downix

What about the QC code? Is that done from scratch on different platforms, or patched for different platforms, or is it common to all? I think they may have just retargetted the QuakeC compiler for the Jags chips, tweaked the source then trimmed up for fit. Unfortunately id claims they lost their QC compiler they retargetted for the Jag. The QC compiler is, really, the main piece of work. It would require JIT, and more RAM to work. As I said, by my calcs, it needed 4MB more RAM, then it ran very smoothly. This does eliminate putting the game onto a cart, hence my idea of the hybrid, pulling the game off of a normal Quake CD using a custom cart. Quake II, mind you, would be an easier job to do. Yes, I have seen the re-writes needed for both on the Amiga. And Quake runs on an Amiga 030, which is less CPU power than the Jag's GPU.

I just chuckle as it needing a 500Mhz CPU and 4-pipelined GPU minimum to recreate a game which ran on a 68000....

complete with avoiding rocks, small children, animals, a paperboy with bad aim.... right?

I made a game called "robosweep" on the Apple II in grade school, where you were to vacuum a room without hitting furniture, random pets, and the like.

This my good man is STILL the key to Atari's return to good times. Not even hardware necessarily but just really updating the classic games. Tempest 2000 with the Jaguar was the right first step. Unfortunately they blew all the other formulas. I love HoverStrike but it aint no Battle Zone. BreakOut2k was a great looking game and fun but I pictured B2k a lot more like T2k. MS, Sony, Nin...sure....great consoles no doubt. Even a few really outstanding titles but lets face it. Outside of a hand full of really nice titles, innovation lacks greatly on these systems. FPS, Racers, Fighters and RPG's all fine..but very few really "classic" simple to the point ideas. Tetris? I mean come on guys....it's games like this that work. Imagine if Phear was ready for release for the Jaguar at the begining. A 3D Tetris? It would have sold a lot of units. Atari needs to remember who they are....Then I think you will see them holding their own once again. Space Invaders, Asteroids, Revenge of Yar, even Death Race 2000, all classics that would have made the Jag stand out. A true Arcade in the home, that is what the Tramiels promised, yet failed to to.

Why limit it to FPS though? I'm sure one could modify the DOOM engine to power stuff like RPGs, Adventure games, etc. Hell...I'm actually thinking of something right now that's not an FPS at all, and fits nicely with the whole "update a classic" discussion we were having in another topic, and could work with a modified DOOM engine: Tunnel Runner 2000 I was working on a Doom-based RPG at one time. But then got bored with it.

actually, 15 cycles for a 68k long move on jaguar, and 3 cycles for movei in internal ram (it breaks the pipeline), but we are talking of external ram here, so it's different It's 15 cycles due to the m68k's memory access (interleaved). Directly, it's 7 cycles, but at 7Mhz. So, in a way we are both right here. And the GPU's actual execution is 1 cycle, then you need to add the cycles for the memory access. 2 for internal RAM, 6-8 for main RAM. Still, half of the cycles, and it runs at twice the speed, so 4x faster access.

What about the QC code? Is that done from scratch on different platforms, or patched for different platforms, or is it common to all? The QC code is usually the same, or very similar. Part of the Quake engine is a QuakeC run-time system. For lower end platforms they had a JIT compiler to make it run much faster as well, as with the original Amiga port.

You cant seriously tell me a 68k that requires a lot of cycles for even the simplest of instructions at one half the clock and one quarter the buswidth is going to be faster or even any where near close to the RISC, even in main with all the latency and pipeline issues. This tells me you dont understand the difference between RISC and CISC at all. If you used a little math you would see exactly why it would be faster EVEN with the bus latency at its worst case. If you coded the DSP and ran it from main its not even close to the same thing. That is connected to the bus at only 16 bits. I don't do math because theory is sometimes wrong when you don't take all system stuffs in consideration, I simply interpret what I see, almost the same amount of vbl color for the same code loop in 68k and gpu main, that's all Alright, then let us compare: MOVEI, m68k takes 7 cycles at 14Mhz, GPU takes 1 cycle at 33Mhz Any questions?

From what I understand, he said he ported it over a weekend. It gave me (and other Jag fans at the time) hope that we'd see a LOT of games because porting from PC to Jag was supposedly so easy. In theory yes it is, if you use the m68k toolchain. But then you don't get maximum performance out of the Jag, as the Doom port demonstrates very well.

This shows your ignorance. We are talking about a TOm and Jerry Clocked at the same speed. The ARM does not stand a chance. And why cant you optimize the J-RISC code? have you ever coded in arm asm ? from what you say, I doubt it. arm has for almost each instruction a conditional use, that is very powerful when optimizing, and the arm is a risc too.. have you ever see some gba demo ? there is no blitter, only pure arm asm at 16Mhz (less than the gpu of the jaguar) and you have some beautiful demo or 3D game fully textured sometimes faster than some 3D jag game ... You have just lost 4 points in believeability if you compare a demo w/o AI, physics, etc to a game with said feature. And yes, I have coded in ARM ASM, I've also worked with an ARM core design. Still not as elegent as Falvotech's CPU design, which works from the same premise. the test I have done show me that it's not true. Just lost 4 more points then, since even a basic test will demonstrate a 3-cycle main RAM access on the Jag, and lookee, the main RAM is 1/3rd the speed of the Jag's CPU core, so they mesh perfectly, imagine that. Such a simple technique too, amazes me how nobody spotted it till now. Incidentally, the m68k is half again as slow accessing main RAM compared to the GPU. (pesky "RAM access every other cycle" bit you know)

Not at all....ifyou use the same render everyone else did...then YES! If you write one from scratch knowing the system real well and also understanding the bottlenecks and how to avoid them, you will see a significant increase in textures and polies. The jag has the power. The trouble is, it has other parts of the system that DRAIN that power when overused or used incorrectly. Quake 1 will run on a 486 25 MHZ with mode 13 graphics at 30 FPS with some effects off. The Jaguar is at least as powerful as that. **ck the polies! If you wrote it from scratch, it wouldn't be the quake engine now would it smarty pants? You tell me, as they wrote it from scratch for the N64, PSX, Saturn, nGage, Amiga.... Each platform has a new from-scratch rendering system and QuakeC compiler. The Jaguar would need a more dynamic QC compiler than many others, correct, but it would work very well.

Perhaps, but the main Quake engine itself might have some problems on the Jaguar, since it uses floating-point math for everything. Not on the DS nor nGage ports, as they lack a FPU.

I agree that those games you mention (except FIFA), seem more advanced than the Jags library, easly rivaling its PSOne counterparts, for the most part. Heck, they look better than some Saturn titles, why is that?, is it because its displaying them on such a small screen? Also impresive are Tomb Raider, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Asphalt 1 and 2, that racer with tron like graphics (cant remember its name) System Rush, excellent game I agree with you, Chaos Theory is quite impressive in the 3D area, the same goes for Asphalt 1 & 2. I think the Jaguar could render Quake but there wouldn't be any real texture mapping. It would come out looking like I-war, except with a worse(er?) framerate. Horrible picture I see. Battlesphere already proved that the Jag can handle the polygon counts with textures at an ok framerate. The main issue remains lack of RAM onboard.

Yeah, been playing it on my CD32, its a really fun game specially on 2 players. Its a pal system though, so i play it on black and white only . I had it on my NTSC CD32. (Still have it infact)