Shamus

Actually the main problem with Jaguar emulation is the fact that the documentation for it is pretty lousy. It's actually possible to do a decent job of emulation of the Jag--just look at the work Aaron Giles has done with Area 51 and Vicious Circle. And of course you can optimize towards a particular game as Mr. Linde did with his Project Tempest, but when you try to have it handle other games that don't like your special optimizations, well... He had to rewrite the whole thing from scratch and it STILL didn't fix simple bugs that we took pains to discover AND document! It wasn't until Curt Vendel released the Oberon specs (BTW, did I mention that you ROCK Curt? ) that I was able to make the blitter work they way it's supposed to (for the most part--a few bugs linger). Netlists are a godsend. Now that I have the Jerry netlists, I can make the emulation pretty much perfect. Then someone else can come along and optimize the hell out of it if I don't do it myself. @Venter127: Sorry, I don't mean to sound flippant, but vista is seriously not a good platform to develop for. Any OS that is DESIGNED to degrade itself because special interests told the developers to do so is not worth the time, aggravation or mindshare. Life is too short to waste on such crap.

There's your problem. Sorry, but I'm going out of my way to support vista--it's broken in so many ways it's not even funny.

It's kinda difficult to help you without any specifics--such as OS, version of VJ, etc.

And the hits keep on coming... Thanks!

Thanks Curt!

Thanks for the info--all I can say is WOW! :) No more guesswork! BTW, what is the language used? I can't seem to find any reference to it anywhere, and I'm no hardware guru.

I don't mean to be pushy, but have you sent those netlists yet? Totally understand if you're too busy.

Done. BTW, that's quite a find! How did you come across them?

As always, you manage to find interesting stuff Curt. Many, many thanks! :)

I have the Oberon netlists (very useful--thanks again Curt! You rock!) but I don't have the Jerry netlists. How about shooting me a copy? Then I could finally lay the sound problems/questions in VJ to rest.

Bard's Tale III intro screen This was done back in 1990 (or thereabouts) but not released until this year. Not sure if/where it fits, but I thought I'd put it out there.

Err, six levels, different weapons/enemies? Did you even try it?

I forgot to mention that this requires an XL/XE. My most sincere apologies to all of you stuck with a 400/800.

The short answer is because 632 is greater than 255. In other words, you need TWO bytes to represent that value (one byte can only hold a value from 0-255).

Nice script, thanks! :)

Reading through the Wizardry conversion thread reminded me that once upon a time, I was determined to do a conversion of Bard's Tale I-III to the A8 (why didn't we get one? Oh yeah, it was from EA when they decided they didn't want to do any more Atari conversions ). I did have a C64 at the time, but playing it on the C64 was an exercise in pain. It was slow, slow, slow. The disk access, that is. At any rate, after transferring the disks over to my A8 via null modem and custom software on both ends, I managed to get the splash screen going but that's about it. Let's just say that at that point, life got in the way as it is wont to do. So here it is, a bit of nostalgia; an echo of what might have been. bt3_splash.zip

QnD translation, for those too lazy to go to Google: 1) If one is struggling with battleships, always on the screen, until they were shot and then quickly even in a good shooting position. These ships are just a precise hit in the middle to destroy. 2) The game can only win if all the cities of the enemy destroyed. As long as there are still hostile cities, the opponents always new space fleets in their own system. 3) To this game too serious in degree of difficulty to create, one must at the outset into the enemy Cylon-System fly and there as quickly as possible to destroy all cities. Thereafter, no new attacker on a more and we can all rest his severely under fire ended planet and its space station rid of the invaders.

I know it's probably late in the discussion of hardsynth techniques, but all of this reminded me of a very short BASIC program that would twiddle AUDCTL. It was like a mini-song all in itself, even though all that changed was AUDCTL! Weird! Who would've thought that the POKEY could make sounds like *that*? Still blows my mind. It works in emulators, but for best results use a real Atari computer: 10 S=53760:POKE S,230:POKE S+1,175:POKE S+2,231:POKE S+3,175:POKE S+4,229:POKE S+15,3 20 FOR X=0 TO 255.49 STEP 0.135:POKE S+8,X:NEXT X:GOTO 20 This is my benchmark for emulators. If they can reproduce this correctly (in addition to gfx, of course) then they're pretty close to 100% in my opinion.

As far as switching ROMs between the 8-bit and 5200 versions goes, it couldn't be done. I opened mine (oh, so many years ago) and much to my dismay, the ROMs were surface mounted. It was probably cheaper to manufacture that way, but damn.

Ah, The Eidolon and Koronis Rift... I remember defeating Eidolon many years ago and oddly enough I still remember the ending. The last cavern had you going around in a zig zag in a mostly black cave until you came upon the multi-headed dragon. Once you defeated that one, there was a short animated sequence which I thought was rather anticlimactic, especially given what you had to go through to get there! At least it wasn't as bad as Rainbow Walker's ending. As far as Koronis Rift goes, I remember playing that one all the way to level 20 and defeating the guardian saucers only to have... absolutely nothing happen. The manual hints at an ending (a massive technology dump! woo hoo!), but I don't know if such a thing was actually coded into the game--which is shame considering just how cool that game is.

The current CVS version of Virtual Jaguar GCC can do FFL, but it's slooooooowww... Actually, thanks to Mr. Curt Vendel, I've been making really good strides on the blitter--very soon it will be 100% authentic. Now Curt, how about those Jerry ASICs? Yeah, I know, I know. We're working for accuracy first, blazing optimizations later.

Wow, and with the new blitter core (thanks again Curt! You RULE) that puppy's gonna be sloooooooowwwww.... I hope he sends us any patches (well, good ones, anyway).

I know that with the 1.0.6 series that it was an issue but as long as you're running 1.0.7 or the latest CVS snapshot, it should be able to automatically load and run your homebrew binary--provided it's in the right format (.abs, .rom, .jag--the readme should have all of the details). I haven't gotten the Stubulator to work properly yet, but there is a little kludge in there that should work. I would really appreciate feedback on how it works (or not) for you or any other stuff that would make development easier. BTW, the Virtual Jaguar project listed on the Jaguar emulator page isn't ours--ours is found at http://icculus.org/virtualjaguar (hey Albert, how about a plug for our project on that page? ). That other one hasn't been actively developed for over a year, and Project Tempest is all but gone too. It's a shame, really, that we couldn't have gotten together and pooled our knowledge like the Atari800 guys did... BTW, Curt, if you're reading this, I just want to say a great big THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH! I think you know why.

Funny you should mention that--Rayman is THE reason that I bought a Jaguar back in the day.

Wow, I just LOVE getting bug reports like these. So detailed! I know exactly how to fix it! BTW, I develop on an AMD64 (in 32bit mode) on both Windows AND Linux and haven't had any problems whatsoever (well, aside from incompatibilities due to bad emulation). So I would LOVE it if you guys could tell me what steps you took to try and run it and send me the vj.log files that it creates when you run it--that would help MUCH more than the standard "it doesn't work for me, what a lame emu, it sux, etc."