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andym00

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Posts posted by andym00

  1. Posted

    Oh so then you just dont comprehend the things you read properly? You certainly did not this time.

    Oh blimey..

     

    Um ...that's lovely....but again you did not read...Surrounded! was never intended to push the Jaguars limit

    but to prove you can indeed run code from main and jump from main to local. It's friggin 3d Simon in Space

    for crying out loud. Im not going to do a demo on the scale of Halo just to prove a simple but useful concept.

    You're misreading what I wrote there.. I said "nothing else I've seen", no reference to surrounded there at all..

    My first comment way back, clearly was referencing surround.. The latter, in no way referenced surrounded, and that's the one that still hasn't been answered..

     

    Oh I think you did...I know Surrounded is no Quake 3 but to bring up the 7800? That's not a shot at me?

    I know you think im an idiot but come on now.

    :roll:

    It's was an honest question.. What does push the limits on the Jag then ?

    And no, I don't think you're an idiot.. Quite how you reach that conclusion I have not the foggiest idea.. But I can assure you I don't..

     

    Hassle and conflict? You should'nt take shots at people for no apparent reason, then act innocent about it.

    There was no 'shot' at anybody..

     

    However you are correct. There is a lot of crap to deal with in this community but it doesn't help when folks

    like yourself come along, inexperienced trying to sound like your not. Reading things that are not there.

    Poking the eye of those of us that have been supporting this system for over a decade now as if all we have

    done to wring better performance is negated because some Mr. Know it all new-comers, smarter than

    everyone, are hear to save us all.

    I certainly don't think that's the case at all.. You can be as defensive as you want and read what you want into my intentions, but you need to be aware that you've misinterpreted things here..

     

    Look, you can read what you want into it, but one thing, specifically on the Jaguar side of things, was that I worked for MSU/Konix/Flare on various revisions of the Konix which later turned into the TSX Multisystem which mutated into the IBM BaliBox and then eventually became your Atari Jaguar.. I was programming this thing in it's many many various guises for a long time before you ever heard of a Jaguar (by that I mean a good 5 years).. Granted the DSP changed, there was only one back then, the CPU became a 68K instead of a 386sx(and yes before anyone picks holes, there were other cpus as well), the Blitter grew extra registers, but I'd like to think that I'm pretty familiar with the overall architecture as it finally arrived in the Jaguar form.. That's not to say I know it all, I don't, I'll be the first to admit to that, but I think that 25 years of working in the games industry, and the 100+ games which I've worked on over those years does not qualify me as a new-comer..

  2. Posted

    Too bad you dont actually read something before shooting your mouth off.

    I read, I commented..

     

    The demo was written to show that the GPU can run code from main RAM and jump

    to and from Main and local RAM...but when we are bitter or jealous...we tend to ignore

    the facts of the matter, dont we?

    I haven't ignored any facts due to bitterness or jealousy, I simply commented on what I saw before me..

    To be quite frank, nothing else I've seen, on the Jag, that supposedly pushes the limits overwhelms me either..

     

    Next time READ before you let your mouth bleed. You wont look like such a fool.

    It's stated clearly in the thread that it was nothing fancy. what I ever did to get you to

    atack me like this I'll never know, but you know what? Grow up!

    I didn't attack you.. If anything your response is an attack on me.. Anyway, I won't spend any more time looking at the possibility of doing stuff on the Jag since it's like a battlefield here.. I came to the Jag scene hoping to do some fine stuff, but in all honesty it's really not worth the hassle and conflict..

     

    Have fun..

  3. Posted

    Oh, hey, you're that guy who put the polygon on the 7800! Or was that two? Anyways, I'm a big fan of your work, and can't wait to see what you have in mind for that crystal you made. Smart money's on a skipping stones kind of game play, or one of those "Lose weight fast" commercials, if you have enough space left for the physics to make it swing back and forth. Anyways, it's cool, and thanks for sharing your expert opinion here with us tiny folk.

    You're welcome :)

  5. Posted · Edited by andym00

    Silly question which I've never thought about before (welll a little bit, but not in this context), but when Maria is reading from anything outside of the internal 4K RAM, does it slow to the CPU clock 1.79Mhz clock for external memory accesses, or does it carry running on at 7.16Mhz ?

    Just wondering about a little project, and am curious if I can feed Maria directly across the cartridge port from some logic running in a cart, but at full Maria speeds..

     

    Are the CLK (and possibly R/W even though not needed) lines coming out on the cartridge port swapped between the CPU and Maria depending upon who's is currently active ?

     

    I always wondered if ROM accesses by Maria were at fullspeed when I was dibbling around with 7800 things before..

    I'd try it right now, but I don't have my CC2 with me here to test with..

     

    Hmm, okay reading a bit more, seems I should use the HALT line to distinguish between CPU and Maria Reads ? Okay :)

  6. Posted

    yeah tell us how the saturn can't do trevor.

     

     

    A cold hard fact that makes this particular sega drone cry himself to sleep at night.

     

    I did say the game sucked. :)

     

    Again my statements are being misinterpreted. Im telling you that a reworked

    BM or HS engine that runs on the RISCs only, will do a decent version of any

    of those games. Less polies perhaps but a 30 FPS frame rate. RS is actually

    using speedier microcode too and the polycounts do look a bit higher than the

    typical N64 game. They are definitely two of the nicer games for the N64.

     

    The microcode also corrects a lot of lighting issues and it really is a nice job

    by the dev team. They also did a really good job of overcomming the 4k

    texure ram limits..a big reason all the N64 games textures for the most part

    are horid ly blurred.

     

    RS uses a texture streaming technique which allows cart space to act (kinda)

    like extra texture ram(its a steaming kind of set up the way the do it.) Kudos

    to the developers all the way. this is not at all a put down on them. It's not even

    such on the N64...Im just telling you what I know based on the information easily

    finable all over the I-net.

     

    The Jag wont EVER push as much on the screen but I can be clever and do

    something similar enough to make you see that for all the technological

    advances inside the N64 the end result is not all that impressive.

     

    It could have competed closer to the DC ( not real close though) if Nintendo

    allowed the Turbo 3D microcode which would have allowed 300-500,000

    polies with a few less effects. That is the code they should have gone with.

     

    Why they did this, I'll never know. I think Nintendo may have held this code as an

    ace in the whole to kick the N64 incase of stiff comp. I think also that blew this idea

    off realizing that the Cart nature of the N64 was greatly limiting what developers

    could do and hence went on to the GAME CUBE instead. My guess only.

     

    Also, if you look a good deal of the N64 games you will see a lot of sneaky G-shading

    going on that tends to go unoticed becasue it is done tastfully and in the right places.

    The reason for this is that the texture buffer is only 4 kilobytes. High color textures

    eat that up very fast and is why you see all that stretching and blurring.

     

     

    So everyone chill...the N64 is a superior machine but a disappointment in many ways.

    The Jaguar is 5 years older tech, almost one quarter the system clock, and no tools

    useful to pull the real power from it remember.

     

     

    You've not sen the best on the Jaguar yet. we'll do out best...hey come on, tell me any of

    you guys would not like to see a much improved game on the Jaguar? hang tight.

    We're working on it.

     

     

    Also remember, in the Jaguar, you have full acess to micro code. There is no top layer

    like in the nintendo.

     

    Nice cut'n'paste of the N64 Wiki page there Gorf.. Not doing yourself any favours now..

    Plus, as far as I know, you have no access to microcode on the Jag Riscs.. Or is this something else

    you've discovered that even Atari didn't know about ?

  8. Posted · Edited by andym00

    Game logic and AI is my job at 3DS in case you we reall wondering. I also do the 3D modeling for whichI wrote my own modeler for.

     

    Who ? Link ?

  10. Posted

    Amongst other features of Perforce that I use regularly is it's capacity as a server. This means I can work at home, or work on the road with my laptop.

     

    I submit changes when I'm happy that a micro feature is working. Especially when working on a 2600 project, it is so handy to be able to go back and compare to last 'working' version and check what I did that broke the game ;) Many times, I will just revert my changes and start working forward, instead of painstakingly trying to spot the problem. I've become accustomed to submitting very frequently as it is integrated into my editor. I also have the habit of commenting every change that I submit, and this gives me a nice history of my work in the database.

     

    My knowledge and expertise with Perforce comes because of the fact that all the game companies I've worked for or with use it. Otherwise, I may not have had the impetus to try it. But having used I can say that I would never go back to just using zip archives.

     

    Ditto for everything djmips says here.. Perforce is the dogs danglies when it comes to source control, and with it being free for 2 users it's quite simply a bargain..

  13. Posted

    I'm looking at finding some time to get into some Jaguar programming, but I'm a bit confused with the options available..

     

    Are there any ~2MB (preferably 4MB) flash carts available that have USB or other high speed links, or am I looking at building one myself ?

    I see constant reference to some Jag CF cart, but can't actually find anything solid about this device..

     

    Do you absolutely need a development Jaguar to use one of the Alpine boards ? Just curious about this, but in reality I don't really want to fork out ~$500 for an Alpine board until I would become a little bit more devoted to programming the Jag..

     

    Are there PC versions of the assemblers available for the GPU/DSP ?

     

    Cheers for any pointers on this stuff.. They might be dimbo questions, but I can't find the answers in any of the Jag forums I've stumbled across..

  14. Posted

    Well, here it is. Version one.

     

    For future improvements, the square waves could be modified to triangle or sinus shapes but of course, we are talking some more cycles. There are cycles available, especially since the third voice is unused in this tune. Nevertheless, we have to keep in mind the cycles one might want to use for the display.

     

    Also, I have not worked on adjusting the envelopes.

     

    Some background on this technique. I was working on a soft synth (inspired by Bruce Tomlin's RedBox), when I stumbled upon Andy's code in the Stella archive. I had seen it when it first came out but I wasn't interested in a soft synth back then and I hadn't realized what it was. I think it's quite well done, and it really has room for improvement (a compliment). Of course, I wish I had written it first.  :)

     

    I think it answers the musings that batari had in the 2600 red box demo thread about using direct control over the audio output to create music. I think there's a lot more cool audio potential here.

    886126[/snapback]

     

    Glad it was useful :) If you need any help decipering what it's trying to do or any questions, just ask.. It was a long time ago, and wanted to do more with it but it kind of was left to rot due to work commitments :( Was a while ago, but I can still remember almost perfectly what it did, and how and why I did certain things..

     

    But it would be good to see it be used for something other than my pitiful programmer attempts at noises..

     

    Pauls right though, you can add the standard TIA audio on it as well, you have on free voice, don't know what it's going to sound like of you start using the 2nd voice for anything, the one being used for the synth playback, probably a bi tlike a tortured cat :)

     

    The idea of taking the 3rd voice of the softsynth would free a huge amount of time up in the kernel, and also in the voice processing code, also a large chunk of zeropage would be available again.. Also it would free a bit more dynamic range on the individual channel levels, might make the EGs sound a bit better, because they're very very feeble with only a few levels available to them..

     

    I did initially experiment with other waveforms and they just don't sound good in 4 bits.. Far too much noise.. And I wanted something that sounded good, without people having to forgive whatever noise and stuff it might have.. The really beauty is the summing method for the square waves which is just beautiful :) I fully admit I ripped that idea of from Pitfall 2 ;)

  15. Posted

    Danno, you want I, Robot on the 7800? A fully polygonal game running on a 6502C processor? The game wouldn't be doable in 30 frames per second, but 30 frames per hour, yeah, I think it could pull that off.  :)

     

    You really under estimate the the polygon friendly power of Maria my friend ;)

     

    In all seriousness, I reckon you could probably squeeze I'Robot onto the 7800.. It'd be a painfully hard job but it could be done, and could look very nice.

  20. Posted

    Indeed it is much smaller.  the compiled executable zips down to 5.8 megs, but I can't post it here. Too large still. I keep getting the error page telling me it's not a proper zip file.

     

    I can whack it up somewhere if you want to email it to me ?

  21. Posted

    ummm, okay but bear in mind this was the state in the middle being distracted months ago.. It's got some horrible glitches in it, but.. bah no more excuses, it's simply VERY work in progress.. Oh, and there's no perpsective transform or clipping on the geometry yet.. The perspective is a small thing, the clipping a big thing ;) I never sent it out to the 7800 list before, simply because it's so early in it's stages, whatever it becomes.. It was simply an experiment in polygon rendering.. And yeah, it's proper polygons, the backside of the cobra model is one 7 edged polygon, rendered in one go ;)

     

    There's some odd glitches here and there, dunno why, I don't recall it doing that last time I was playing with it, maybe it did, it was a while ago..

     

    I've no idea if it even works on a real 7800 yet :roll: never got that far, all development was done under Mess until I sorted out some Ram cart thing for my 7800.. I doubt it'll run on a real 7800 judging by the other demos and things posted on atariage, that work on mess but fail on a real 7800 until some tweakge is done..

     

    Here's a .a78 and .bin..

     

    http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~csaba/7800/elite.a78

    http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~csaba/7800/elite.bin

     

    There's no user input on it.. That's what I was working on along with general printing and debugging stuff when I slowed to a halt on it..

     

    The config is any need the bin is:

     

    SuperCart bankswitching, 8 banks, 16K SuperCart RAM at $4000 PAL..

     

    or if I've missed something out this is the complete .a78 header I use..

     

    ; This automatically generates the A78 header information

SEG	ROM

ORG $0000

RORG $0000 

HEADER:

DC.B	1  ; 0   Header version     - 1 byte

DC.B	"ATARI7800"	; 1..16  "ATARI7800   "  - 16 bytes

DS	7,32  ;

DC.B	"m00"  ; 17..48 Cart title      - 32 bytes

DS	HEADER+49-.,0	;

DC.B	$00,$02,$00,$00	; 49..52 data length      - 4 bytes

DC.B	$00,$06  ; 53..54 cart type      - 2 bytes

   ;    bit 0 - Pokey cart

   ;    bit 1 - Supercart bank switched

   ;    bit 2 - Supercart RAM at $4000

   ;    bit 3 - ROM at $4000

   ;    bit 4 - Bank 6 at $4000

   ;    bit 8-15 - Special

   ;   0 = Normal cart

DC.B	1  ; 55   controller 1 type  - 1 byte

DC.B	1  ; 56   controller 2 type  - 1 byte

   ;    0 = None

   ;    1 = Joystick

   ;    2 = Light Gun

DC.B	0  ; 57 0 = NTSC 1 = PAL

ORG	HEADER+100	; 100..127 "ACTUAL CART DATA STARTS HERE" - 28 bytes

DC.B	"ACTUAL CART DATA STARTS HERE"

     

    Anyway, if anyones really interested I can post the source sometime, if only to show how I render the polys and hopefully provide someone with the motivation to do some proper 3D on the 7800, if I never get going again on this that is ;)

  22. Posted

    Now that's just teasing everyone! :-)

     

    Hmm, okay :)

     

    1.png

    2.png

    3.png

     

    This is nothing special, I just fired up the last binary I had lying around from months ago, so the text is scruffy, the stafield is broken, but this does run around 16 fps.. The general purpose text printing slow it down a bit, but you can see it does the business...

     

    There is a frame rate counter buried under that text somewhere, but the last thing I was working on was some generic verison of printf essentially to allow me to display sensible info..

  23. Posted

    I don't even doubt that with proper programming,  

    and this wouldn't be the first forum that I mentioned this, that the  

    7800 can handle 3D with a little extra RAM.  It probably wouldn't

    be nothing spectacular...

     

    It can and does it not too badly.. I was working on some 3d for the 7800 a few months back, but work demands put a stop to it, and I've never got up to speed again..

     

    I had Elite models rendering full screen at 160 x 160 using up to 23 colours, running at 20fps.. Which isn't too bad 8) for a little 6502.. THe Maria is perfect for drawing polygons, if you can draw it in wireframe you can draw it solid on the 7800 for very little, (I mean very little) extra cost.. Though there's a whole host of other limits.. And yes you need 16K of RAM on the cart to make it doable, which negates the use of a pokey which is a shame (well without some custom bank switching voodoo chippery)

     

    I shall when time permits, clean the code up and post something to the 7800 list..

     

    My first goal in mind was something like I'Robot on the 7800, but that was just too much, then a Virus/Zarch/Lander type thing, but that was to special cased to do used a generic polygon system.. It's certainly doable on the 7800, just very hardcoded ;)

     

    So I settled on just getting 3D up and running using Elites models..

     

    It's a shame as the 7800 could certainly do some wonderful solid 3D stuff, especially with 23 Colours available to you..

  25. Posted

    In that case I think I'll support the stereo outputs. Seems like a good bet if only to give 20 or so people some magic bonus sound extras, and it won't affect mono output except at the cost of a 3/4 extra cycles..

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