, and Atari had beaten Nintendo at the 'lets exclusive all the developers' game, NES would have been an abimal failure. The machine has so many problems...the flicker is just plain nausiating and the cart port was a laugh.

What has a tendency to die? The Skunk or the CD player? I will assume you mean the CD player. In that case, you only bolster my argument further. I've never heard of an unreliable Skunk. CD Players are mechanical and are bound, like all things mechanical, to break eventually. As long as you dont 'brick' your skunk by some unorthodox use of it, it should run long after we are all dead. A Skunk does not require any medium. A simple download will do the trick. The Jag CD needs a blank disc to burn at very least. The Skunk can also communicate with a PC so you could in theory have an unlimited amount a game data space with a careful coding system between the Skunk and the PC...you could even use the PC's DVD player as a storage medium and transfer the needed content to the skunk....in this respect is is far superior to an CD based game. The only trouble here is someone needs to write the needed software for the Jaguar and the PC to communicate automatically between each other. YOu can fill the Jag memory from a PC in a matter of seconds. So every level could easily use up the entire 2 megs of RAM in the JAg , possibly making for a seriously involed app. Try that with a Jag CD unit with out never ending disc swapping.

Of course you can also use a seperate voltage supply for the needed 12/16/24 volt relays. Try goggle with this link... http://www.google.com/#hl=en&rlz=1R2ADFA_enUS338&q=5+vdc+relay&aq=1&aqi=g-s1g3g-s3g2g-ms1&aql=&oq=5+vdc&gs_rfai=&fp=8f72db810780d33e ...all sorts of options for 5 vdc relays.

move.l $800808,d0 ; serial cmp.l #some_serial_value,d0 bne not_this_one Tursi and Kskunk did an amazing job with the skunkboard. By using that to lock an app to a specific skunk and/or ULS to serialise a CD making unique bootable versions is beyond trivial. You could even automate it via a download script whereby the webserver injects the correct key into the file before allowing a download. Ok and just what hardware on the Jaguar CD do you use to check a serial number against to prevent a copy? If you say use a Skunk in conjunction with a Jag CD, fine but you still need to have a Skunk. However, as far as I remember, unless Tursi or KSkunk updated a recent version of the bios, I do not belive the Skunk works with a CD unit very well...or at all. Not exactly trivializing, would'nt you say? So, though ULS is good for trivializing the encryption process, it hardly trivializes a serialized unit as is the case with the Skunk Board.

1st: How about you use a nice normal font like everyone else? 2nd: What you are asking for is a daunting task: Are you willing to pay/learn to code/help such a big project? 3rd: Are'nt you sick of FPS games by now?

The high mem carts are for games that need them. However, there are other very important features that do not necessarily require high memory, like the built in extra RAM for allowing real live backdrop screens and the extra sound channels and more importantly, the awsome PLD assist to the MARIA chip to take a load off Sally the CPU giving developers more processing cycles per frame that would have been wasted on seting up MARIA. I know that Bob(PacManPlus) would have loved to have a few extra cycles to allow for more processing cycles toward the invaders in his excellent Space Invaders cart to allow for individual movement of the invaders instead of all at once(based on what he himself told me that is.)

Making serialised units invalid? ULS is a tool to insert (program) data in session 0 of a pre-encrypted CD image without affecting the encryption. So what CJ means is that with ULS you can easily create personalised CDs without re-encrypting each personalised copy. Just as you can make personalised ROM images for the SkunkBoard. But the SkunkBoard has a build-in serial number (So the SkunkBoard is the "serialised unit" here, not the software). So what Gorf means is that you can make a personalised ROM image for the SkunkBoard that only runs on a SkunkBoard with a certain serial number. This is something ULS can't do because CD units don't have a build-in serial number. Robert Bravo Mr. Demming. Well said! You can always burn an unauthorized CD that will still run on a Jag CD.... it would take a serious amount of work to deal with a properly prepared Skunk specific app.

Dear Lord not again! Have to agree with Chicky about this thread! SHEESH! The 'glory days' of Atari are over guys.....get over it. The only truly successful console Atari ever had was the 2600. Not the 7800, 5200, Lynx or Jaguar. After the 2600, they dropped the ball and flattened it as well. The A8's were the only successful computers they had...not the ST, Falcon, TT....whathave you. The later have had mild success and compared to the 2600 is no success at all. If Nolan had a pair and a brain, he'd do his homework first and probably come to the same conclusion. Unless Atari(which does not exsist and in all truth has not exsisted since the late 70's for all practical purposes) can come up with investors with bottomless pockets and also pull all the 80 titles they ignored for the most part for the last 40 years, you wont see anything good come from another console. Especially if they aim to compete with Sony, Nintendo and MS bringing everyone more of the same three beaten horse genre( fighters, racers and FPS) they'd be laughed out of the race again. The one thing as a long time Atari fan I would like to see is a console that played everything from every console/computer they ever made. Don't hold yer breath too long on that. Lets do the world a favor and forget this type of thread as they are more annoying than anything else. First moderator to lock this thread gets a free copy of my next release!

It doesnt. It makes creating serialized units trivial. Um right.. Now ...... I dont see how ULS(a means to make an encrypted CD image) trivializes the Skunkboard (a very powerful and versatile developer device)? I'm sure Tursi and KSkunk would love an explaination for this statement. ULS may be fine for a final product but with out the SkunkBoard or some other developer device it would be rather useless now would'nt it?

No longer a valid concern with Jaguar ULS being freely available - serialized units are trivial now :-) I dont see how ULS makes serialized units invalid.