belboz

Let me find a suitable replacement power supply for my scanner and I will scan my Double Dragon V manual for you.

Well I actually wanted the developers tools, and have no real desire to use the alpine to run roms of other games. Again not concerned about loading 4MB roms to the Alpine. My main reason for getting the Alpine is development. Not to say I wouldn't mind having a 4MB Alpine for large stuff, but I think 2MB will do me fine for now! Main reason for starting this thread was to see if anybody could help me figure out what was on this disk and how to load it.

Normally they can't. That Jukebox software loads a cartridge image into an alpine board for running there. So it is still loading from ROM space, just on the alpine board.

Actually the CD is bad. Which explains why no method worked. The method of loading the bypass into the alpine (stones method I mentioned above, and just loading it directly) work fine for booting non signed CD's. My problem was just using a bad CD to start trying this! Robert Demming's Jag Creation software works very well. You can get it at http://www.xs4all.nl/~rdemming/Atari/index.htm It will build a bootable CD for you that can run one program, or can create the menu for loading multiple programs (but you need an Alpine for the latter menu disks currently).

No bypass cart. Thats why I was loading the bypass image into the alpine. Curt actually tossed this disk in for free. I actually bought the Alpine board, developers docs, and some developers cd's.

Everyone, I just got some development related stuff from Curt (Thanks Curt). One of the items he sent me was a CD that was labeled "CD to Alpine Loader with Jaguar Games". I think it is like (or is) the Jukebox 2.4 software detailed in the latest issue of myatari (oct 2003 issue, jagfest 2003 article). http://www.myatari.net/issues/oct2003/jagfest.htm I was trying various methods to get it to boot to no avail. I am hoping people here might be able to help me figure this one out. Curt suggested I check with people here, since he wasn't sure about it. I have a stubulator (94 rom) in the Jag. A 2MB alpine board, and a Jaguar CD (original Atari bios in the CD player). All of my problems might be related to the fact that my CD drive doesn't have the development bios in it. I plan on doing this eventually, I have just been too lazy. I did try loading the cdbypass rom into the alpine board, and then booting with the bypass image with the CD to Alpine Loader disk in the drive. The system always ends up going to VLM player in the CD and I can play a single audio track on the CD. Stone on here recommended I boot the stubulator Jag and hold the A button to get the stub to load to dram. Then he said to load the bypass rom image with rdb or wdb to address 802000 and run it. This seemed to give me the same effect as booting the cdbypass image directly. Although with this method sometimes I see various crashes being reported from the debugger. Any thoughts on any method I should be using to boot this disk? Am I screwed until I put the developers bios in the CD drive? I was thinking possibly I need to load something else into the alpine instead of the bypass rom image. I was also thinking the disk could possibly be bad also. Thanks ahead of time for any help on this one.

damn, I was looking at this and was going to do a BIN and someone beat me to it.

Stone, Makes perfect sense. Thanks for all the help.

Robert, Thanks for the information. You answered most of my questions. I should have been more specific on my one question. Let me be more specific. (I think faster than I type ) Since the alpine board has a battery on it I assume it keeps the cartridge image contents even when the jag is turned off. Until the battery dies. I was wondering if after it has an image on it can it be plugged into a normal Jag without a stubulator rom just to run the software on the cart?

Stone and Linkovitch, Thanks for the feedback. I guess I will go out and get some shielded cable and build a new cable. I will put the old cable back in the jaguar controller. I'm not sure how long I will use the BJL interface, as I just picked up an Alpine board from Curt. Don't have it yet though. I figure when I get the Alpine board I will use that over the BJL interface. I will probably burn an EPROM with the BJL code and the stubulator code on a selectable switch. I don't have a developers jag, but from what I understand I only need to put a stubulator rom in the jag and solder on the little pin header so I can get a little ribbon cable to go from the Jag to the Alpine board. Any other changes? Are there any sites with info on the Alpine interface cable? Would be nice to know if the ribbon cable is a straight through or not. One other Alpine question. Do you need the cable if your not debugging? Say you just want to download something to run only. Can you do that? Also can you download and run something on the alpine without the stubulator rom in an unmodified jag? Thanks again for all the quick replies.

I have a quick question for some Jaguar programmers who are using a BJL modified Jag. Do you have any problems with downloads not working all the time? I find when I do an 8bit transfer with the wait parameter set to its default of one, I rarely get a good download. If I set the wait to about 15-20 I seem to get 100% accurate downloads. I'm doing the downloads with a 300MHz system. I have an AMD 1900 system running XP, but I didn't mess with it because I figured the DOS lo.exe program would not be able to access the printer port in XP. Anyway, I am guessing it is related to one or more of these things. 1) The 300MHz system being too fast for the lo.exe's original timing. The wait parameter seems to help here. 2) My BJL cable being too long for the TTL lines on the parallel port. I am using a cable from a Jaguar controller. I chopped it off inside the controller so it is 6 foot long or so. I don't want to chop it down unless I have to. Again I think if length is an issue the wait parameter helps give time for the parallel port to drive the long signal lines high. 3) Something else I am missing. Would love to hear any feedback from people who have used the BJL interface. If you had problems like mine what settings did you use. If you didn't have any problems what kinda specs do you have on your PC you download with. Thanks for any feedback

Thanks everyone for all the comments. The votes ran all over the place! Votes for 2600,7800,5200,Lynx,Dreamcast, and Jaguar. I think I am going to tackle the Jaguar first. It looks to be quite fun to deal with the 3 processors in it. Hopefully in the coming months I will have something to show and talk about.

Everyone, I have what I think is a pretty unique idea for a game. I don't want to go into specifics on the actual game, but I think it has good potential. Anyway I am curious what people suggest is the best Atari platform to target. The following are the platforms I could potentially develop this game for. Atari 2600 Atari 5200 Atari 800/XL/XE Atari ST Jaguar Now my main programming experience is with 68000 based systems. I am an embedded systems engineer and have written code for the 68000 and 68332 families (assembly and C). I did a lot of hacking on my ST on up through TT (still have a Mega STE and TT). So I feel the most comfortable with the ST line. The Jaguar would probably be my next pick because of the 68000 and DSP's. I feel the ST and Jaguar could obviously do the most justice to the game with their more advanced hardware. I could do it for the 8-bit Atari computers (and the 5200 since it is so close) also. I got an Atari 800 right after they came out (late 1979). It's been awhile since I did any assembly programming on the 8-bit, but I am sure I could make it happen. I wrote the old Dos Atari 8-bit emulator Pokey, so I do understand how the 8-bit hardware works. The 2600 would be the toughest to develop for since I have no real experience with developing for the 2600. With the weaker hardware (compared to the others) and low memory, it would be a challenge to make this happen. There are a bunch of good resources here and on the net, so I think I could get up to speed eventually. My goal would be to develop for the platform that would have the strongest interest (i.e. sales). I don't expect to get rich obviously, but I want to target the system that would have the strongest support. Right now I am thinking the 2600 and Jaguar (i.e. the consoles) would have the best chance of interest. I would love to hear what everyone thinks on this. Besides just interested gamers, I would also love to hear from any developers, publishers, vendors, etc.

Hello, I was backing up a bunch of my 8-bit stuff to ATR files for burning onto a DVD. I had a problem with one of my old 8-bit disks and I was hoping someone has an ATR image of it. So if anyone has the Mac/65 toolkit disk, I would really appreciate getting a copy of it. Thanks for any help.