phoboz

Does it play as nice as the PC Engine (Turbo Grafx 16) version, that one was very close to the arcade version? That console was really the master of shooters (it had many faithful arcade conversions, like arcade perfect R-Type. Plus exclusive games, like Gunhed/Blazing Lazers).

It's good for preservation purposes, so future generations can see kind of wild stuff was made for the Jaguar. I wonder if @VladR's 3D game prototype works! Great that he did release the emulator, and even better if it will be maintained in the future. This emulator seems to run many games that fail in other emulators. I am prepared to share personal copies of the ROMs that I have the rights to share, provided that there is an interest in making them work on the emulator.

Sorry guys, no perfect Jaguar emulator yet. 1. Mad Bodies, frozen black screen right efter the loading screen dissapears. 2. Atari 3D demo freezes after a few seconds. 3. Asteroite freezes a few seconds in the game *) 4. GORF no sign of life at all. Tested and working: 1. Kings of Edom 2. Wormhole 2000 *) Pressing escape and the resuming the game from the system menu seems to unlock the freeze. Until the game freezes again.

No, this game will have a pre-drawn world, like the Final Fantasy games. Actually there has been a step-wise expansion of the KoE gfx engine: 1. In KoE eryting was procedurally generated. 2. In Asteroite, the gfx engine was expanded to render worlds drawn using the Tiled level editor. 3. In the unfinished game Shadow Kingdom, transparent highlights, and shadows were added. 4. For Wyvern Tales II, non rectangular collision detection between objects and the world was added. 5. For Wyvern Tales II the possibility to define NPC walking paths, and trigger areas using Tiled were added.

@Eternal-Krauser has made a leap forward as an artist, both in visual domain and in composing music optimal for the Jaguar. I have to admit I had a motivation issue, rather I tended to focus on advancing my artist career in heavy-metal, punkrock and death-metal. Thanks to Krauser for being still around and commited, I hope that this Halloween annoucement will ignite to a new spark?! It is true as Krauser says, for every game porototype our methods for developing games have been refined. Maybe it's not visible on the surface, but it certainly has increased our productivity. So if we can take advantage of this now, I hope that we will be able to continue developing more and more exciting games for the Jaguar in the coming years. Happy Halloween, 👻👾💀👽

Halloween special 😈 New Game (WIP): SplatterVania! Credits: Game Design: @phoboz Art & Music: @Eternal-Krauser Enjoy 😉

Remember that he worked on professional software for PC when we were just little babies.

Yes I also thought about a grid based approach. If an enemy already occupies the cell right in front of the player, the next enemy should approach another empty cell close to the player. Thanks for the link. Unfortunately I am so bad at understanding other people's code, but it may be helpful to see if they also used a grid based approach?

Currently figuring out how to make good enemy AI. I didn't like the AI of Open BOR, e.g. all enemies walking the shortest path to the player (many enemies will overlap). Rather I would like to make something closer to the AI of Final Fight (where the enemies actually try to surround you from different directions)

I think that the demand was so high for the 3rd run because of the of prices copies from previous runs had on eBay. Let's face it, there is a lot people trying to make profit by selling retro gaming stuff at high prices. Look for example on the Jaguar GD robberies once in a while on eBay. Probably a similar situation may occur if a new run of Battlesphere was announced? Some of the buyers might not even have a Jaguar console to play these games on?

How many copies in this run? If each run was 200 copies, then sales would have reached 600 copies. For comparison: Protector SE (one of the best selling Jaguar after market games) had sold 500 copies as of 2019. Battlesphere I am not so optimistic about, given the high price on the spot market (perhaps a rare game by purpose, as there seems to be limited re-runs, even though the demand is still there)

To bad that online repositories, like GitHub wasn't so easily accessible back then. I lost the first embryo (on Windows DirectX) of what later became Kings of Edom, as I removed a disk partition by mistake. From that day I never started a project without setting up a file repository on a server first. I guess for the game in question here, the most valuable work must have been the pre-rendeted scenes rather than the code itself?

Wow you are so got at playing gravity games like this. I also see in the "Let's Play..." videos that other play games better than me (in including my own games) I wish I had more time to play games these days.

Sorry that this thread was hijacked with some irrelevant discussions. The voxel demo looks terrific. Great work @42bs! I will take a look at the code on GitHub now.

The netlists does not contain any logic, they only tell which input and output signals the functional blocks have, and how they are connected. These netlists were used as a starting point for the Jaguar FPGA core (now ported to MiSTER), but the original author of the FPGA core had to implement the actual logic (VHDL code) insude these functional blocks himself.

That is always a challange, especially when 'happy testers' get involved. Sometimes people also have great ideas that shouldn't be missed?

Unfortunately I cannot say so about the collaboration yet, but we aim for a formal announcement later this year. The result will definately bridge a gap in the Jaguar's library.

I think I was replying to someone who has an understanding of basic calculus and linear algebra (the kind of math that is taught the first 1-2 semester(s) on any enginnering training) Internediate knowledge about computer science, practical experience in some x86 assembly. This person may be an academic in a technical, or scientific field? Maybe the person has an interest in old computing hardware, by having some home computers to play with? The one I am replying to seem to have a theoretical high level understanding about some parts of the Atari Jaguar's architecture (maybe obtained by reading posts on this forum?), but no practical experience (yet?) The posts usually start by something that could make sense, and are about 80-90% relevant to the topic. Later in the post, statements appear that doesn't make sense at all (not to me at least). Maybe because these statements are mixed with concepts relevant to other (random?) computer science topics, and these may not be relevant for the Jaguar?

I think they meant a color gradient, and not the gradient vector of a curved surface. People rarely use the word gradient for normals to flat surfaces, but I guess you can see it that way? E.g. if you approximate a curved surface using many flat facets, the normal for each of these small elements is also an approximation of the gradient for all the points on that small facet. Voxel graphics is more commonly generated using ray casting. E.g. you cast a ray for each element to be rendered on screen, and calculate the height of the bar (starting from the bottom of the screen) by looking at the intersection point between the ray and the height data of you voxel representation. When you draw these vertical bars, you may overwrite many of the lower pixels of the screen several times. So I guess there might be some clever optimizations to avoid doing that so much. (Yes I made the voxel excersise in the book "Black Art of 3D Game Programming" many years ago) In the end I really don't see the benefit of approximating voxel data using 3D popygons, unless you have a graphics card that is really fast in rendering 3D graphics. So for the Jaguar, you might as well stay with the more straight forward approach to render voxel graphics (e.g. the ray casting method described above, with some optimizations) At least if your other game objects are scaled sprites, and not 3D polygon models.

Is the source code available? If the source code is available, porting this game will be less about emulating the Falcon hardware, as calls to system dependent functions could be replaced with Jaguar custom functions that do the same thing (for example to draw an image on the screen). In the end it may be much easier to port (depending on how well structured the source code is) The programer may also be able to utilize the Jaguar's jardware much better, as there is no need to emulate things the Jaguar wasn't built for.

It's probably one of trickier ones to find as you need to backtrack, but you can still get this one before you even entered the abandoned factory, or the laboratory area.

Yes I think the ones that already bought a physical copy from me should be able to buy the games for just a symbolic fee (using a coupon at checkout)

Actually I only have one copy left of Asteroite that was made for the European market (out on eBay now). So eventually physical copies can sell out.

I did promise one person that I will make Wormhole 2000, and SpideX available as digital purchases this autumn. I also got an answer from @Songbird (that still sell these games) that I can start the digital sale around October. So this will be like a pilot for potential future digital purchases. This will also be an opportunity for me to check out how it could work from the technical side (e.g. in the web-shop etc.)

Yeah that's a good technique (often done to my singing in the studio, because I really don't sing entirely in key). The fun thing is that it sounds fater on singers that sing less accurate.