Gorf
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Posts posted by Gorf
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In software terms, OPL could stand for "Object Processing List".
Well...kinda....the List is the software part of what the logic uses to draw the display.
The 'language' of the OPL however is almost irrelevant to the discussion here. The function
of it however does apply.
It is a language and the OPL is a processor regardless of what some knuckleheads around
here wish to believe. The only difference is it needs to be started...but here is a little
secret....so do any and all other processors. The difference here is it is started by another
processor....but so are the GPU and DSP RISC's which no one argues those as being any less
a processor than a 6502 is. a 6502 simply has a boot strap circuit on board where the GPU
or the DSP does not. The Blitter is also a processor. Like the OPL, it will 'run code'.
The difference here is the Blitter does not have a PC counter like the OPL does( well it
actually uses links to point to the next line of code( an object definition actually.)
The link is a good way to avoid more silicon for a fetch...the blitter does not have
that either. Both the OPL and the Blitter do maths, compares, interrupt handlings and
every other thing any other processor will do. They just need to be assited. They are
not just some simple support chip like you would find in a A8, Vic-20 or C-64.
The blitter and the OPL get set up and started and then go about there own business
and can do some very powerful processing all on their own after that.
A nice command buffer and command fetch ont he blitter would have been a nice improvement
to the system, even with the 68000 but I still say the 020 is by far the most practical
and by far the most cost effective, as well as greatly increasing the systems performance.
Using a a 020 just for opening up the DSP to 32 bits would have been worth it alone.
I'm glad Gorf is still around
Actually Im not...just popping in to giggle at the longevity of this thread once in a while.
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OPL = Object Processor Logic
so no, It's not a typo.
Heh, that's what I'd actually assumed the "L" stood for in the first place.
Oh come now!
But I'll give you that if...you finally kill this thread!!!!Sheesh! This makes Beatle mania looks short lived!!!
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OPL = Object Processor Logic
so no, It's not a typo.
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I guess anything other then 2D would be too much for the Jag to handle at a high resolution of 720x480.
Oh it could handle it...at a low frame rate.
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Amazing....What
was I thinking?
You where thinking of making a totally new system and calling it an add on for the 7800. What you described was nothing like a 7800 at all, figurativly speaking it was pretty much a totally new system using the 7800 for video and audio output.
How so? It was an addon of a math unit, pokeys(nothing new there) and some peripheral add-ons.
It was and expansion. It's now cancelled as is all my 7800 projects.
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I think this is a great project and I would support it 100%, great work Gorf!
Well, dont save you money for it. It is officially cancelled. With all their quirks,
at least the Jag fans would not have acted this way about it. At least they would
have welcomed is as the welcome anything new for their DEAD system. Amazing....What
was I thinking?
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It's funny how people bitch and moan about people never making anything new and exciting, and
then the minute you do, they bitch and moan anyway. Then they wonder why some of us throw our
hands up in the air and wish to walk away from the whole pointless mess at times.
Damned if you do and damned if you dont.
Are you a little insecure or something (or maybe a lot)? I didn't bitch and moan, I asked a valid question, I would never in a million years purchase something like this and wanted to know how you justify wasting your time to yourself.
Did I say YOU bitched and moaned? You sure you are not the insecure one?
Oh and just for the record,your opinion is not that of everyone elses, so if you do not want to purchase one, I promise not to lose any
sleep over it...really.
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Seems no one reminded poor old deluded Underball Im ignoring him!
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I'm excited to see new ideas for the 7800, particularly when it comes to upgrades to the console itself, and I'm not trying to discourage anybody from creating something new. But, speaking personally, I would prefer to see something smaller and simpler, something like a combination of the XBoard (more RAM and at least one POKEY chip) and the High Score Cartridge, inside an enclosure that fits into the cartridge slot so that there won't be any need to do any soldering. As an alternative to that (since the tooling for an external enclosure would be expensive), design it as a board that can be installed internally without having to desolder/socket any chips. As an aside, I am convinced that the biggest reason the XBoard hasn't gotten wider support in its current form is that it has to be socketed, which (for NTSC consoles) is more trouble than its level of support can justify.
Well you have nothing to fear as this essentially does all these things and more and you simply
plug it into your cart port.
My main concern is that an upgrade like the one Gorf describes would be too expensive, or that it will overlap with the functionality provided by the original 7800 computer add-on design, which Curt Vendel has talked about completing and putting into production. The "market" (if that isn't too great a term for the handful of us who appreciate the 7800 enough to make or buy new games for it) is small enough without splitting it between two competing devices, assuming they're ever completed and made available.
This would be an add as you go board. It will come with almost nothing except the BIOS ROM, a
small RAM and the math unit. The rest would be sockets and the user can then expand it as he/she
saw fit, simply by plugging in new chips. Of course you'd have a few plugs for key boards and such.
Again, the responses here tell me I've wasted my time once again trying to help the homebrew scene.
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That sounds really cool Gorf - It would be great if it were a 'dev' cart ( like the skunkboard, or the harmony ) with a USB link to a PC.
Yeah right, but after this wall of responses, I might just go back to coding my PC and actually
make some money with my talents instead of wasting on people who damn you if you do and damn you
if you dont! SHEESH!
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The user base of the 7800 is already so small, why look for an even smaller audience?
I guess its an attempt to break the catch 22 scenario. If you do nothing the user base remains small. If you do something interesting you have the potential to expand the number of users. Even if Gorf only makes one working proto it makes the hobby more interesting to him and thats also a good thing.
It's funny how people bitch and moan about people never making anything new and exciting, and
then the minute you do, they bitch and moan anyway. Then they wonder why some of us throw our
hands up in the air and wish to walk away from the whole pointless mess at times.
Damned if you do and damned if you dont.
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Exactly.
Um no not even close. It is an expansion chip. A computer add on is just one of many
possible uses. It was not because I ran in to an coding wall that a RAM/ROM/POKEY cart
cant handle. This chip simply makes it possible to fit a good deal of features inside
the small area of a 7800 cart. We have very small versions of very large RAM/ROM chips
nowadays and the only big chip would be the pokey. Of course you dont need to add anything
you dont really want either.
A computer or console would require much more than what I proposed. Plastics, PS, a processor
designed into the system along with having to find TIA's, MARIA's and the other things needed
to keep it compatible with the 7800. No thank you. This would be a simple enclosure running
out of your 7800, via a ribbon cable if you wanted an add-on. The chip is the real beauty here.
It will allow for very powerful carts that the current versions cant do.
Oh and please...someone remind Underball , I have him on ignore.
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A MAC is much more useful than a simple 8x8 multiply.
For 3D yes, which is not the goal of my endevors.
To be homest having sin, cos, arctan and square root tables without a MAC is not much use for ultimate performance. Especially with all the data shuffling, ADC, CLC etc. you'd need to do on the 6502.
Its not impossible to do 3D stuff on MARIA using DLL stuffing, andym00 did it :-
http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/62320-maria-graphic-power/page__view__findpost__p__765483
However, the demo doesn't work on real hardware for some reason
but the concept works.How about adding more colour depth similar to VBXE on the A8s?
As far as 3D in theory that does not work on real hardware.....need I continue?
This is a simple logic chip. That is all it was ever intended to be. The silicon required to do what
you are asking is way more work than I am interested in dealing with. Also this chip would be very
small and ideal for powerful carts or an addon. You also know well enough that no one would ever make
a whole lot of use of any of these over kill featuers, save a few of us.
Also for simple algorithms(such as synth sound algs)as the multiplies would be plenty fast(6-8 cycles)
with the sqrt function. We are not doing rocket science here. Simply a small inexpensive means of adding
a lot of nice and useful extras. What you are asking for is all great and such but completely out of the
realm fo the system this chip is intended for.
Color depth would require an entirely new gfx and not my intentions for this project. I am simply giving
means for easy addition of a few siple functions, comunicattions and RAM/ROM expansion. I still want
this to be a 7800 system...not a Jaguar. I have other plans for that and the 7800 is not the system to
base them around.
All of what you are asking would require very expensive ASIC's or at least me needing to update my lowely
Spartan 3E unit for a board I just dont have such money for. It would also cost way more than the average
7800 owner would be willing to pay for. The silicon foot print would be better suited in a next gen system,
not the 7800. Remember, this is a 6502 we are talking about. Would you rather take a few hundred cycles
for these functions when you can do them in under ten?
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Excuse my ignorance, but what is the point?
What's the point of supporting any homebrew system?
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I say go the next step and just make it toally new console. The "7800+" so to speak cause with this heavy of an add on it's making it into a totally different system as is, might as well actually make it a new system. If you can put your word to at least 5 to 10 killer over the top games for it I will buy it up in a snatch.
That would be way too much. Also this add-on would not be loaded with everything, but allow the user
to add these other features in. If I were to make a new system, that would be a Oberon based unit and
fully backward compatible with the current Jaguar. It would have a fixed blitter and a much better
register file on the risc's to eliminate any write back stalls from ALU, multiply and divide operations.
And this unit would still allow you to plug in normal 7800 carts. IT would indeed
have a 7800 cart port.
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I would think that two would probably be enough.
and...
Up to 16, 8 bit sound channels/8, 16 bit sound channels
Is what four Pokeys would give you. Also, you would not need to have them all or any on board.
So no PCM stuff. Four pokeys would make for a nice music synth.
Is this SIO compatible with the A8 range?
That is the hope since the POKEY's are what handle that in the A8.
Its a bit of overkill in my opinion. Probably 4 to 8 would be the limit e.g. 1 for each X,Y and Z axis and some spares. Again I think FIFOs and assorted timers would be needed to keep Sally under minimum load.
You are probably right but the connections would be there if someone creative enough can come up
with a way to make use of them, like for instance, parameter inputs for a music synth.
Just scan a few at a time every so often instead of all of them every frame.
Is this a MAC unit?
No.
You mean 16 bit/8 bit surely?
Yes my bad.
How about a polygon point transformation unit? You pass in a list of your polygon coordinates and X,Y,Z rotation angles, translation matrix, scaling matrix, perspective distance, viewpoint and it returns the transformed coordinates and if the polygon is visible. Might even be better if it returned some form of DDA for the polygon lines. That would make DLL creation or RAM buffer filling much easier.
Im not planning on doing polygons with the MARIA and DLL generation...nightmare.
What you are asking would require a lot of design and silicon. This is an 8 bit
machine. I dont intend to turn it into more than that. Simply to expand the 7800.
into a nice 8 bit computer. Again, this logic chip I designed can be used
for a lot less and a much different config than what I've suggested.
Think simpler.
Fixed point square root would be useful.
How about a 32 bit barrel shifter?
Even simpler than that....there is already a 256 entry fixed point SQR.
For these suggestions of math additions to be useful, you
might as well add a whole new gfx engine....not looking to do that.
Possible USB ports for Flash drives, Keyboards and many other USB devices.
I hope this functionality will be handed over to a dedicated USB master controller? Sally certainly isn't up to the job.
Yes but it is why I used the term possible and not definitely, since the SIO and such would be fine
for handling mose of these fucntions. The Flash Drive would need something dedicated.
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Those suggestions are fine for an Atari ST but for the Jaguar? I guess if you must. I suppose the pinball
one is not too bad. Now if you are making an arcade perfect clone of a game, yeah. That's never a bad thing.
But a Breakout clone would not need such high color nor high resolution. Of course you can make a BreakOut
plus like game.
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Isn't pure white one of the colors available int he CRY palette? (by the discription, I'd have assumed that there would at least be 256 shades of black/gray/white -which are indeed available in 24-bit RGB)I assume it's CRY. Also note that the shading only applies to the non-textured non-polygonal heightmap (aka voxel) terrain. The enemy sprites have no such shading. I'm not trying to diminish their work -- it was probably a difficult effect to pull off, possibly using lookup tables or event some GPU math on a per-"voxel" (height pixel) basis, to calculate the interpolation factors to get to "white".
Yeah, a real shame that game never got finished/released (even in as limited distribution as Battlesphere was). And PZ does use normal sprites for enemies? (gorf seemed to give the impression they were voxel models earlier in this thread -I'd assumed they were sprites originally)The guys who did Phase Zero have some mad skills. I've had a couple of conversations with the guy who did the heightmap engine in Phase Zero, but I'm afraid to ask too many questions about it. He already thinks I'm a total nut for still knowing or caring about the Jaguar.- KS
And, of course, voxel based games shouldn't have been limited to such masterful prgrammers at the time either, others may not have produced as amazign results, but that still doesn't mean it wouldn't have been preferably to plygons for a lot of things. (like the terrain in Cubermorph/battlemorph among other things)
A port of Comanche would have been pretty awesome.
(apparently that was even planned for the SNES using the Super FX2 coprocessor -can't immagine how cut-down that might have been though)Non polygon based rasterization would be more preferable in general, like raycasting. (Doom seems to be a much better example than AvP, but the added disadvantage to voxels would be greater use of texture mapping)
There's another Jaguar video mode I found a long time ago while poking around with BJL. In the Jaguar docs there are some "gaps" where registers "should" be, such as between F00054 (HEQ) and F00058 (BG). If you set bit 2 in the undocumented register F00056, you get "black and white CRY" mode.
In this mode, C chooses a grayscale shade from 0-255 and I shades that intensity. This mode is well-supported by the blitter (using TOPNEN) and can produce a few interesting shading effects not possible in normal CRY mode. The downside is, obviously, no color.
Neat! Doe it still use 16-bit pixels, or 8-bit? (as it is only 8-bit grayscale) And is shading still limited to blending toward black alone, not the reverse?
Assuming it uses 8 bit shades and then a seperate intensity value, 16 bit is probably the case.
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The fact is, even though a machine might display a high rez with higher color, it is best to use it
at it's strength's and get a great app rolling on it then to simply max it out for the sake of saying
you did so. Let's face it, though the game may 'look' great, the chances of it playing great when
you start to push it that hard become slim to none.
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Most interesting indeed.
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Are all the colors and shades in CRY mode actual 24-bit RGB values? If so, the shades/colors can't be exact as there would only be 256 shades of black/white, red, gree, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow (and all the darkest shades will be pure black). So does CRY use separate luma control, or approximate shades for other from a standard 8-8-8 RGB palette?
My guess is they are interpolated from a tru RGB palette.
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From looking at online websites here's what I got......
Display:
- Programmable screen resolution. Horizontal resolution is dependent on the amount of scanline buffer space given to the "Tom" graphics processor. Maximum vertical resolution varies according to the refresh rate (NTSC or PAL). Reportedly, a stock Jaguar (without additional memory) running NTSC can display up to 576 rows of pixels.
- 24-bit "True Color" display with 16,777,216 colors simultaneously (additional 8 bits of supplimental graphics data support possible).
- Multiple-resolution, multiple-color depth objects (monochrome, 2-bit, 4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit) can be used simultaneously.
If you want the website with LOTS of Jaguar spec's:
I have personally done 800 horizontal pixels across but the 240 vertical makes it less than a
reasonable ratio. To get a higher vertical res, you need to tricks and the Jaguar at higher
resolution will have serious performance problems depending on the amount of action you
intened to have in your game. 2D you might have a cold chance in hell, but I would not even
think about such a thing trying 3D in that high a resolution. To go even higher than using the
tricks for more vertical line, you need additional hardware.
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I have come a long way in my VHDL design of a 7800 mega computer board add-on.
Tonight I have sucessfully compiled the preliminary VHDL code and will start work on
the simulation and testing phase.
Up to 4, POKEY chips
Up to 16, 8 bit sound channels/8, 16 bit sound channels
Up to 4, SIO's(serial, MIDI, 102 key PC compatible key board, and special function controllers)
32 A-D converters for elaborate gaming devices
Up to four keyboard like devices(possible 88 key polyphonic musical key board)
A8 compatible key board.
on board:
32k RAM in two banks of 16k each
16k kernal/BIOS ROM hopefully with some form of BASIC and an assembler monitor/debugger (not bank switched, always operational)
Will include static DLL list sprite/animation engine, POKEY sound engine, back drop buffer graphics engine, communications engine,
including serial MIDI and special funtion controller support for devices like modern mice, track balls, encoders)
8 function math unit
1) 8 bit x 8 bit = 16 bit
2) 8 bit / 8 bit = 16 bit
3) fixed point sin/cos 256 degree circle or 256 entry square root
4) 256 entry arctan table
still deciding the other 4 functions, suggestions welcome
Expansion:
7800 cart port thru connector.
CART/ROM port for up to a 256k RAM/ROM bank switched: 16 banks of 16k x 8 bit RAM/ROM
Possible USB ports for Flash drives, Keyboards and many other USB devices.
Will sit under the 7800 unit.
Again, the cost of this unit could be prohibitive in making it worth while but the
custom VHDL chip I have designed may help a long way in making this possible at a
reasonable price.
Let me know what you all think.
Gorf
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Me thinks GB is only interested in original concept games.... So I guess that he'll be cutting bk on his 7800 games then as most of not all games ideas have already been done and copied ad infinitum
Not at all. I just don't like fighting games like Tekken. I did like Way of the Exploding Fist and IK+ back in the day.
I only like shmups from a technical standpoint. Normally they involve pushing lots of sprites around at a decent frame rate. A high sprite count and a high frame rate are not always easily achievable..
Please developers, no more fighters. We are at ad nausium with the over abundance of fighters,
racers and first person shooter. OY! More clasic space shooters however as you can never get
enough of those!
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Playing Jaguar with the girlfriend
in Atari Jaguar
Posted
Well it will be a cold day in Hell when a women decides if I get to play video games or not.
Cathy already knows and understands that video games are part of the package now while we are
dating and NO BIT DIFFERENT if and when we possibly may get married. I'm finding out just how
much better singlehood is to be quite honest.