Stone
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Posts posted by Stone
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The first run of them sold back in 2004 (or was is 2002-3?) I believe it was, a guy from europe sold them who was a member here (AA name = "Stone" havent seen him in years on here). That release came in a jewel case with a nice insert and the cd had a nice label. Better quality than B&C but I think the content is the same, though I could be wrong, cant remember.
I'm still here, and thanks
It was 2003 - back then it was unbelievably difficult to get a consistent quality of copy on Jag stuff - I went through an entire pack of CD-Rs at the start burning coaster after coaster! The CD bypass unfortunately means that imperfect copies can still be run so there was a lot of playtesting involved on each disc to make sure there weren't any extra errors above and beyond my original copy. I think I only sold them for £5 though so it was a bargain 
Threw out a huge stash of leftover inserts a couple of months away actually - it wound up easier getting a larger quantity printed all at once. I think I only sold 50 or so, so if you have one then you're part of a lucky minority 
Not sure if the B&C version is based off one of my copies or not, to be honest. All power to his elbow though, it's not at all easy making copy after copy of this stuff.
Stone
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Hey Stone! great to see you around again, it's been years since we used to chat via IM. I miss those days.
I'd heard you had left the jaguar scene for whatever reason. Are you back into the Jaguar again?
Hello
I'm still around but very much on the fringes - not only have I moved on rather but I've had a load of irritating IRL issues to deal with. I do still have a soft spot for the Jag, and you never know, there might be a secret project in the works
The best thing about secrets is that you can never disappoint people by working slowly...Stone
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Actually it is possible to burn a CD 'jukebox' - Atari devs used them internally to play the latest cart games. The disadvantage is that you need an Alpine and dev BIOS in your JagCD! All the CD software does is copy a cart image onto the Alpine, then resets - the valid cart image then forces the Jag to run from cartspace instead of the JagCD. So it is possible, just deeply awkward and expensive
Stone
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Quite a few of that list still exist (and some were released, even). Big chunks of American Hero are playable, same with BIWN, same with Brett Hull Hockey, I've seen someone playing LiveWire at a JagFest UK. We all know about Phaze Zero, Tiny Toon Adventures and Painter. There are mockups of Jack Nicklaus Cyber Golf. I have Virtual VCS. So really a fair few are accounted for!
Rollcage would have been awesome, same with Phear (rumoured finished but Nintendo got exclusive rights when they recoded it as Tetrisphere for the N64). It's probably a blessing some of those got cancelled though, Lester the Unlikely was awful
Stone
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Damn phone, triple post?!
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It was released as HoverstrikeI did wonder that, but I was expecting Classic/Plus/2000 style so ruled it out. Battlezone was great but I hated Hover Strike
Stone
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It was released as HoverstrikeI did wonder that, but I was expecting Classic/Plus/2000 style so ruled it out. Battlezone was great but I hated Hover Strike
Stone
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It was released as HoverstrikeI did wonder that, but I was expecting Classic/Plus/2000 style so ruled it out. Battlezone was great but I hated Hover Strike
Stone
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And Battlezone 2000Still waiting for Gunship and Alone In The Dark!
Stone
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For a real blast from the past you can now read it here, courtesy of a 2001 cache from the Wayback Machine
busterm: My first BJL cable was made of 30cm of bare wire with a shield made of tinfoil (earthed to the shell at one end using a blob of solder attached to a wire, with the other end soldered to the shell. The blob was stuck to the tinfoil with electrical tape.). I only made a proper one when I got fed up with the crinkling noises whenever I swapped carts
Stone
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Second vote for Power Drive Rally - you're really missing out there. Worms is good but a bit of a sloppy conversion - only really worthwhile if you have a bunch of regular players and can have a properly long league.
Atari Karts is definitely a good buy.
Stone
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I wrote a BJL FAQ once (it was on Starcat's old site before it died). I'll dig a copy off my old PC later
Stone
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I'm rationalising my collections. There might be some mileage in it yet
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Oops, you're completely right. They have different serial number runs too.
I wrote an FAQ post about this very subject once so it's a bit upsetting all my trivia's gone west!
Stone
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There were two runs. The ones with the black rubber keys are slightly earlier - and the ones with grey keys are slightly later (Procontrollers have grey keys too).
No real difference but obviously you can make your own mind up which you prefer
Stone
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I like Ruiner much better than PF.
But then I'm rubbish at 'real' pinball
Stone
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Again, nobody really uses SRAM any more: mainly as it uses 6 transistors per bit instead of 1 like DRAM - much lower density so high cost, even with the downside of having to refresh DRAM. You can get something called PSRAM (pseudo-SRAM) which is DRAM internally but with all the refresh mechanisms done automagically on the inside and just an SRAM-style bus on the outside, with costs to match DRAM (about $4 per chip).
It's amazingly cool, but as it was developed for mobile phones it's all in FBGA packages or smaller - which are fine to solder with hot air reflow but pretty much impossible to design a PCB for in affordable technology (you're forced into a multilayer board, and often more than 4 layers). Even if you could make or buy a package adapter from FBGA to SSOP (basically, forget it) it mostly runs at 1.8V so you'd need a bus converter on the adaptor board too. And you'd need 8 adapters. Suddenly spending the cash on SRAM seems like a better idea
[edit: especially when these would be under £40 for a full set. If it was me I'd buy a set just in case they work, and reattach the old chips if they didn't. Having seen Tyrant's soldering skills I'm not 100% sure he's game for it
]Stone
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I would have done it, sorry I didn't see this thread in time
Let me know if it gets relisted.
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I don't know if it's what you're looking for, but here are some documents by Glenn Bruner about upgrading Alpine Boards : http://www.jagware.org/jag_uploads/dev/alpine.zip.
That's the puppy. Good find! The jumper positions are on page 8 of alpine_upgrade.pdf.
Stone
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I did add BIN to a couple of the auctions for nifty-er stuff. The problem is some idiot always wants to bid on it instead, so the seller's wasted his £0.35
So, no. If it hasn't got a BIN now it won't be getting one.
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Sorry, no. I've always wanted one of those, lucky you!
Any chance of some external/internal pics?I believe their Sega and Nintendo ones used a custom card inside the PC, have you got that too? It may be a common connector but not used as you expect, IYSWIM. Try asking on assemblergames.com .
Stone
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Not 100% sure of the answer to that (it's been at least 7 years!) but IIRC there was a large document about Alpines that included details of how to do the remote-stop and remote-reset mods (these were applied 'in-the-field' by devs but some Alpines don't include them). If I were you I'd have a word with Glenn Bruner since I think the doc originated with him.
I have >2GB of Jaguar files on my old PC so I'll have a look in there. No promises!
ISTR the jumpers are mainly to allow different configurations of SRAM to be fitted. As you know your common-or-garden 2MB Alpine has 16 SRAMs on it, in two banks of 8. Without double-checking (can't be bothered
) I'd expect them to be 16-bit SRAMs (so two banks gives a 32-bit cart) storing a total of 1Mbit each (so it's a 512K x 16 SRAM). The 4MB Alpine has half as many SRAMs so I'd expect each to be a 4Mbit, 16-bit chip (so 2M x 16). Equally you could build a SRAM cart out of 8-bit chips, using 4 banks to give your 32-bit cart, or one massive 32-bit SRAM if you could find one. (or you could do it the Skunkbox way and use a single 16-bit chip, altering the cart header so the Jag expects a 16-bit cart, though it then takes two cycles to transfer each 32bit word instead of one). The jumpers allow you to select which address lines go where so you can cater for multiple chip types, though they're all pretty much equally hard to find cheap.Mostly these types of SRAMs aren't really available any more as the electronics market's shifted. The neatest thing I've seen recently is something called 'serial Flash' - you talk to it with a two-wire serial bus so the physical chip can be a lot lot smaller as you don't need to put as many pins on it. You can get crazy sizes (eg 64MB in an 8-pin chip!) but they sadly don't work when you have older hardware like the Jag which expects parallel buses. They'd be great for having loads of storage attached to a microcontroller though.
Sorry, I got distracted. Did any of that answer the question?
Stone
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Didn't you win one of the 2MB ones at JFUK 2003? (which I found a video for early tonight infact).. and discovered it rattled?
Possibly, I've owned 6 or 7 Alpines so I don't remember! I never won the raffle prize one, but I bought it off the winner - in the end I sold that one to Symmetry of TNG.
As you guys have been talking about here the 16Mb, with the small "b" means bits, not bytes so the solder mask Alpine is a 2MB unit correct?
(Sorry Just checking, of course it wouldn't make sense for the unit to be a full 16MB!)
Yep, it's 16 megabits, which is 2 megabytes. It makes more sense to quote it like that as SRAM is sold in megabits, eg a 1M x 16 SRAM (1,048,576 words with a 16 bit databus) is a 16 megabit, 2 megabyte device. They do it this way so it's instantly obvious how wide each data word is, as you can buy some funny configurations like 18-bit words (two bytes each with a parity bit).
The other clue is that Atari 4MB boards only have half the SRAM positions populated - home-upgraded ones can have any weird layout as Atari put a ton of jumpers on the board to configure the board for different types and sizes of SRAM. The Jag can only address 6MB of cartspace anyway, as you said
Stone
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So we'll have to wait 13 years, 5 new engines and a new dev team which takes over your work, right?
Come on now, it hardly warrants accusing him of being Did Not Finish
Stone
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List of Pro Controller Games
in Atari Jaguar
Posted
You realise I posted that fifteen years ago, right?
I've mapped a Saturn controller to a Jag port before - it was actually a lightgun, but one of the ones with a d-pad and a couple of buttons on as well. Not too difficult if you follow the diode matrix on the keypad PCB. I may still have my old notes somewhere if you're interested.
I switched over to exclusively using ProControllers when I realised how much nicer the A/B/C buttons were. Should have been like that on all of them in my opinion!
Stone