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phoboz

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phoboz last won the day on March 3 2022

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  1. Doom also had a swastica, I belive that was also present in the Jaguar version? If I remember right, one of the Doom developers motivated this by saying something like (quote from memory) "It was supposed to amplify the feeling of evil in this place" https://soulsphere.org/mirrors/www.rome.ro/lee_killough/memorabilia/swastika.shtml In fact it was an astrological tool used when studying diagrams of the zodiac, before it became a symbol of something political. PS. The same thing happened to the toothbrush mustache that Chaplin also had. This was probably not originally intended?
  2. The sound of Rebel Assault was amazing, I almost remember dialogs by heart. Some things are better remembered than re-experienced, as I recently played Rebel Assault on 3DO. The game is very much based on video sequences with low enough resolution to stream from a dual speed CD-rom. This is of course not very impressive by today's standards. The game is a nice very piece of art, and it can work if you sit far away from the TV to not be bothered by the low resolution video. Some sections in the game are not according to the movies. I really liked the part where you have to shoot all the armored parts off the walker. In the movies, the walker can only be defeated using a cable, which was the case in Empire Stikes Back on SNES, but Rebel Assault has it's own take on that part. I kind of liked that, but some of my friends were not hesitating to tell me that this game was wrong (maybe there was an uninteractive section with a cable after you shot off all the armor from the walker, I don't remember now? Just to satisfy that part of the audience)
  3. To answer your question. Skyhammer has 3 degrees of freedom, while Doom only has 1. (E.g. it needs full matrix, or quaternion calculations) In short, much more complex math than Doom. Although I do agree that the Doom engine could be nice for many other games.
  4. Yes good documentation helps, as well as having a common programming convention/style guide. Even a set of design rules can help, provided that programmers are ready to follow them. For example MISRA C is common in the automotive industry.
  5. Yes this is definately a big risk that few commercial software companies would accept today.
  6. Yes there are plenty good examples that showcase the Jaguar's 3D capabilities. The problem is that it's not so easy for small teams to achieve something similar in the 3D domain, as tool support is so limited. In that sense, Sony, Nintendo and SEGA made excellent choices (for their post 16-bit systems) as they selected commercial of the shelf components, which already had excellent tool support (E.g. MIPS and SuperH professors) To expect that some homebrewer miraculously archives something that overshine for example Skyhammer (in terms of textured polygons) is very slim. Given that it took many years for a professional team to get to that level. We all also see where to Open Lara project stands now. I did read that 4Play/SCATO Logic were in discussions to make a licensable 3D engine, that other developers could use. Perhaps the Skyhammer engine could also be generalised? That would have helped a lot back in the day. If these engine would also have been opened up when the Jaguar went an open platform, developers today could make use of them. At the same time, we also have the sourcecode for Fight for Life. No one has been able to make something useful out of it. So this is a problem with something written in a low level programming language (e.g. not maintainable). You need to provide an interface that hides this complexity to another user, otherwise it's pretty useless.
  7. It's popular for a reason. Because you can focus only on developing an optimal backend for your specific architecture. The GNU compiler collection is somewhat similar, because it has also been extended to more and more architectures in the past. I guess many of these target implementations re-used a lot of the existing GCC code. LLVM make a more clear distinction between backends and frontends. It has more tools included for optimization etc. I cannot say if it's harder to get started compared to using GCC. In the end, I am not sure writing a C compiler from scratch is a good way to go for maintainability reasons? The website says that Siemens used LLVM for developing a toolchain for an embedded WLIV processor, so it should be feasable for the Jaguar's custom CPUs. PS. On the VLIW architecture it is very important for the compiler to find the paths for parallel execution (e.g. static scheduling by the compiler as opposed to dynamic scheduling by the OS on the PC). So I guess they found some tools in LLVM that motivated them to go this path? Maybe there are more optimising tools (or will be in the future) in LLVM that can help optimize code at compilation stage for the Jaguar? I mean, if we can leave some of the cleverness to a computer (when tools for that are available) Maybe we should try to move away from the demo party style programming we did in the 80's and 90's?
  8. 1. Skyhammer is an excellent display of the Jaguar's texturemapping capabilites (with clever programming). 2. Air Cars & Battlesphere etc. are excellent displays of the Jaguar's capabilities with non-textured polygons. 3. Zero 5 & Tube 2020 are excellent displays of the Jaguar's capabilities with flat shaded polygons. 4. Phase Zero & Fallen Angels are excellent displays of the Jaguar's capabilities with 3D Voxel graphics. 5. Spacewar 2000 is an excellent display of the Jaguar's capabilities of mixing polygon graphics with scaled 2D sprites. 6. Super Burnout & Val D'isere skiing and snowboarding are excellent displays of the Jaguar's super scaler capabilities. 7. Iron Soldier, Club Drive & Fight for Life are displays of the Jaguar's capabilities with 3D polygons (texturemapped, gouraud, or flat shaded) To me this sets the top bar for the Jaguar, and these games are very impressive compared to other consoles of that generation. So I am not really sure what more could be expected in the 3D domain of the Jaguar's capabilities? How more clever can a programmer be? ==== My belive is that if a C compiler becomes available for the GPU we could see more advanced games. =========== Because I don't belive going to a lower abstraction layer (= lower productivity) would help. Rather I think any remaining potential can only be unleased if something previously missing on the Jaguar would become available (compared to PSX, N64) Remember, the Jaguar is a 64-bit system, not like an 8-bit system that a single developer can squeeze some extra bits out of by writing machine code. As we have seen, it is even a challange for a small team to develop a game that looks like a professional 16-bit game with the current toolchains. Hint: (to any potential Jaguar toolchain developers out there) LLVM is an excellent framework for developing toolchains for new architectures. You simply need to write the backend, as frontends for several programming languages already exists. Today it is used for developing shading languages, high level programming languages etc. by Adobe, Apple, Intel, Sony Imageworks etc.
  9. I have played games like Golden Axe. The current priority is to get to something like that. @Eternal-Krauser has made animations for some more moves, so once he explain how this is supposed to work I will see if I can implement it. (He usually send me a Flash animation using his art to explain things to me)
  10. Remember that the Jaguar competed with the Super FX chip for SNES and perhaps the SEGA 32X. So gouraud shaded low polygon count games which use old school 3D math (like fixed point calculations) can run at a frame rate comparable to games for the above mentioned competing systems. I would not expect a stable 60 FPS, but 20-30 FPS is a very good achievement and still fully playable. The problem is that it is not easy for a programmer used to modern hardware (everything beyond a 486DX PC) to even begin doing something for the Jaguar. Every single example you find for 3D math today uses floating point calculations, and even many 2D examples (as opposed to fixed point calculation) If you are lucky you may find an example for Arduino or similar that you can use as a starting point. Note that fixed point calculations are very sensitive to precision, so you most likely need to experiment a while with the decimal position before you get it right for your game. Trying to compare the Jaguar to PSX and N64 is really pushing it, as the Jaguar was probably not even meant to be able to handle texturemapping. The fact that the Jaguar hardware does not provide out-of-the-box hardware accelerated rendering made it possible to achieve things outside what was expected due to clever software tricks (like the really impressive voxel games, which I doubt you can even do on the PSX). So what you see in games like Skyhammer is really black magic, and it will probably take decades of work if a homebrewer would ever achieve something similar. This is probably the max if insist on comparing the Jaguar to the PSX and N64, but you can do do many other nice things with the Jaguar instead?
  11. OK, so I need to put: move.l #$0,$DFFF00 Here? https://github.com/theRemovers/jlibc/blob/1937a1372ff3ac452ce89ec3291c9490d2b1212b/crt0.s#L40
  12. Do this mean that there is a problem playing 6MB cartridges when the CD unit is attached?
  13. Yes, the ROM is between 80.0000 to E0.0000, which is 6MB. Then Butch is inside the ROM range, thus treated as read only memory above 4 MB? General Jaguar Memory Model: =========================== $000000 +------------------------+ | | | RAM | | | $1FFFFF $200000 +------------------------+ | shadow | | of $000000-$1FFFFF | with 2MB | RAM | $3FFFFF $400000 +------------------------+ . . . ... . . . . . $7FFFFF $800000 +------------------------+ | | | ROM | | | $DFFFFF $E00000 +------------------------+ | BOOT-(EP)ROM | $E1FFFF $E20000 +------------------------+ . . . ... . . . $EFFFFF $F00000 +------------------------+ | TOM | $F10000 |------------------------+ | JERRY | +------------------------+ $F1FFFF . . . ... . ???? . . ..........................
  14. Yes, must be a typo. A8 should be EA6. I double checked that B3=EA23 and B4=EA22.
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