philipj
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Posts posted by philipj
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Hmmm...? Isn't that what Atari did with the "Amy Chip" for the ST...? They had problems getting it to work so the ditch the whole thing all together and ST users were stuck with the mediocre YM-2149? A slightly better chip than the Pokey, but still no where near as good as what the AMY chip had to offer. Sounds a little bit like a repeat of history if you cancel the YM 2151. Just saying that's all, but I can certainly understand the impatience for a final release of the XM module.
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Thanks for the response... For a minute I didn't think I was going to get one; was thinking I might be asking the wrong question. lol
its not as simple, the Sega Genesis had alot of hardware options to help, like hardware sprite, more color on the screen, also think to remember it had hardware zoom.
Yea I was thinking about that considering that the Genesis was created 4 years ahead of the Atari ST... Great little system; I think it was the Sega CD that had hardware zoom.
to describe the plane ST.
it have a video chip, that in low resolutions had 16 colors out of a palette of 512 color, and 320x200 pixel, and that was it.
so all you wanted it to do you need to code for it. even a simple task, like putting a character on the screen(i know it had rom call for this, but they was still soft coded).
Sprite also need to be soft code. so the video shifter on the ST was very simple.
The last few days I was at www.archive.org looking at some books on the ST hardware as well as "Wikipedia" and finally get some kind of rough understanding about what made the ST hardware a little more affordable to buy than the other competitor computers during its heyday, which were the IC chips inside the ST that really kept the whole system "GLUE(ed)" together versus a typical standard system, which I thought was a bit clever and a bit risky at the same time.
i would even say, that many of the 8bit computer had more advanced video chips that the ST.
but they was lacking in resolutions, color on the screen and cpu speed.
Jay Miner were responsible for those 8bit chips... Enough said. lol Yea I think it would've been cool if they had put a better version of a GTIA in the ST; although I think the ST video SHIFTER coupled with the 68000 CAD and 3D applications. The ST seems to shine a little bit with racing games like "San Francisco Heat" that uses pseudo 3D style graphics and such.
the STE did improve little on the video chip, it expanded the palette to 4096 but it still only 16 color on the screen
but it also add the blitter to help move memory from one places to an other places. (plus it have some other functions like scrolling the bit planes).
it also had hardware scrolling.
so you really need to know the hardware on the ST/STE to do wonders, this is also the reason in my book, why many of the new things that have been done on the ST/STE, the last couple of years, is even more impressed
What's the name of your book and where can I find it? I'm always looking for new material on the ST versus the dated material I've been reading.
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Hi... I just purchased an "Atari ST 520" off of ebay for the first time "Ever"; I never really owned one before so I am a first time of one of these machines. I was wondering has anyone ever programmed Mode 7 style graphics on the Atari ST? I've posted picture of a demo of mode 7 on a Sega Genesis and wonder if anyone ever tried to pull it off on the ST yet? It sounds like a neat little project for somebody.
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For those who might be curious about "HammerHead" or "TS 404" programs I used with Jaytrax, I've attached a song I made using both programs called "Super Comet" back in 2001. You'll hear both loop machines / samples in action with this song.
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It's been a while since I posted anything here in this topic... This is a bit known "Jaytrax" specific, but very music composition related. Having looked at the history of music composition using midi interface, I felt a bit compelled to get my hands on an "Atari ST" to do a little retro digging into what the old computer had to offer. Never having owned one before, in the 90s, my first computer wasn't really a computer; it was but it wasn't... It was an "IBM Portable Word Processor" that came with it's own printer so I was doing homework and writing poetry in my teen years. I did have a couple of keyboards in the mid 90s, but nothing to really do any real composition back in those days so to get an Atari ST now really served as bit of a "What-If" throwback. I probably should post this in the ST section, but it's kind at the heart of my curiosity of what I could've really done with the old ST if I had it back in those early 90s versus discovering the "Jaytrax" sequencer in the late 90s as well as some other great programs like "HammerHead" beat machine for beat loops or the "TS-404 synthesizer" program to make synth loops. Among other thing like learning to program the "Motorola 68000" for other experimental projects and ideas, I might be prematurely putting this out there... Screw it; I'll take my chances anyway. To be honest the Atari ST actually looks better than the eBay post, which are the last three pictures.
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I think the 7800 is superior to the 5200.
In terms of graphics in my opinion... My only interest with the 5200 is learning to program using a Atari XL computer an possibly porting over to the 5200, but I've been wanting to make games for the 7800 for a while.
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Why the quotes? Is it an exotic modded FrankenConsole? In any case, I’ve really warmed to the 7800 over the years, and homebrews make it worth owning irrespective of the XM.
You're right... Ever since the "Cuttle Cart" the 7800 has been an interest of mine for some time and I'm currently without one at the moment. I'll eventually get a 7800 at some point in time, possibly before the year is out. It's just when the XM ships, I'll most likely be getting much sooner than later.
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I just purchased an "Atari 5200" with 12 games for it yesterday and a 600XL computer... Looks like I'm going to have to get myself an Atari 7800 system as well where as I sold my old one a couple of years ago. Can't wait to get my hands on the XM; I've been wanting to learn to program the 7800 for a long time.
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Good call!
I use to own that game before I sold it a couple of years back... Wish I'd kept; thank God for "Everdrive Cartridges".
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It reminds me of "Sub-Terrania" for the Sega Genesis. The company made this also did "Red Zone, Batman & Robin", and a 32X demo. I think they were in the Amiga demo scene.
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That's some good stuff guy... Congrats on your game; very inspiring... Keep it up.
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Don't want to throw this off topic, but I was thinking about the SNES a few days ago and how people considered the "Mode 7" effect to be a game changer when the "Atari Lynx" had a blitter to do all of it's effects. I think if Nintendo had taken a page out of the Atari Lynx book and included some kind of math co-processor with the graphics chip they already had, it would've been changed the game even more even if it was some old cheap 4-bit bit-slicer running really fast, that would've been some extra resource on the table and you know Nintendo would've used it to the fullest. Just imagine what "Mario Kart" would've looked like; they would've had the advantage of the masses to see on such a large scale the SNES probably would've lasted longer than it did because it would've had enough chops to survive maybe another year or two when the next gen stuff like the PS1 came out. They already had the Mode 7 for Affine Transformation of graphics; a co-processor would've made a world of difference in such an environment, someone would've used for real 3D in some way instead of the pseudo stuff. At least Atari had the balls to release to release the Jag even though prematurely.
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The textures on the fence are very telling. Looke at the texture on the horizontal connecting piece on the fence.
That much is clear, but look at how the ground is being rendered... I looks almost like a mode-7 kind of effect; it reminds me of Atari Kart or Val d'Isere Skiiing and Snowboarding where the game has hills and slopes with some 3D element to it with the low polygon buildings in the mix. The game looks great like the old "Buggy Boy" arcade game.
https://youtu.be/awsYwI3cpxA?t=321
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It's so strange seeing non perspective corrected texture maps these days
Oh so noticeable, especially since I just hooked up my original Playstation a few weeks back.Don't know...? The texture maps looks pretty corrected to me... It almost look "Mode 7" like with the only real 3D are the low poly buildings. Reminds me of Atari Karts and Super Burnout with some real 3D elements in the mix. Roadrash for the 3DO had something like this going on for its game engine only they had real looking landscapes to form hills and valleys and such. This DOS game comes pretty darn close to doing that.
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Hey VR-Vlad if you're still around, here's a DOS jewel I ran into yesterday... Something like this looks very feasible for the Jaguar thus this seems right up your alley.
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I know this topic is a bit aged, but still very cool... Don't forget the "Casio CZ Synthesizer" which also used the "NEC D7811g" processor to manage 8 voices via "Phase Distortion".
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I do have one question... Will there be any technical documentation, schematics, programmers references and things of that nature for the XM?
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I almost counted the XM as a lost where as I sold all my 7800 stuff a couple of years ago... But I'm finally glad its coming out; I just have a get game console off ebay and strike the collection back up again. Also I've been meaning to Dev on the 7800 for some time now thus the XM is a nice incentive for me to get back on board with that sort of thing especially with the added memory and two sound processors. Don't exactly know how far I get with it, but if I good a strong foot hold on this programming thing, I'll take things to the moon God willing.
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I've had my email since the late 90s... In fact it's the very first email I signed up to. Still using it after all of these years.
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No.
Quote from John Carmack:
I actually dug up all my old jaguar development hardware to give to these
guys a year or two ago.Unfortunately, it turned out that I had lost the C compiler that I had retargetedto the jaguar RISC engines, so DOOM was no longer buildable. -
Wasn't a custom C compiler used to program Doom for the Jag...? Every one and their mother was looking for the compiler at one time before they gave up.
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Wow...! I nearly missed this. Just submitted mine in. Can't wait to get the module; I might order a second one.
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Here's a little fact nugget about the music I did for "Jamind Bomb Squad"... The inspiration for the song came from a couple of sources; originally I only knew the game to be "Jagmind" in the beginning. When Is started working on the song, at the time I had just obtained an Intellivision with the game "Bomb Squad" that I was playing a lot back in those days. I didn't know what the game would play like so if I recall Starcats had brokedown the game play to me in description as a puzzle game so my first thought would be to create something of mystery and atmospheric while the player figure the puzzle out. A song that came to mind was one off of "Samurai Showdown" for the SNES, which was Nakoruru theme song; so I would play the SNES song in the background while playing a game of "Bomb Squad" on my Intellivision to help drum up some inspiration "Jagmind" and that's how I wind up making two songs for the game. Also that's how "Jagmind" had the name "Bomb Squad" added where as before, it was only known as simply "Jagmind". Lars changed up the game a little and added new stuff to what he had already made as well as the Bomb Squad name at the end.
One more thing I want to mention... I remember a person posting sometime ago about me not making more songs for the "Jagmind" video game...? Well there's a very good reason for that. I'd previous made a crap load of songs for the game "Jagworm" and the songs were set and already made with the game still being worked on until the infamous "Hard Drive Crash" were the original source code or game got lost. When I did the music for Jagmind, I remember asking Lars if he wanted more songs, but he didn't seem to want to take the chance again of me making a lot of songs and him loosing his work again, which was completely understandable at that time. But for those who might remember those days, yea I did want to do more songs, but it just never worked out that way.
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I like that "real-time Mandelbrot" demo Atari had with their development software where they used both the GPU and the DSP to render fractal mandelbrot in real-time... That seem pretty promising especially when it was demonstrated on "Battlesphere" in one of the menus. I think the way those fractal mountains done on the 8-bit platform was very simplistic considering how fast the 6502 was able to pull off the pseudo 3D effect on the Atari-8. I think fractals has become a bit of a lost art in the gaming world today, but I think that's on account that back in the old days, computers just couldn't handle the number crunching it took to do what most people wanted fractals to do and in the case of "Rescue on Fractalus" that was some level of fast/cheap reasonable pseudo 3D visuals on an 8-bit system, which was very ambitious for its time being the original "Behind Jaggi Lines" using a scheme designed for "anti-aliasing".
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Happy New Year... XM shipping this month
in Atari 7800
Posted
Sounds like some audio clipping with in the decibel; too much loud audio for the speaker to pick-up... I like how the Sega CD module had a mixing audio jack in the back of it to cover stereo sound exclusively from the module. It's possible to do the same on the XM using some cheap method to compensate to whatever changes will be made to the hardware.