flux

It is pretty timing-critical, but apart from that, I need it tied to real world time and I'm fairly sure that the current framerate won't be maintained as I add complexity to the game and I need to maintain the same timing for any framerate.

It sounds like it should work for my purposes. I'm still new to this and I'm not sure yet the syntax for reading in a value from a memory location. My programming experience is mainly system administration stuff like python and that never really came up. I vaguely remember doing it in a c++ class a ton of years ago, but that's all basically gone. Thanks for the info though, much appreciated!

Is there any way to keep track of the elapsed number of milliseconds? I know I can count frames but it isn't really sufficient for what I'm trying to do. I haven't seen any references to this so maybe the Jaguar doesn't really have an internal clock that would facilitate something like this? I'm not really a hardware guy so I don't know if my guess makes any sense but I'm hoping there's some method. Won't be the end of the world if not and I'm sure I could work around it, but it would definitely be helpful.

You'd probably just want to pick up a little portable PA system and do your microphone through that. You could probably do the sound from the Jaguar through the PA as well but I doubt it would sound super great through such a system.

If anyone was curious about what the issue ended up being, it seemed to be a bad scart cable. I ordered the first one from some random person on ebay, but this one I ordered from a vendor who seems to specialize in cables for retro consoles and their cable worked like a charm. I'm using the same screen, same scart to hdmi converter box, and everything is now working perfectly.

When I got my jaguar out of storage, not a single one of the carts worked. I cleaned the heck out of the cartridge connector and the game I was trying to play both with first a can of compressed air and then rubbing alcohol, and it worked just fine and reliably. Then I thought maybe I had the issue fixed but for each additional cartridge I tried, they'd all initially red screen until I gave them a pretty vigorous cleaning with alcohol. The fact that it seems to work reliably with Wolfenstein makes me inclined to think your console is fine. Or it could be your copy of Wolfenstein is just more tenacious or has some specific characteristics that make it make contact when other carts fail. You can't be too sure. But my recommendation would be to clean the heck out of another cartridge and see if you can get it working reliably before you send it back. I used a microfiber cloth and drenched it in rubbing alcohol. Shoved it in each side and scrubbed it back and forth.

Unfortunately I don't. It might have even been some website. I'd guess late 90s or early 2000s not that I'm sure about that or even that it would be much help if I were. The only thing I remember is seeing some kind oh physical tiles with a tube along the edge that they used to make a wall texture and i thought it was really neat and unfortunately didn't think to save it.

I can't remember if I saw them in a magazine or online, but I have a memory of seeing some photos of AvP being worked on behind the scenes, and they showed a physical tile with some kind of tubes along the edge, a picture of which ended up being used as a wall tile with pipes at the top. Does anyone else remember this or have an idea of where it could be accessed nowadays?

I tested it with a Dell lcd monitor and a Toshiba 55" TV and they both had the exact same phenomenon. I suspect it isn't an issue with the tv because the image stays confined to a non-widescreen "window" in the center of the screen, and when it wraps around it comes in from the right side of that window rather than the edge of the physical screen. So to me that sounds like it isn't an issue of the tv struggling with the signal but I'm not super knowledgeable about such things, I'm just maybe reasonably competent. Also, it does happen on every resolution the converter box supports. I do have a sega saturn with a scart cable and the thought had occurred to me to test it out but I was hoping I could get away without having to dig it out, but it's looking like perhaps I ought to. Time permitting, I'll do so tomorrow after work and report back. Edited to add: I also did use a different hdmi cable for each screen that I tried, but initially it was done more for convenience than as an experimental control.

I ordered some cheap scart to hdmi converter from Amazon and I'm having problems with it. For the most part, the image seems to be ok but then every once in a while the screen will sort of shift to the left slightly and wrap around so the left most portion of the image appears on the right side of the screen. It only lasts a fraction of a second but it happens seemingly at random but regularly enough to be incredibly annoying and distracting. Ballprk might be every five seconds on average. Could this be a bad cable or is ti just a got a terrible converter box or what?

Well, I dug out my Genesis controllers and tried it and sure enough, they don't fit together at all. I swear I wasn't on drugs or anything but I guess over the years my memory got a little skewed. I seem to remember plugging something into something it ought to not have been though. I thought it had involved Jaguar controllers but now I don't even know anymore. I apologize for wasting people's time with my wrong ideas.

They seemed to. I still have them lying around and I didn't set my genesis up or anything but my Jaguar stuff still seems good. Took some cleaning of the cartridges to get it to power on though. I didn't even realize until this thread how different the pinouts are. As a kid they just looked close enough and I was just screwin' around not knowing anything. That's crazy that it somehow even fit. Edit: I'm now starting to doubt my own memory of having done that and I'm going to try it again when I get home just to see. If it's not that, I wonder what it could possibly be that I was thinking of.

No I realize that, what I was saying was that I could plug the controllers for the respective systems into each other. Of course to no practical purpose but it amused me at the time. It was with that in mind that I wondered if the extension cables would work.

Ok, thanks for the info. I just vaguely remember as a young man being amused that i could plug a genesis controller into my jaguar controller so I figured they had the same pins. I'm just recently getting back into Jaguar stuff so there's a ton of info I never picked up on.

Flipped around the other way of course.

This isn't maybe directly a programming question so if it needs to be asked elsewhere just let me know. But how is the floor shifting perspective effect found in, for example, Kasumi Ninja accomplished? Is it an actual texture mapped 3d surface or is there some other trickery going on there? If it isn't clear to what I'm referring, I mean how when you move the characters left or right, the perspective of the floor adjusts slightly with the movement.

Just to chime in on the Saturn stuff. I recall reading that the Saturn had a newer version of its development kit available towards the end of the life that was able to make better use of the hardware and make 3d easier for developers, and just be easier in general. But by that point it was too late and no one was really developing anything for it anyhow. It does seem true that there was a lot of untapped power that was hidden by some combination of poor tools and complexity. Edit. Oh wow I didn't notice how old the conversation that I'm replying to is. Oops.

I just received a Team Tap I ordered on ebay. It's missing one of the four rubber feet on the bottom, and another one is very clearly not located in its proper spot and is only partially covering the screw hole. I didn't order it expecting it to be new or anything like that, and until the video cable I ordered gets here I can't even test it out to begin with, but my question is this: Is there any compelling reason one of these would need to be taken apart? Is there some common way where they become non-functional and someone swaps out some capacitors or something?

For me it ended up being the embodiment of my irrational psychological attachment to a specific era in gaming. There was that magic hour right before the Sony Playstation, Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 hit where there were all these companies doing crazy things. It actually probably extended a bit into the life of those consoles as well. But it seemed more like the future was wide open and everything was more experimental and exciting. Everything seems more rote now. Microsoft and Sony will come out with a new thing that looks a bit better than the one they had before and then Nintendo will do some wacky crap and stick Mario and Zelda on it. Until we die. The Jaguar was the only non-standard console I had at the time (which I define as anything besides the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis) so it gets to occupy that spot in my mind. I similarly associate things like Neo Geo and 3DO with that 'gaming future of the past' type sentiment, but those things were out of my family's price range so I don't really have any particular attachment to them.

Thanks for the quick reply! I'll definitely be looking into this. I'm glad it will be getting rolled into the Raptor stuff because that is exactly what I intended to use (which probably goes without saying for anyone starting nowadays). I'm still waiting on my Skunkboard and SCART cable to arrive from a couple of European countries so right now my Jaguar is just sitting there not doing a lot apart from lookin' pretty but a little battle scarred. A couple scratches and some white specks of what I can only guess is paint from some overspray when a room got painted. My brother had my Jaguar for some time so who knows? Wouldn't even power on at first but a can of compressed air to the cartridge slot and the cartridge seemed to clear that up. A google search on that issue brought me to this forum. Incidentally, I feel a little weird like someone famous and important is bothering to answer my dumb question but I am super appreciative.

Back in the 90s I loved my Jaguar but at some point it ended up in storage and I only decided to dig it out just the other day out of a desire to try my hand at some homebrew stuff. I have a particular project in mind, and I'm under no illusions about the long and difficult road ahead. However, one thing I didn't anticipate but recently read about while doing some initial research is the 6MB limitation for the size of a cartridge game. While I fully accept that it would be some time into development before this is a practical concern, my ultimate goal involves characters with a lot of frames of animation and also several sound (mainly voice) samples. So my question is, are there any libraries for decompressing compressed assets like images and sounds? Nothing that would have to be decompressed in real time like some kind of mp3 player or anything like that, just something that could, during the loading stage, get some compressed data out of its compressed format and into memory so I can cram more of that junk into the rom. I'm mainly trying to get a sense of what's available so I can adjust my goalposts accordingly.

I saw that box on ebay too. I just yesterday dug my Jaguar out of some storage bin that was kept at my mom's house (what a mess) because I was interested in tinkering around with homebrew stuff for it. I wanted to pick up some pro controllers that I vaguely remember reading about in magazines and the price was insane. Then I saw the post on this forum about the guy setting up a production for a new batch of them and I tried to email him but never heard back so I think I missed that window. I'm really bummed about it.