Tyrant

Nice idea, but any decription system would have to be extremely fast, and pics I believe are SLOW chips. Too slow for that anyway. Nice idea about how to do it, but whatever the custom hardware is, it'll have to be very fast. The aim is not to make a system that cant be cracked, or even one that wont be cracked, the aim is to make one that the emulator developers, not the users, have to crack, and if they do, you can take them to court over it. You can never stop people dumping roms or burning cd's, but if you stop people making emulators that can run new releases, people might just release a few new games.

I just managed to finish the Predator scenario of AvP, but I was really disapointed. Once I found the Queen's chamber, and got over the initial shock of quite how scary she is, I quickly descovered a bug in her AI that made her almost no chalange at all to kill. This would be a good point to stop reading if you dont want to know what it is, I would prefer not to know if I hadnt killed her already. The AI she uses, stupidly wont let her follow you if you retreat from her chamber, so all you need do is stand in the doorway and carefully take a step forward, throw a disc, and step back, wash, rinse, repeat. Very very dull, and a real shame for such a magnificent creature to be brought down by such terrible AI.

It all depends what your playing the games for. Dedicated collectors of retro systems will want the cart's, boxes, manuals, etc. People who just want to play games and dont really have deep feelings about the systems might play on the real thing if they have it, or might play on an emu, if the controls are similar to the real thing. Also since PC games are insubstantial anyway (software on a cd is just data really, and the manuals are very thin often), so I dont think many people care if its pirate / downloaded. I sometimes load up Sonic 1 or 2 on a megadrive emu, since while I do own a megadrive, its all boxed up. However one day I really want to play Zelda64 again, but I cant do that unless I get a real N64, the controler is so unique, even if I could persuade ultrahle to run it nicely, it wouldnt feel right without the original hardware.

Then you are a very rich, and very lucky man.

Isnt there an official external input into the vlm either on the JagCD dev kit or the test cartridge? I dont own either unfortunatly, but I remember hearing something about an external vlm input.

I enjoy working in very limited environments and trying to get more out of them than people expect... but yes, it can do some very nice things. The real problems will be in storage and operating memory, but the processing power I dont think will be a huge problem.

Yes, both CEX PC and CEX Gaming / Retro are very close by. Its the heart of the west end (well almost), so there are thousands of people arround and all the shopping you could want hehe (electronics / pc shopping especially). There are also small hotels in the back streets I think, but I dont know how nice or expensive they would be. Oh, and I wouldnt start advertising until we get the venue actually booked, after that we can start putting the word out to everyone, but until we know which city its going to be in even, it seems a little strange to try to promote it yet.

Hehehe, Im learning how to code for Symbian series 60 phones (Nokia 7650, 3650, the upcoming N-Gage etc). There's still a little way to go before Im ready to actually release anything, but the game I was thinking of including Jaguars and Lynx's in is a 3D game, using a similar rendering technique to Doom's. Suffice it to say such a complex game probably wont be ready for quite a while.

Cool cool =) Oh, noticed something else, the eyes should be moved down one pixel, since there's a yellow dot above the top of the J that looks out of place. Oh and I'll go and turn on the file upload page of the msn group so you can upload it there too if you'd like (putting up the layered version would be very cool tool, I *WANT* those eyes, really nice scan you've done =)

I plan to include Jaguars in one form or another in most or all of the games I'll write for other systems, I might even put in a Lynx or two as well, since they're both cats and fit nicely with the feel of a game Im planing now.

Hmm... looks great, but the claw marks on the K still arnt torn properly. Try to find a high res scan of the Jaguar logo, and just copy/paste the slash marks on the R, obviously cleaning them up a little, but otherwise it looks really great, nice one =) How goes the search for a venue? any more info on that chruch hall yet?

Doom actually does things rather interestingly. Raycasting, as I have read about it, involves as was said, casting out lines for every screen column, and doing collision checks to see when they hit walls, working out the distance away the wall is and then drawing a column of it. I spent all day friday reading the doom source and actually understanding it which surprised me, but, the way it draws the world is quite different. Because normal raycasting systems are built from square blocks, like Wolf 3D and AvP, the check to see where a ray intersects a block is quite simple. Doom however has a masively more complex map structure, and how it draws is quite interesting. Firstly while building the maps, a preprocess compiles them into a BSP tree (which I finally understand, wee! ). Each leaf on the tree is a subsector, which is allways a convex area (normal sectors can be subsectors, if they're convex. Each subsector is composed of SEGS, which are either a complete sidedef, or part of a sidedef cut in half along a subsector boundary. When rendering a view, it will draw each visable seg in the subsector the player is in, and record which screen colums have been drawn. If not all of the screen columns have been drawn yet, it will draw the next nearest subsector, and so on. Interesting eh? I had wondered how it could manage to raycast such a complex environment, and it seems that it dosnt, at least according to the definition of raycasting that Im aware of.

I do plan, one day, on programing for the Jag, and I will do as many things as I can to make sure any games I write will not work on emulators. I think I'm not alone in this view. Does anyone know the legality of emulating dedicated hardware in games? If Im not mistaken, the reason mame wont emulate pong and other really old games is that the game was just logic circuits, not a processor and rom memory that could be dumped. A simple encription method, which could be cracked quite easily, made onboard the cartridge, I think should be enough to protect the game, since emulating the encription is different from just emulating the cpu's and there is a legal distinction, I think.

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I think the solution to emulators and piracy is easy, logically anyway. Onboard the cartirdge, put a very small, simple bit of logic code, to do a very simple decription on the rom chip's data. That way, any emulator which clones your decription technique can I do believe be taken to court. While the rom images are legal if you own the cartridge, logic systems onboard the cart I think are not allowed to be emulated by law. I could be totally wrong tho, and it depends which countries law your talking about, but it does allow people to make legal chalanges to the emu developers, instead of the users of downloaded roms.

Looks like video capture from a real Jaguar to me, and without a downloadable version (even a demo if they're planing to charge for it), we cant tell if any of it is real.

Its not dificult to get to, and being there we'd get passing people wander in and perhaps become Jag fans and buy stuff, I dont fancy sleeping on the floor tho, but its easy for me to go home to my real bed hehe =) How much will it cost, and how many power points are there? also where can tv's be rented from thats close?

PSP is Jasc Paint Shop Pro, a very powerful paint program, and much easier to use imvho than PhotoShop. I havnt had time to work out a banner yet, and the uni's are being a little slow in getting back to me. Oh, and I'll make another rotary soon, for eBay tho, I've got rather a lot on my mind at the moment. For people who really hate eBay, I would consider trades of rare Jag items for rotaries, on an individual case by case basis.

Ouch, you're using ms paint? ms paint is useful for... well nothing hehe, it is without a doubt the most basic of tools. I think I'll have a play arround at making a logo later. Get hold of Photoshop, or, I prefer PSP, but photoshop is more commonly used to learn that, including all its features. Oh, and I've been looking at some uni's in London for holding the event in, I *THINK* it's not going to be that expensive at all .

No, there is also quite a bit of new code in them I think. Oh, and about the texture mapping vs. raycasting... I went and had a read, and now understand raycasting much better, and how simplistic it is relative to a full 3D texturemapped engine. Now all I need is to understand BSP tree's properly and I'll be a happy man. Oh, and I think the Doom source is totally useless without the c++ compiler, which was lost.

Yep, I think both Goldstar and Panaphonics versions come in PAL and NTSC.

Yep Ive got a pal goldstar. If I ever spot a panasonic 3DO cheaply I'll grab it, but Im not a *huge* fan of the system, its nice, but I wouldnt spend a lot of money on games for it. Oh, and no, its not being killed in close combat, although thats very annoying too hehe, this happens when the whole game just freezes totally.

I stand corrected. Alas it seems there is stilll much I have to learn.

I'd be more interested in completely understanding the interface between the VR setup and the Jag itself, so we can write an interface box to allow a modern, commercial, VR setup to be used (there are lots of people making simple fairly cheap setups). Then again, if someone can accurately reproduce the helmets, complete with the red case (the blue one looks less... like a Jag product), I'd be happy to buy one... when I can afford it.

Doom was written in C++ (or was it plain C?)... so any source would still need a LOT of work to completely rewrite it into assembly, and to make it work on a jag. If Im not mistaken, to port doom onto the Jag, ID wrote a powerful c++ compiler, which could create code for the Jag... then took the standard doom source, modified it so it would work on the Jag, and compiled it. Unfortunatly the compiler was lost, which is a shame cause a lot of people would probably be programing using it if they could.