Tyrant

It's tricky, tweezers or needle-nose pliers can usually fix them, but it might break off while you're working with it. However, if it does break off, it's not too hard to re-wire a new plug onto the end of the cable.

You might be able to save yourself a bit of money by making your own cables. It's not that hard to do.

People seriously think low resolution, tiled, sliding puzzles a 2 year old can solve is a good game? I actually really quite like it. I've never been all that good at sliding puzzles so I find them challenging but still fun, the swappy puzzles are trivial but still entertaining. The only problem I have with vid grid is that there's only a handful of videos in it. I wonder why nobody has ever taken the concept and written it into an HTML5 app. You can render video to a canvas surface easily enough and then chop the surface up into tiles... and you'd have all of youtube as your video source.

Projects like Raptor, and all of the other libraries that have come and gone over the years have all been designed to make creating simple games easier. Tempest 2000, is one of the more technically demanding games on the Jaguar, and there's no way it could be re-written (let alone improved upon) using an easy kit like Raptor.

Yeah, I used to use a mechanical type one, which I believe has been discontinued now days (at least, the last time I looked I couldn't find anyone still stocking it). It did the job and fitted into the space pretty well which was an advantage. If I ever make any more rotaries I'll have to come up with a new design of case, and probably build them around a different encoder.

I used to make rotaries, in fact I was the first person to put the knob and encoder where the D-Pad usually sits, but I haven't made any for a number of years now, although I did make a handful of special one-button controllers for Superfly DX.

Rotary support was a last minute hack, put in with Atari gave Yak a hacked up 2600 driving controller and said "Make it work with this."

Interesting. What book is that from?

Does speed matter that much for transferring 4Mb (plus a little filesystem overhead)?

Well done! The awkwardness of the Jaguar controller stems from two design decisions Atari made. First, it uses negative logic throughout, so all of the signals are high when the buttons are released, and zero when they're pushed. Secondly, it uses four "common" lines, and six return lines, which are also common. It's an awkward circuit for people new to electronics to figure out.

In all seriousness (seriously), I find comparing games consoles to be about as much use as comparing meerkats. It gives people a laugh, and something to talk about, it seems to be something many people like doing, but ultimately, it's all just a scam to make you buy insurance. On the subject of which, how much do you all think Jaguar insurance premiums would be? Higher or lower than N64's? How does that compare to other consoles?

And to think it took almost a decade before the N95 came out and it's only one and a half times as good! Then again, it is a phone and a lot smaller so that's gotta count for something, right?

You bumped this thread to say THAT?

Ah, my N64 is green too, but my Jag is even easier to tell apart, the N64 doesn't have an Alpine board sticking out of the top of it.

One of the most obvious (and frankly, cool) uses for the usb ports has already been mentioned, and nobody noticed it. I.e. You can have your Everdrive just by sticking all your ROMS on a USB memory stick, plugging it into the skunkboard... and then writing a suitable driver program to read the USB stick and copy a game ROM into the internal flash of the skunk.

I still want a Skylar voice for TomTom... not that I have a car or anything, I just think it'd be cool.

The sad part is, I was being serious. I should have known better.

All seriousness aside, one of the major reasons the Jaguar failed commercially is that while there was plenty of hype around the Jaguar, Nintendo spent almost half a decade hyping up the N64. It was announced as imminent almost as soon as development started, and they continued to encourage consumers not to buy a Jaguar or 3DO but to wait for their new system which was always just around the corner.

It's sad that I can only like this once.

It's exactly the same, the extra buttons just map to various buttons on the num-pad, so for those buttons, add an extra button in parallel.

It's good that someone new is making rapid fire controllers. AFAIK there haven't been any on sale for many years. I'm sure your sales will be good, I'd buy one myself if I had any money spare.

You might find that a bit tricky. While most controllers use a single common wire connecting all the inputs, the Jaguar has four common lines, each connecting to six of the buttons, and then to six return lines. It might be tricky connecting them to the same connectors as the other boards at the same time. My advice would be to use a stackable rotary switch to redirect the buttons between each of the boards. JAGPAD__Schematic_Design_.pdf

This is very true, but it is understandable that people are concerned, very confused, and wish to see a resolution to this situation that keeps them in the community and working, happily, towards new releases. I see lots of concern and encouragement, much less demanding explanations (and I wasn't demanding, just summing up the most relevant questions as I see them).

To sum it up for the non-technical readers (because I'm seeing a lot of confusion in this thread). Rush initially said that a rom file had been found dumped. What this means is that someone had taken one of the 23 cartridges sold, and saved the contents to a file for use with emulators, skunkboards, etc. Then his later post said his development machine had been hacked, and for some time had noticed odd changes in source code, etc. While it's possible this was just an entirely random hacking (machines get compromised all the time, mostly in order to send out emails selling viagra), the implication here is that someone else in the community had managed to target that specific computer. While it is possible to do this with fairly limited skill (you don't need to know how to write your own rootkit in order to download one and use it), it's still a technical challenge and quite hard to believe (but, as many people have said, the Jag "scene" is full of enough drama and hate for it to be possible). The final straw was the emailing of a rom file to Rush. All the released cartridges had a unique serial number in them, to prevent this kind of thing, but the serial in this version was not one of those. That implies that whoever sent it had to know where in the code the serial was stored. I can see three ways to find that out. Either they dumped one of the 23 cartridges, disassembled the code and looked through it for references to the serial (this is time consuming and potentially very difficult if the serial was well hidden), they might have dumped two of the 23 cartridges and looked for differences between them, or they had access to the source code and compiled it with a new serial (this would imply they were the hacker who had access to the development pc). Please correct me if I'm wrong on any of this btw. I haven't spoken to either of them, I'm just trying to explain some of the more technical points from this thread, for the fans who are less technical. There are a couple of questions that immediately jump to my mind: 1) Was the machine really hacked, and was it by a Jaguar "fan"? I really don't mean any offence, and I accept that it is possible, but this seems so horrible and so unlikely as to set off alarm bells. I'm a firm believer in Hanlon's Razor and worry that malice is being assumed here. Even if the machine was rooted (hacked) which is quite possible, especially if it was such an old setup, I find it hard to believe it was a deliberate attack by a Jaguar "fan" and not just someone trying to sell viagra or create a botnet. 2) Was the rom that was emailed sent by the same person who hacked the dev machine? Pretty logical question. There are some malicious elements in the Jaguar scene, we've known this for years. It's not too tricky for someone to get two independent rom dumps (by buying two cartridges, or by two users buying one each and comparing rom dumps) and deduce the serial location by comparing files. 3) Why on earth would they email it? The only reasons I can see are that they either wanted to produce such a ragequit, or they were trying to (legitimately or maliciously) whistlyblow / point the finger at someone who they claimed as the dumper. Having said all that, let me join in the chorus calling for cool heads and for you not to let them win. A ragequit is never the answer, and while I can understand the frustration of it all, you do need to find a way to rise above it. I don't think walking away (after all the work that has gone into such an excellent looking release) is the right way to do that.

Once again it's Zerosquare to the rescue with a definitive answer.