Stone

I'm still trying to understand this...Freudian slip? Stone

Yep, sounds like you're running in 'greenscale' We had problems with this at JagFest, until someone thought of pressing all available buttons on the screen Stone

Nothing you said contradicted my argument. In fact, it only strengthened it. The higher-performance HSCD renderer is truly the result of greater programmer experience. Oh no, I wasn't in any way disagreeing with you on that! I was just pointing out that the Jag doesn't just add storage space, it adds a whole new dimension of headache for the Jag programmer. JagCD coders are brave people Atari did very little to make the Jaguar easier to program It's simultaneously the huge advantage and the major disadvantage of the system IMO - while you have a ton of flexibility in what you do, you do have to do everything yourself without useful API calls and drop-in modules (only real one I can think of is the FULSYN/Music driver which Atari wrote, and even that requires a load of configuration before it works right). You don't get any fancy code written for you for instant access from ROM, you have to write your own...which I guess is one of the reasons Jag coding scares so many people, cos you're working so much closer to the hardware than people are used to Stone

You don't know what it's worth and you start the auction at $100?! That's edging into silly money in my book... When I need one for JagFest I was just gonna buy a couple of aluminium flight cases and a large chunk of antistatic foam and cut the whole thing to fit what I want to take...one Jag/JagCD, couple of controllers, PSU, a couple of games and an Alpine isn't going to fit in the plastic case, plus mine will look nicer Has anyone checked if the foam's antistatic? It didn't look like it to me when Gaztee brought his pile of them to JF:UK...wouldn't want to fry anything expnesive by using one of the original cases Stone

@CHR_AeON: with all due respect, you're talking crap. For a start, there's no such thing as an NTSC or PAL JagCD. They're all the same. Period. They also all run off 9VDC at 1.2A, which if you look *very* carefully is exactly what the Jag power supply outputs. Any normal Jag power supply that works in your region will also happily power a JagCD. End of story. @Dragonforce: Maarten Maartens is 100% correct. No matter where the JagCD came from originally, if you're in the EU then using an EU Jag power supply with it will be just fine. If you're in the UK then use a UK power supply, if you're in the USA then use a USA power supply. It's really not rocket science...how on earth are people getting so confused? Stone

The Jaguar CD is a storage device, period. The only thing it adds to the Jaguar is more data for games, and load times. The improvements in Hover Strike CD's renderer were due solely to greater programmer experience. See, by making sweeping statements like this you seriously weaken the impact of any further arguments you may make. The major disadvantage of the JagCD from the programming standpoint is that while you have to be maintaining a large data buffer in RAM to get any decent speed (as in fact you should be doing in cart games), the speed at which you can refill said buffer is greatly reduced by comparison to doing it from cartspace. What this probably means for you game is that without clever segmentation strategies and predictive loading, you'll end up having to keep large amounts of level data as well as your engine code in RAM, simply to achieve acceptable access speed. This could easily eat 25-50% of your RAM, which in turn gives you much less scratch space in which to store your various buffers and do calculations, which in turn makes things much less convenient when compared to a cart game. All this is also ignoring the effect on the bus access speed of streaming CD audio at the same time, which slows everything down significantly...it's a miracle we have any impressive CD games (Battlemorph!) at all Stone

I didnt find it all that hard at all, strange that. I wasn't sure if I'd got myself into an insoluble position by not repairing absolutely everything when I got the chance, but even with a completely fresh car (by the end of the game I was very flush ) I was having serious problems getting around enough of the course at speed. Looked to me like you had to have a totally perfect run, not ever skimming a wall or taking the wrong line at a corner, to be successful, and though I was getting closer the endless practicing finally got to me. One day I'll pick up another copy of the game and give it a go, but I got plenty of enjoyment out of it as it was, and then spread the joy in return for a nice collection piece, so I'm happy Stone

It's a fair point that the AI routines being processed are less complex (hell, it's the 68K, it's reasonable enough to assume everything slows down when you add stuff, I know it happens to me ) but I've been specifically told, by the coders involved, that the movement speed was dropped for the final release. I've not played the final version extensively, so I don't know how often you have framerate 'issues', but it certainly doesn't seem vastly different in the final version to the beta (and there are moments when everything slows down). If I missed someone mentioning the framerate being slow rather than the movement speed, sorry, I just tend to assume when people say 'speed' they're referring to how fast the Marine scoots about, which was definitely changed. No need to at me for honest mistakes, I'm perfectly capable of admitting I can be wrong Stone

I always suspected this, since my 4MB Alpine came from the AvP team (Purple Hampton wrote his name on it ) through Jeff Minter, and I was wondering how they'd run into each other if they weren't working in the same building. Nice to have some confirmation Also cool to hear Goldeneye's running big chunks of AvP in the background! Stone

Uhhh...you mean Battlemorph Stone

Look in his sig...the 'www' button links to his site Stone

Come to JagFest and I'll prove it Stone

Well, first off, the Jag doesn't have any dedicated video RAM at all...unless you're gonna count the scanline's-worth of buffer built into the OP I'd disagree with people alagging off AvP as well...it was designed to be slow, for suspense reasons. It's nothing to do with the engine being craply-written...corner me at a JagFest and I'll show you a couple of betas where it runs at nearly twice the speed of the released game. It is not a slow engine. As for Quake, I still think we should believe iD Stone

With regards numbers, I've got (quick count) 15 Jag programs which I would consider protos. Of those: 2 are homebrewers' projects which were never released 9 are unfinished versions of games that were later released 3 are unfinished versions of games that weren't released 1 is a completed, unreleased game. And I've also got a couple of corrupted Alpine dumps which I've not been able to salvage - need to look through these sometime for surviving text strings and graphics. Not too shabby Stone

Prove it. Please. Show us something you've coded entirely by yourself. Anything. Some people get irritated by other people who constantly claim to be able to do amazing things when they've not even started to learn to code Stone

I think it was about 75-100MHz to run at minimum detail - at least, that was what we looked for when playing across the network at school However, the question's kinda irrelevant as you're comparing apples and oranges...the Jag 'only' runs at around 25MHz but because of the nature of the processors and the way things are set up you can achieve performance well in advance of a 25MHz PC with comparable amounts of RAM and storage space in the kinds of applications it was designed for. Add to that the way the Jag does things (mmmm, multithreading ) and you'll find it ridiculously difficult to make any sensible comparisons as to what's possible or not, right up until someone tries it. But given that iD wrote the game, already had Jag coding experience and opined that it was possible, I'd be inclined to agree with them Stone

tiw: Naturally I respect your opinion, I guess I'm just young and foolish Of course I know about the max lead temps, but I've always found them to be rather conservative for the majority of parts - as long as you're not obviously abusing the component then you'll rarely get a failure, in my experience. Of course, this will vary depending on the parts you're using (I tend to use lots of CMOS which I've found much hardier than TTL, likewise I'm not going to make a rush job of a $50 ADC ) but for the most part I've not found the need to go vastly overboard on precautions unless I'm using expensive parts. On the other hand, this could also partially be down to my being an impoverished student and having to make do with cheap tools Naturally I'm not trying to encourage anyone into slack working practices (Sod's Law states that the very first thing you kill with a static discharge will be expensive...the example being a friend of mine who never had any static problems until he killed a 512MB stick of RAM ), I was just saying if you're going to salvage a couple of capacitors and some cheap DRAM then you can probably substitute a $2k ESD-protected setup for some soldering iron finesse. Stone

For me, PDR probably shares the top slot for racing games with WTR - I really loved it and found it a total blast to play. The last race is nigh-on impossible though... So after a couple of months of failing to complete the final race in time, I traded it for Breakout2000 Stone

The first character of the serial number on all Jags is either K or M. If it's K then it's a K-series Jag...I'm sure you can figure out the rest Each series was made by a different manufacturer (though which was which escapes me atm) and there's a LOT more M-series than K-series. K-series came first. Only real differences are that K-series Jags tend to have slightly more hardware bugs unfixed, and early K-series Jags (the first 2500 or so) were the only ones to be fitted with an internal ADC. Other than that they're all just Jaguars Stone

You're right, it's two 16-bit chips combined to form a 32-bit databus. They do use JEDEC pinouts for the mask-ROMs; I believe the matching EPROM part is a 27C800 (256KB*16bit) so two of them make a 2MB cart. (or you could use two 27C400s for a 1MB cart). 4MB carts can use a pair of 27C160s to achieve 32-bit access; this is what BS and BSG do. HTH Stone

I was thinking '$150...sheeesh! :roll:' until I remembered how much the dollar's worth Either way, I'm pretty sure you could find someone willing to hook you up with a base unit/PSU/controller for not that much...if I still had spares of everything I know I would (though all my stuff is PAL...) Just ask, most of the AA people are a fairly friendly bunch Stone

Ruiner rules! I love this game, it's great fun. Recommended Stone

Me neither I have a couple more left from people who never responded to their 'your order's ready' messages actually, one of these days I should dust them off and get them out to people who want them. Probably only have 5 or so but they're not doing me any good just sitting here... Stone

Not for the Saturn, for the ST-V (arcade version of the Saturn - more powerful, no CD drive, uses carts). Was cheaper than the Saturn version, and it's a damn sight less easy to damage! (nice solid carts ). Only problem is, Treasure thought they'd make it easier for USA/Eur players (who obviously aren't as hardcore as the Japanese ) and make it play with only 2 buttons on those regions instead of 3...so you only get access to 3 weapons, not the full 7 Gonna have to dual-BIOS my ST-V now...but it's still worth it An *excellent* game - as an example, when I played it through the first time to get a feel for it, I checked in the test menu later and found I'd been playing for 2.5 hours and put nearly 60 credits in it Stone

The music does it for me I love this game, simple but properly addictive. Stone