Tyrant

That's great but you don't cite a single source, there's no way to verify your timeline.

Random question number two hundred and eighty seven: When was the pro controller released? (on either side of the atlantic) Magazine scans relating to its release would be even better.

I don't, I build proper rotaries But before I came along and started the current trend of having them inside the standard pads, a lot of people played with one button hacked ones. some of those have gotta still be around. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KazkRxmU8hE

Or you could read the buttons from a second pad... in a one player game it doesn't even take any longer to read both ports at once... for two player you'd wanna poke at the extended teamtap ports to do it which might not be entirely worthwhile...

Surely 2, 4, 6, 8, is more common, then you can have the diagonals (which probably make no sense in a 4-way stick game) on 1, 3, 7 & 9. Other than that though, sounds and looks like a most awesome game indeed. Oh and I'm sure you have already allowed the rotary trim to go a long way either side of "normal", but remember that the extremes are pretty extreme. Hacked 2600 controllers have really poor control (4 cycles / 16 steps I think, may be less) and also only one fire button, so allowing buttons on pad 2 would be cool. At the other extreme JediJeff controllers use optical encoders similar to mice and produce a positively absurd number of inputs per revolution (I would guess 60-150 cycles per revolution).

Looking pretty impressive already. I can't wait to see this with additional graphics and powerups in place. I'm curious as to what kind of "additional features" you can't fit onto a 4mb flash cart though, but I'm sure we'll find out in due course. Also it is lovely to see another Rotary-enabled game under development.

Agreed, on both points. Simply amazing for 24 hours worth of work. I've been bashing away at mine for almost 6 months on and off and it's only just beginning to resemble a game now. Demo coming soon, but it's not going to be terribly impressive until it gets a full re-write onto the GPU.

That's almost as good as bits of the doom source, where the only comment in the whole file is ; F*CKING DSP!!

AFAIK, yes, it's the first one. The first one to be publicly demo'd at least... Not the first one to have work started on it.

The one and only time I ever played it (JFUK2k...3?) I couldn't stop laughing at how bad it was. I ended up being killed by a green triangle shot at me from a ship so far away it was just 2 pixels in size. All that hype, all that disappointment, all the laughter and joy it brought to my heart. Good times, I miss those early JFUK's.

Oh I know, but I was using it as a counter-example that the razor/blade model isn't always the best choice.

Agreed on all points. I once saw (although cannot put my hand on right now) an article which said something along the lines of "Atari thought 3DO and Sega were their competitors, when in fact it was Nintendo and Sony" So yeah, the Jag doesn't beat the playstation, but that's because Sony kind of surprised everyone (and as you said were able to pump billions into development). Also I believe it's around that time when the model shifted from making a profit on the console to making a profit on the games and a loss on the console. Although I'm still amazed that Nintendo have made a profit on every single Wii ever sold, and yet were able to launch it at £180 and still be the best selling system by a mile, but now I'm going off topic a little.

I won't treat it as an ultimate reference hehe, but as one among many. Thanks for posting it, it is useful to me. As for questions... I guess the only real question I would have is "Why the f*** wasn't the Jaguar chipset given one more revision cycle to fix some of the biggest bugs in it?" Things like the RISC Jump bug, or the blitters A1 clipping failure, things that rather severely limit what the system can do and force programmers to go rather drastically out of their way to work around them.

That's pretty harsh man, and the question (which wasn't really a question at all, more of an observation) wasn't stupid at all, just based on a misunderstanding that's far too easy to make unless you're familiar with the above mentioned sources (specifically that the guys who designed the Jaguar's chipset also designed the KMS chipset, but didn't design the associated hardware / enclosures of either system).

That's all fine and dandy but what happens if the OP then starts chewing through your half-written list, finds a broken link pointer and dances a fandango on core? Or... hang on... would the BLJ ROM reset the OLP on illegal? I guess it would have to... why didn't I think of this sooner?! Trying to debug malformed object code with WDB is a nightmare, the OP keeps crashing so badly the debugging link breaks.

Sort of... it does some weird things with the addressing of it... essentially putting the rotary encoder on its own onto teamtap port B, thus leaving the d-pad and all the buttons on port A. I seem to recall testing that configuration once, and I've looked through the T2k source and never once does it write the appropriate row codes to read from port B, so no, it doesn't work. It's odd though, Yak did say he remembers writing auto-detection code, but looking though the source I couldn't find it anywhere (and other people have tested with the C2/C3 bits, and it doesn't auto-detect). So, basically you can throw out that whole section. The only useful thing is the explanation of the quadrature encoding, which you should hook up to left and right in place of the d-pad. Oh and remember to read the pad (or at least the encoder) very often. Yak does it by PIT interrupt and when reading a rotary he reads it 8 times more often than just reading a d-pad.

Yes but the controller described in techref wouldn't actually work with Tempest, so it's a good thing they didn't release it.

KSkunk that's some excellent info, just what I was after. I had seen one of those interviews but not the other one so thank you. That's fascinating... where did you find that? Is it publicly available?

Sounds good, all new development is to be welcomed.

Can anyone tell me (preferably with verifiable sources to back it up) when exactly the Jag started being developed? I know it was mostly (entirely?) developed by Flare, but I'd like to know when they started it, when Atari got interested/involved, and any interesting bits of history that happened at that time. Google is not being very helpful so far, so I turn to you guys. Thanks.

Afaik RGB also needs you to connect composite up so as to get the sync pulses from that.

So... you mean xbox kinect with xbox live on a 3DTV? Or how about the 3DS with street-pass? All things come to those who wait (and buy the latest stuff).

Uh... Guitar Hero anyone? That's a pretty fscking specialist controller, and it's only good for one kind of game (all of which are essentially identical, except for the songs in each).

For the record, I don't see how you saying JS-II is "a place seemingly built out of drama" is compatible with your seemingly sincere desire for greater peace and calm in the Jaguar community. Nah you're quite right there, I was having a slight dig at the place and I shouldn't have. Consider the comment retracted.

I know I shouldn't get involved, I REALLY know I shouldn't get involved, but I do have to point out the blatantly obvious here, and I do so as someone who has the required talent, and currently, the time, to create new and decent Jaguar titles (I don't know how worthwhile any game is however, they're all just for entertainment after all). This kind of infighting makes me, and other developers, want to have nothing to do with the scene. Read that again. I love the Jag, not so much for its games, which are on the whole fairly meh (with a few gems), but for its hardware, and the joy of trying to create something on such a weird buggy system. The Jag had potential, which still has rarely been tapped. I like the fun of writing code for it, and trying to make things that are awesome and exploit some of that potential... but the attitudes of a small part of the community sap all my will to ever release anything and make me want to have nothing to do with the whole bloody lot of you, which sucks, because I know it's a minority who fight and bicker constantly. Also I know from talking to other talented people that I'm not alone on this. Think before you post, and if you must get into a fight, take it to JSII, a place seemingly built out of drama.