Tyrant

Yeah I know, I've pretty much dropped out of the Jag scene entirely now days, although I still have all my stuff still. Things seem to have moved on since I was around, but yet other things seem not to have changed at all. I do miss this place though.

I'd love to be there but can't, have a blast without me.

I'd love to go, I miss the old ones (I was at all the early ones down in Rochester) but money concerns mean I really don't think I can manage it.

Wow, a long term project finally pays off. Well done.

Heh! I'd sell my body on the street if I thought anyone would actually buy it.

Wow, not been here in ages... I kinda miss all you guys. I would like to come, but money is a MASSIVE headache for me right now, so I'm really not sure I can manage it. Keep me informed though (various people have my msn) and I'll decide if I can afford it nearer the time. If I did come, I'd obviously stay both nights, but as things look right now I barely have enough money to eat, so I voted very much an "unsure yet". Happy Skies.

I guess I wasn't being patient enough. Without a disk it took about 2 minutes before giving me a dialog box saying something about A: not responding, and suggesting I check the connections or insert a disk, but with a disk inserted, it took a whopping 1 minute 40 secs to get to a gem desktop. I hope that's because it was hunting for a keyboard for all that time, and not indicative of some kind of hardware problem slowing the whole system down. Still, at least I know the machine works, now I know its worth tracking down a keyboard and tos upgrade for it. Thanks for your help.

Hiya, I'm trying to test my newly donated Mega STE, and so far am getting mixed results. Can anyone tell me if it should run without a keyboard? I've got it hooked up to an SC1224, and the MegaSTE is running 2.05 (french) tos roms, and doesn't have a hard drive. When powering up, I get the pure white screen I'd expect, the psu fan works, and the floppy drive briefly accesses. However, with or without a disk in the drive, it never seems to get any further. Is this normal behaviour when no keyboard is connected, or should it eventually go to a gem desktop regardless? Thanks.

It may be a french thing, the french jaguars don't have RF either (and mine is french, says so on top of the tos roms).

Thanks, I hadn't thought of asking Nick. I've gotta talk to him soon about some JagFest stuff anyway so looks like I'll kill two birds with one email, hopefully.

First question would be if there already is a hard drive or at least a scsi hard drive controller inside. I've opened it up, and no, it doesn't have a HDD already. I'm not sure how to tell if it already has a controller or not. Where would it be if there was one? what would it look like? The central expansion bay appears empty, with just a serial port on the back. First priority however has to be a keyboard, since it's not really much use without one.

Hiya, a few questions. I was given a Mega STE yesterday (woo!), however, it had been salvaged long ago, and lost it's keyboard. I've not tried powering it yet, since I have to dig out my old ST monitor (There is no RF out on the back, is that normal? I suspect it may be a French model, since I was also given a 1040 STE with an azerty keyboard). When I do, can I expect it to boot even without a keyboard? Where can I find a replacement? Is it possible to hack some other keyboard to work? If it is a French one, and expects an azerty keyboard, will it work with a querty one, will the keys map properly, and is there a way to set it up properly? Would the localisation data be part of the tos roms, and would replacing them with uk roms work? Finally, what are the options I'd have for installing a hard drive? I'd love to use it as a serious machine, but I would really need some kind of hdd for that. Thanks.

Yeah, you ask me, thats a fscking awesome thing, and while we may all have a damned good laugh about the idea, the execution can't be faulted. I'm most impressed. Really.

Indeed, he'd never even played it properly until he used one of my rotaries at a retrovision, he was like "woah, so thats how it should have felt", which made me more than a little proud. Ouch! Thats not really what you wanted to have happen is it? Still, they *should* be fairly generic components, its just a case of finding one with a suitable package and making sure the electical specs are close enough, and then the fiddlyness of actually swapping them. I did it in a pretty crude way really. If you take a look at the upper board of a normal (non-pro) controller, there are large flat areas of copper all round the edges, most (all?) of which connect to the main "common" line of the d-pad switches. So I just drilled a hole though the board in one of those areas, scraped back the green coating, threaded two wires through and soldered them on, re-connected one to another bit of the board, to fix a trace I had to cut when removing the d-pad end of the board, and hooked the other one to the middle pin of the rotary. The other two (left and right) I just cut from the ribon cable, extended and connected to the two side pins of the rotary. As you can see its a lot less work than pissing about with optical encoders , and, well, I think the results were at least as good. I didn't actually care for the only optical rotary I ever used (a Jedi Jeff one, which was hyper-sensitive).

As I understand it, Yak was given, at the last minute, a hacked up 2600 driving controller and told to "make it work with this". I believe he had about two days to do so, hence the areas where it is a little lacking (like the high score entry). Also, the calibration and sensitivity was never really tested, since he only had a 2600 driving controller which as you've noticed, is horribly in-sensitive (just as your optical one was horribly over-sensitive before you blocked out some windows) The problem you're having is entirely related to the fact that your optical encoder is powered all the time, I doubt there would be a switching circuit already present on the board, since in a pc context, it should be powered all the time, so I would be surprised if you found one. Oh, and for the record, the rotaries made by myself and others (with the possible exception of the JediJeff optical ones) use mechanical encoders, and hook up to the original row column that the left and right pads were connected to, so they don't cause interferance with the keypad. Good luck, it's been fun watching this project develop. It looks like you're very nearly finished now.

Actually, from the "well known" and "lesser known" developers who've voiced an opinion on this, it seems that they all consider it a good thing, myself included (I being one of the lesser knowns ). If you're meaning Thunderbird, well, I don't think anyone here honestly thinks he's ever going to release anything more anyway, except perhaps a new colour case for bs or something, at twice the price and with just ten copies available. As I said in my other post, listen to the real coders if you want to know what they think, but something tells me you dont really want to know what they think at all. Ho hum... life in the Jag scene flames on as usual... I'm so glad I came back

I said electronics wasn't my strongest suit... glad to know at least someone in the scene knows what he's doing however

Umm... shouldn't those be AND gates rather than OR's? or am I missing something there? (electronics never was my strongest suit )

Damnit, I was trying to stay out of this argument, but now I think I really should say something. I'm 110% behind this, with the rom emulation feature. I've got a pretty substantial set of games, about 40-50 as a rough guess, including some paid for homebrew, and some downloaded homebrew. I have an alpine, and a reasonable set of dumped roms, which I often load into the alpine to play rather than finding the cartridge (not least to avoid damage to the alpine by moving it about too much), and yes, sometimes I play games I dont own. Big f*cking deal! Piracy is not evil, and I'll defend my right to do whatever the hell I want to do. I consider myself a collector, I'm proud of the Jag games I own, and plan to complete the set one day, but in the mean while, if I can get a dumped rom, I see no reason on earth not to use it. I am also a developer, and I'm sure that at some point, (i.e. when I actually release anything), people will use cf carts to run my code. This does not worry me at all, because some of what I will release (most, probably) will be free, and because if I write anything good enough to sell, I can code it to recognise when it is on a cf cart, and either refuse to run, or ask for a serial number or something similar. This is not true of the emulators, which are a potential problem for anyone attempting to sell games, but, realistically, people WILL buy games, if they are good enough, and nobody expects to make a proffit from Jag coding. It is a hobby for each and every one of us, and so if people choose to download games instead of buying them, big deal. It would be an insult, yes, but it wouldn't hurt the developer in any way at all, and lets face it, we've all been insulted before, and will be again. Oh,and: How on earth can you know this? You must be joking, right? Anyone who has EVER had a conversation with Thunderbird knows instantly what kinda man he is. Just try doing a search back through the AtariAge archives, look for locked threads featuring Thunderbird. Before he was banned, that is. Seriously, listen to the people who are actually writing code eh? (yes, I know I've not actually released anything yet, and thus maybe don't count, but there are many active developers here with real projects who are in support of this). Right... now I've said my bit, I can return to lurking quietly in the shadows.

</lurk> To go back to walter_J64bit's jittery video problem, the effect is clearly being caused by the object processor not starting at the top of the screen. Why this should be is something of a mystery to me however. I would suggest checking to make sure that neither the blitter, dsp, or gpu are at their higher priorities (which is explicitly forbidden in the dev manual), and also, if the 68k is handling the vbl isr, that you don't call the module player until AFTER you restore the object list, since the mod player has a pretty sizable chunk of code to run, and could well be producing that jitter if the object list wasn't restored in time for the op to begin drawing the next frame.

Its been a while since I played iWar last, but it really does rock. I found the controls rather tricky tho, and rather unresponsive, but I think part of that is due to the graphics. I like the graphics, and the style of them, but its really hard to get a sense of speed or movement in an environment with no surface detail and no depth of field focus changes. Imvho a very subtle darkening with distance would have made the game much better, not fogging to hide the draw distance, I dont remember it having draw distance issues, just tight levels, but just to give a feel for depth. Still, its a wonderful game despite this and I really should play it again sometime.

Once again you fail to understand that they are talking about "Jaguar" (the chipset) and not "Jaguar" (the console). Read the docs more closely.

Did not know that, why is that? I though GIF generally produced lower image sizes or am I wrong? 916773[/snapback] Terribly wrong Im afraid. GIF uses run legth encoding, and a palette of 256 colours. It's an excelent choice for pictures with large areas of flat colour, such as comic strips for example, but a terrible choice for anything with photorealism or smooth shading. GIF also allows for palette based transparency. JPEG uses some complex, and slightly destructive, methods of compression, which are designed specifically for photo's and other realistic type images. When you save an image, some of the fine detail gets discarded because its really not important at 1:1 zoom. The compression is variable (there should be an option in whatever paint program when you save the file), so you can select a smaller file with a worse quality image, or a better quality image with almost no damage. Play with the settings until you get it right, but I usually find about 20% compression 80% quality gives an excelent quality image with a nice small filesize. Oh, and JPEG is, due to the nature of its compression, very bad at producing large flat areas of colour, but thats ok, since thats what GIF excels at. Edit: Final point to note about JPEG is that the detail loss due to compression is cumulative, so if you save an image, reload it, and save it again, many times over, you'll get quite nasty artifacts and corruption. This is why you should always work in a loss-less format during the editing process and only convert to JPEG at the end of the process.

Difference in contrast? oh, you mean doing it that way? wow, thats low tech... but anyway this thread is getting very off topic now hehe. Suffice it to say that guns can be made to work just fine on the Jag.