phoboz
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Posts posted by phoboz
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1 hour ago, agradeneu said:
I was really craving for Rebel Assault coming to Jaguar CD.
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)
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5 hours ago, agradeneu said:
Why Skyhammer, the Doom engine would be much more versatile for a wide range of games.
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.
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3 minutes ago, 42bs said:
I have seen this in my professional carreer quiet often. Esp. small companies cannot afford to have two or more programmer knowing everything about a project. You can hope for a good documentation.
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.
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4 hours ago, agradeneu said:
When Telegames wanted to release IS 2, only 1 guy was able to understand all the code and finish it.
Yes this is definately a big risk that few commercial software companies would accept today.
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28 minutes ago, agradeneu said:
I would not consider Club Drive a great example of Jaguar polygon gfx and it was universally panned by critics. Which is no surprise as Stunt Race FX for the SNES totally smokes it. Aircars is okish at best, falls flat compared to Cybermorph, a launch title, but was released 2 years later, late in the systems lifecycle.
What about Doom and AvP or Battlemorph? These were great examples, Iron Soldier too. Tempest 2000 was a also showcase what the Jag could do if programmers knew what they were doing.
IMO Hover Strike CD is quite an impressive 3D engine, technically (also used for Space War).
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.
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54 minutes ago, Gemintronic said:
There are already plenty of assemblers and such. Just because LLVM is a popular thing on the PC side doesn't mean it's optimal for classic consoles.
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?
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3 hours ago, tripled79 said:
Isn't Skyhammer already a good example of 3D programming for a Jaguar game?
We should turn this thread into a poll:
Was Skyhammer the ceiling as far as 3D games go on the Jaguar?
No? How about AirCars, then?
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?
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My belive is that if a C compiler becomes available for the GPU we could see more advanced games.
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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.
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5 hours ago, Otto1980 said:
Looks excelent.
Did already you think about grabbing enemies?
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)
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Player 2, a female archer.
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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?
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7 hours ago, Zerosquare said:
OK, so I need to put:
move.l #$0,$DFFF00
Here?
https://github.com/theRemovers/jlibc/blob/1937a1372ff3ac452ce89ec3291c9490d2b1212b/crt0.s#L40
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Do this mean that there is a problem playing 6MB cartridges when the CD unit is attached?
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39 minutes ago, 42bs said:
TOM does no generate an OE outside the card range (my 99% sure guess).
Remember: C0.0000 is Butch, E0.0000 is BIOS, F0.0000 are the internal registers.
Maybe it is possible to use the 2MB range of Butch. IIRC JagGD does so as well as SKUNK for communication with the controllers. So there must be a chip select. Or one has to decode
it oneself.
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 . . . ... . ???? . . .......................... -
3 minutes ago, neo_rg said:
I'd double check that diagram as it has a EA5 pin at A8 and A10.
Yes, must be a typo. A8 should be EA6.
I double checked that B3=EA23 and B4=EA22.
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What confuses me is that the Jaguar cartridge connector has one additional address pin to the left of the one I marked as PIN #4 in the image above.
That corresponds to EA23 in this image.
If this is connected, why can't the Jaguar have 16 MB cartridges?
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3 hours ago, 42bs said:
I would say so, yes.
I figured out that an original cartridge PCB can be patched like this to enable using 2x 27C322 EPROMs for a 6MB cartridge:
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Just now, 42bs said:
I would say so, yes.
It can be a good way to test the approach before ordering custom made PCBs.
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39 minutes ago, 42bs said:
compare the pin outs of the two. It could be that it is just the extra address line.
Yepp, on a PCB for 27C160, pin 32 it likely pulled up, so if you use a 322 directly, you only have 2MB as pin32 == A20.
So it could actually be possible to patch an original cartridge PCB by re-routing pin32:s to the correct cartridge connector?
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How would a PCB that uses 2x 27C322 differ from the original one that can use 2x 27C160 EPROMs?
PS. 2x 27C322 is actually 8 MB, but you could only use the lower 6MB (e.g. 2x3MB)
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I decided to start checking out @WAVE 1 GAMES recently, so I ordered JagZombies 2. I haven't heard anything except for the automatic order confirmation, hope everything goes well with this order?
I have until end of July on the buyers protection at PayPal, so I will give it a while (maybe not all the way to the summer?) They might be busy shipping a lot of orders or something 🤔
I will let you know when I get it 😌
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5 hours ago, grips03 said:
When hero hits bad guys is there anyway for some blood and gore, sort of like Mortal Kombat?
If facing a really tough boss type guy, can he clear his way to you by smashing a couple of his own troops that get in the way.
We plan to add some transparent sword slash effects in this game. We opted not to go for gore, as we have already chosen that direction for the Splatter Vania game.
We will see what kind of bosses we make for this game.
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9 hours ago, Editorb said:
You seem to welcome feedback, so if I may, I've always disliked circular shadows under characters. Is there a feasible way to have each shadow become more diffuse or transparent as it extends away from characters? Course, circular shadows was a hallmark of the genre, so it might wreck the homage.
It is possible to make the shadows less transparent, or more transparent depending on the brightness of the color in the transparent sprite. I can look more into that.
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50 minutes ago, SlidellMan said:
Will there be special moves and magic attacks?
We will see how far we go, but we have thought about an archer and perhaps about some magic.
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On 10/10/2022 at 10:06 AM, LordKraken said:
Maybe overkilled for a Jaguar game, but dividing the floor into a grid and using A*. Since the grid can be small you should'nt have any performance issue.
I used the grid approach, but each player can have a set of dynamically defined grid cells around it (moving along with the player).
Each cell has an offset from the player, and an attribute to tell if it's to the left or the right of the player.
Enemies will target a non-occupied grid cell behind the player (they will make a detour to avoid walking straight into the players attack range). If the player turns around, all enemies targeting a grid cell (now) in front of the player will select a new grid cell behind the player (after a random delay, otherwise the player can never hit the enemies).
Each playable character class can have a different formation of grid cells connected to it. So the Knight may get a different target formation (of enemies around it) than for example an Archer.
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Revisiting Wolfenstein 3D on Jaguar
in Atari Jaguar
Posted · Edited by phoboz
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?