Tyrant

Hi, I got my JagCD the other day (yeay!) but I found a bit of a problem with it, while the unit functions perfectly, getting a reliable contact between the cartridge port and the bottom of the JagCD requires removing the top of my Jag's case. Not a huge problem but Im curious as to why it is. There is clearly almost a centimetre gap between the bottom of the JagCD's connector and the bottom of the slot its ment to plug into. I am using a UK Jaguar (the case has revision 1, 10 / 93 stamped into the plastic) with a US CD, but I wouldnt have thought they'd ever change something like the design (or depth) of the case. Has anyone else had this problem? What did you do about it (besides removing the plastic lid of your jag )?

No, I know Im not a good coder, hell I've never written anything in assembily yet and I try to stay as far away from low level hardware stuff as I can. I am going to learn tho. What pissed me off is that almost everything I've seen you say in several topics recently relates to your own products and how superiour they are to anything any of us lowly mortals could come up with. Also the assumption that we cant be real jaguar fans unless we have a copy of battlesphere really pisses me off. I would rather spend my money on, as I have just done, a dev kit and a cd drive, than on one game.

Because most people cant afford Battlesphere, myself included, and Im getting a little annoyed with the constant salesman act frankly. Why would anyone want to plug a controler in via multiple adaptors and then get one of the main processors tied up interpreting it, when you could have it as a small box on the front, and it wouldnt cost... how much is battlesphere going for now? I think with a simple pic type chip it would be possible to write the code far far more efficiently for a normal advanced controler than some back end hack. edit: having calmed down a little I realise your only talking about buying a special adapter from you, then adding it to a jaglink which must be bought seperately as well, and not battlesphere itself, but its still an inelegant solution and I for one would much rather have a nice mouse interface box that goes in on the front of a jag, would be compatible with a team tap, identify itself to games, and generally behave how a controler should, not how a network product should.

Yes but that isnt a serial mouse. ST mice and some other old old old mice from when pc's were young work very differently from serial pc mice now. As you may or may not know, mice use a pair of slotted discs and four optical broken beam detectors. There is allways hardware onboard to clean up the output from the detectors and make 4 binary signals. ST mice, and antique pc ones (the kind that need special isa cards to run) output that data directly to the computer, placing all the processing on it. Modern serial pc mice have chips onboard that count the speed and direction of revolution on each disk, then send that information as a 2 or 3 byte (or sometimes longer) serial data stream. Jaguar controlers are designed to take inputs and outputs in a very different way, the jaguar has 4 output lines, by which it requests one of 16 rows of data, then the controler sends back the data using the remaining 6 bits of information per line. His mouse hack is obviously not an intelegent jaguar controler (its just cables), so what Im guessing he did is just wire up the outputs of the mouse to the 6 input pins, simple, effective, but you need an ST mouse to use it, which isnt a bad thing since the original ST mouse is a magnificient device, painful with prolonged exposure, but gorgeous, and with that satisfying clunk of the buttons. Theoretically it would be possible to make a jaguar serial mouse hack, by using the dsp as a serial decoder, but its an ugly solution, much better would be to build a small decoder board that decodes the serial data, and passes it to the jaguar in the proper way, also identifying itself as a mouse controler to the jaguar, the way advanced controlers are supposed to, and generally following the specs in the dev manual.

I can help you work out the code to imput from the rotary controler, no problem. Its a nice game so far, but the controls could use a little tweeking... the way the ball allways seems to bounce the same way from the controler, and almost randomly from the blocks is a little strange. Also the behaviour of that 4 ball icon is... weird lol. Normally when you get a multiball if you loose some of the balls (as allways happens), they dont get replaced by new balls, that just makes the game even harder since its impossible to catch all of the balls, and normally the extra three are free, and dosnt matter if you drop them, unless you drop all 4 balls, at which point your ball count goes down by one. Also serial mouse support isnt possible on a jaguar due to the way jaguars interface with their controlers. I have considered making a small box that would interface them, but it dosnt seem that important yet, when games that could use mice practically are being writen I may make some. I still havnt had time to make up any rotary controlers yet, well except two for myself, hopefully I'll make up one or two in a few days.

Thanks, I'll go have a play. The other thing thats annoying the hell out of me is that I cant use the programs inside windoze 2k, I think because it dosnt allow direct access to any system device, including the paralell port. Does anyone know a way to bypass this or am I going to have to drop back to using 95/98? It runs nicely in real dos, but like having windows multitasking abilities and the viewing of pdf files I tried all day yesterday to install the software on a 486 and a P1 I have sitting here, but then found that neither of them have a bidirectional paralell port, and the extra isa paralell port card I have isnt bidirectional either. Ho hum.

Take a look at this thread from the board a little while ago.

Not wanting to sound like a total newbie, but how does one upload it via an alpine? I've only had mine a day, and managed to put up some of the atari example programs, but I couldnt get the ballgame to run. Also as for suggestions, support for rotary controlers (with a sensitivity setting) and a two player mode would be good. The second player being on the top of the screen, both players start the game with a ball, they bounce and destroy blocks as normal, and whoever drops three balls first looses

Infighting and squabbling like this will be the death of the Jaguar! BattleSphere may be a great game, but trying to get a copy cheaply is not easy, and even if it is a lot cheaper now its still a lot of money. BJL is more common than JUGS and talk of interface beauty is just plain dumb, sorry. The only way to get future developments made for the jag is if EVERYONE agrees on some basic standards of how to do it. Most games wont be released on cartridge, those that are done for CD need a common encription bypass process, with saving data, so that a programer need not release seperate versions for all the different systems. The same with uploaded games, they should all be the same so the poor programers dont have to try to support conflicting systems. As for you Thunderbird Im disapointed, I allways looked up to you and dismissed the roumours of you being selfish and moneygrabbing, but bickering like this makes me think maybe they're right. Please can we all try to get along?

Yes EB found a lost warehouse and started selling stuff, its all gone now I think, but mainly it was piles of standard control pads, quite a lot of different games, and US Jaguars, boxed, but reconditioned I believe.

Why dosnt someone start producing new rare / proto hardware for the Jag? There are lots of companies out there who specialise in making small runs of boards, and a wave of new hardware (modems, new controler types, maybe the vr helms even) would be a very good thing, especially with emulation on the horizon, which would imvho be a bad thing for collectors or real games. Obviously new games need to be writen to take advantage of them, but I think there are now more developers than ever (well since the death of Atari anyway), and I'll soon be joining the ranks... hopefully.

Not to mention Xenon2's "RealCash" and the oh so cute shopkeeper hehe, now that was a fun game, but yeah cash is a strange way to play a game. I only just played the demo today (my big box arrived, JagCD, DevJag and Alpine, ProtSE and the native demo disk). I must say Im very impressed with the graphics on the old version, and the overall speed of it, I cant wait to see the finished version. One ever so slightly off topic question: Does one actually need the CD dev kit / emulator to develop cd games or can it realisticly be done with a bypass cart and a stack load of cdr's?

For me at least, the issue of rarity isn’t that important, a few games such as AvP and BattleSphere are worth a lot simply because you cannot find them cheaper unless the seller is an idiot. All other games are worth roughly the same and if I see a game I dont own, if the packaging is in good condition, or if its a game I really badly want, I'll buy it. Since almost all Jag games are roughly the same price, it’s all the same to me. Only in a very few cases does rarity equal price since, to be fair, most of the Jag games are unfortunately not worth that much due to the terrible production values that went into them. If your a dedicated collector you buy even the games that stink, if your not you buy only the ones you want to play, being rare doesn’t make a game good, and unless its exceptionally rare it doesn’t even work as a status symbol to boast about owning it, so why should rarity equal price? The rarity guide is a nice feature, but as with all of human endeavour, if you put too much serious thought into it you end up not actually doing anything else. Thought for the day: It is not in my mind to ask questions that cannot be answered, that is the soul standing on the crossroad of vacillation, you search for wisdom, but achieve only a stasis of will.

If I had a job I'd even consider flying over to goto one in New York... ho hum, next time I guess. Why is there still no real info on the E-JagFest 2k2 tho? I really want to make plans but no details have been set... have they?

I have a few shrinkwrapped copies here, I'd be willing to sell you one for £20 (gbp, about $30 usd) which would include shipping.

Thanks, where did you hear about this?

Those VR headsets are going? I do hope he's enough of a fan to make sure they only sell to someone who will treat them with the reverance due to such sacred relics. Can you let me know this guy's email address so I can contact him please?

I sent him a message as well, asking for shiping to the uk, but got no reply as of yet, even tho I sent the mail on the same day this thread was posted I think.

And so it begins the corruption of our once beautiful boards by people using colours and font styles when there is no need to get the attention bold text generates. Why did you do it? As for the mystery projects... well I guess they're a mystery :-)

Do you mean how the white AA in the logo is off-center, or is the actual graphic off-center in its table cell? If it's the first, that's just to give them a cool look Sorry, but it really isnt cool, just looks dumb to me. If the logo at the top of every page all over the AtariAge site is going to be centered, keep it centered on there... also why are they rounded? nothing else outside of the forums has any 3D effect at all, why put it in here? it makes the forum look detached from the rest of the site. Maybe Im going mad but I was allways taught to keep everything with in a product looking the same. Thats not to say change is evil (althogh I dont like these changes much), but a partial change looks amaturish. If your going to make the site look "cool" and "modern" (why have a moden looking site about retro games?), then make the whole site look that way, I would strongly discourage you from doing this since the old look is far superior, but a mish-mash of moden looking boards and classic, simple, clean looking pages elsewhere is even worse than carrying this new look over to everywhere else. If this site were mine, which it obviously isnt, I would strip out all these "cool" soft looking rounded buttons, re-do all the colours to match elsewhere, including these off blue backgrounds, shrink the avatars (they're getting too big now, a 1 line post takes the same vertical size as a 20 line post). I would also take out all the text formating commands and just have a few well chosen ones, that marry in with the site's colour scheme and allow attractive highlights easily. Remembering the old adage that less is most definatly more, the same goes for smilies, when you put in a new pack, set a limit for yourself, that you will include no more than 10, then pick the best 10 that are unique and easy to tell apart, and leave it at that. Less is more... if I have to open windoze magnifier or hover over an emoticon in order to get an alt text explenation of what it meens, then it has failed its life's purpose and wasted my time. Oh and can you please do something about these thrice bedamned scrollbars, they're driving me crazy.... white on white, impossible to see what they're trying to show. Finally the text in this edit box is waaaay to tiny, and having no border (or a thin, 2D black border, is really annoying too).

Personally I use a PC for everything, one day I'll pull my ST out and set it up, when I get my room completely rebuilt the way I want it and have the space for it, but I'll probably still only use it to play all the old games on, and for two player stunt car racer when linked to my pc emu :-)

I was wondering that too, and why the subjects for replies apear so small that you'd easily be forgiven for missing them (might be an idea to just turn them off, we never used to be able to make new subjects) As for load times, while it was a bit faster earlier on, the whole board does seem incredibly slow now, perhaps its just cause there are a lot of messages on these pages, but even on shorter topics there is a very noticible delay.

Thats not quite what I said, what I ment was that no matter how many standards get published, since 90% of the population use IE, it has become the standard, since everything needs to be compatible with it or face users complaining. Personally I hate micros~1 and all they stand for, but you have to admit, if something dosnt work on IE, then most people cant use it, so people should only use elements supported by it.

Two more bugs to add to the list... html <pre> tags dont work, as can be seen above, the board dosnt cope with the end of line being an actual end of line, I think its trying to make it an end of paragraph, but inside <pre> tags everything should be treated like its pure ASCII text. Also, editing posts takes forever, you click submit then wait in excess of 30 seconds before anything happens. Whereas, with the old board, I never noticed any slowdowns at any point ever.

I am very analitical by my nature, which may make me seem resistant to change, but this is not the case entirely. I am resistant to change that has not been fully thought out. In any environment, the colour scheme should be very limited, on AtariAge it consists of two highlight colours, black text, and white (or very pale grey) backgrounds. This is good... until you give people the easy ability to post in whatever colours they want... yes its nice to be able to highlight key words in a different colour, but when used excessively it really spoils the look and feel of the site. If it was up to me, I would make three highlight styles availible, bold black, bold orange and bold blue, nothing more. With that simple subset you can make quite attractive posts, while maintaining the feel of the site perfectly. /" / ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN X AGAINST HTML EMAIL / AND POSTINGS