Shamus

Gee, who'da thunk it would be so easy to spam the entire forum with useless one line replies? And having said that, nobody should pay any attention to said spammer. I think I now know why that the glitch wasn't really noticed--a fix in the blitter code shows things pretty much as they are on a real Jag. In my not-so-humble opinion, of course.

Could someone post a screenshot from a real Jaguar? That would put the controversy to rest.

Hi all! Tyrant: Hmm... I know the Jag had lots of bugs, but you'd think the guys writing that intro over at Atari would have caught that. Especially with all of the debugging I'm sure they had to do on it! And yes, I did know about the pause trick on the boot screen. Matthias: That's the image, but I'm almost 100% sure I saw it somewhere else--someone had taken a bunch of screenshots to show the difference side-by-side with the original. Unless I'm totally misremembering what I saw, which I suppose is possible. But I don't think so.

BIOS, boot ROM, yeah yeah yeah... Actually, what I saw was someone who had "hacked" the boot ROM to display some group's logo on the spinning cube instead of the usual spotted cat we all know and love. They actually had some decent side-by-side static screenshots showing before and after the modification. Damn. If I had been on top of things, I would have grabbed them. Oh well. I guess my only hope at this point is for some kind soul to post some screen captures. Here's what I'm talking about: I'm pretty sure that the incoming "A" shouldn't look like that, and that the shading on the side of the vertical letters should be continuous instead cut across the diagonal.

I ran across some screenshots of the opening BIOS with the Atari logo flying in somewhere on the net a while ago, but haven't been able to find them again since. I was wondering if anyone else knows where I can find those and/or could post some screenshots of the BIOS screen with the letters flying in? Any help would be appreciated!

First of all, to those of you who hate emulators: Don't bother replying to this, as you have nothing to add to the discussion other than your hatred of emulators. In my opinion, emulators serve a very useful function of documenting hardware that will eventually cease to function and won't be able to be repaired since it is no longer being manufactured. And of course, you have every right to feel the way you feel, but please keep it to yourself. This post isn't directed at you anyway. Now, with that out of the way... I thought that this had already been addressed--everything that is except for contacting Cowering that is. Virtual Jaguar 1.0.7 finally does proper recognition of the various extensions, including the newly minted .J64 (which you and I minted over a year ago ). Check this page for the lowdown (I also put a section in the README called *** READ THIS OR ELSE! *** to draw attention to the issue). I know I'll get flamed to hell for airing this point of view, but so be it. In my opinion, adding DRM to Virtual Jaguar would serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever. It would do nothing but inconvenience legitimate users, since anyone who would be determined to bypass it would not only find a way to do so, but be highly motivated to do so as well. I firmly believe that Atari's greatest blunder and what ultimately killed development for the Jaguar was to embrace DRM, since it made it impossible for anyone to publish games without Atari's blessing on their efforts--indeed, once Atari abandoned the console developers were unable to publish anything for the Jaguar until someone figured out how to bypass the fecking DRM. Yay DRM. Anyhow, that's my two pence on the subject. Feel free to disagree.

Ok, I guess I asked for it. The reason I know is because I spent a looong time tracing through GPU code and blitter calls to try to find out why Virtual Jaguar wouldn't render the screen properly for objects at the top of the screen. Ultimately it turned out to be an Object Processor bug. (That sound you hear is the sound of hair being ripped out of my head. ) Anyway, basically what the the blitter is used for is for moving a sprite position table around as well as for moving code to the GPU. If I recall correctly, the GPU's main function in Rayman is to check for collisions and for scrolling. Not a complete waste. I mean, come on--even though they didn't stretch the limits of the hardware the coders still managed to do an amazing job with Rayman.

Oh, the blitter and GPU are being used, just not necessarily for graphics. Ask me how I know.

According to this, pressing the A button will cycle through three modes including "VLM only."

I guess I'm curious about the process of taking the binary with header/footer and converting it to a track. From what I gather, it seems to only add a couple zeroes in front and pad it out to 1MB if it's shorter than that. The other oddity is that the digital signature track seems to have a signature of the TOC as well as the tracks themselves. Which makes me wonder, how can they guarantee that the TOC (since it must be a good guess) will match up what's being burnt? Of course, I could be reading things wrong... I suppose you could burn all of your tracks except for the signature and then there would be no guesswork involved... :ponder: I think you can guess why I want to know (yes, I'm getting close--and that's all I'm going to say about it for now).

Belboz: I've been meaning to ask about that CD image. I'm curious to know why the track images (data tracks in particular) are padded with two zeroes in front. Are they necessary to get the thing to work as an "encrypted" CD? What did you use to create the data tracks?

It does...*points at first reply* D'oh! (I noticed it too, after I posted. Ah well.)

An image of Phase Zero with the correct crypto signature can be found here. [shameless plug] It also works with the latest CVS build (win32 only ATM!) of Virtual Jaguar PJE. [/shameless plug] If I recall correctly the flashcart copy loads at $800000 and runs at $802000... I believe that all you have to do is load it like a regular ROM image without any other voodoo necessary.

Thanks for the tip.

Hmm. Would you happen to have schematics for the Jaguar CD unit?

Way back when I had my Jag, I read a review for Rayman and that convinced to buy it--and I wasn't disappointed! And one of the reasons that I liked it was the fact that it was hard (not to mention that cool music and eye candy! Wow! ). Actually, Rayman is the main reason I got involved in the Virtual Jaguar PJE project--I just had to be able to play it again!

It probably won't be as trivial to bypass as the regular BIOS ROM signature checks, but it should be doable. So in other words, it should be developer friendly.

Actually, that's not such a bad idea. Assuming the serial protocol on the Jaguar side is fairly standard, it shouldn't be too difficult to implement... But first things first (cough CD cough)!

It's being worked on.

Assuming that the number of bids stays at zero, that would be as good a smackdown as any. *Sigh.* Maybe it's time to put the standard disclaimer into VJ that I had at the top of Thunder: This emulator is freeware. It you paid for it YOU WERE RIPPED OFF.

Actually, it turned out to be a problem with the saturating add in the blitter (though I'm not convinced it's 100% correct yet). Thanks for the help everyone!

walter_J64bit: Thanks! Great! Very helpful! I may ask for other screenshots in future (in this thread, 'natch). (CDs? What CDs? ) Stone: VJ/SDL doesn't use hardwired colormaps but tries to faithfully reproduce the color spaces that a real Jaguar uses. Now that I know what to look for WRT Hover Strike, I should be able to figure out what's borked. Also, I'm pretty sure that VJ/SDL is the only Jaguar emulator to use correct video aspect ratios. For examples, look at the homepage and you'll see that all the screenshots are the same width/height even though the games pictured are using different horizontal resolutions... I don't know if PT does this or not, since the latest release (0.9) crashes on my machine (and yes, I do have the latest DirectX drivers, yadda yadda yadda).

Hi all, I've been working a bit on getting Hover Strike to work and I came across this in the difficulty selection. I'm pretty sure this isn't right... Does anyone have a screenshot from a real Jaguar that shows this screen? Or a description? Any help is appreciated! Thanks!

What part of "I don't care" didn't you understand?

Sorry if I took this the wrong way, but it sure sounded like complaining to me. And I can see how you could say that in a disinterested way. But if you don't care about it, why are you even bothering to weigh in on the subject? Why so touchy? Personally, I don't care if you don't care about emulation. That's fine. Like I said before, whatever.