Stone

I use a wooden crate sent me by Randy Femrite (cheers btw) - it's custom made to fit 12 carts nice and snugly and has the Jaguar logo burned on the front Nice work Stone

Well, I already got stiffed by Fred over some CD protos. He was going to send me some stuff but 'copied the wrong CD'. Either way, I got a buggy Quicktime for Windows porn film and a non-functional VCD. Great. Some people go out of their way to make me lose all respect for them, and he's one of them. Bastard. *fulminates* Stone

I understood the switch to be part of the modulator, which would make more sense since it's only going to be important in converting composite video from the pcb to the RF output. Could a US person clear this up? Stone

Unless it's a multi-sync set, or it just has a really sloppy video sync. Can happen, though it happens by chance on cheaper sets and by design on expensive ones There's nothing else that needs doing...you may be lucky in that 60Hz signals aren't letterboxed on your TV. My bedroom one letterboxes which is a right pain when you're trying to see if your image is at the edge of the screen and in the correct proportions Stone

I hate flex-printed cables (Psion5 screen died on me a while back). You can repair them with little bits out the middle of some multi-core wire (peel back the plastic with a sharp knife until you hit copper, apply a little solder, then use SMD tweezers to apply your wire thread to the ends. Then cover the whole thing in Araldite so it'll never bend again Mind you, if you drink as much caffiene as me you'd probably find it easier to just replace the mech Stone

Yes. Grab a pinout of the chip from www.chipdir.org - you'd be using a 27C040 since it uses *almost* the same pinout as a 27C010 /27C1001 (which is the bootrom chip). Plug a socket into your BIOS socket with pins 30 and 31 (A17 and A18 respectively) bent out at 90º so they don't connect (they're grounded on the PCB so you can't plug the chip straight in or you'll only get the first BIOS image working. Solder resistors (4k7 should do) between each of these pins and ground (pin 16) and connect the center pole of two SPDT switches to the pins also. Then connect one side of each switch to ground (pin 16) and the other side to Vcc (pin 32). Call the switch on A17 switch one and that on A18 switch two, then you have: Switch one: off / Switch two: off = BIOS image one Switch one: on/ Switch two: off = BIOS image two Switch one: off / Switch two: on = BIOS image three Switch one: on / Switch two: on = BIOS image four. Or you could use some cunning arrangement with a multi-pole rotary switch (a 2-pole 4-position one would work) or a hex switch if you feel up to it I've done that before Cut the cable off at the other end to the connector and thread it over, then either repair everything with lots of solder and heatshrink tubing or desolder the stubby ends and try again with a shorter lead Mind you, if you were trying to connect the Stop cable to a headphone jack you probably don't deserve to own an Alpine Stone

See Gunstar's reply above, but no. Caves of Fear is widely available if you ask around; as prototypes go, copies of it are EXTREMELY common. Certain other games are much less distributed and I only hope Bruce doesn't start selling copies of these too - while all these copies are infringing of copyright, making a coupla copies for your mates is ENTIRELY different to making 50 and selling them at $30 each. Sad thing is he'll actually get orders. *sigh* While there's still stuff you can't get other than at B&C their standards seem to be slipping, if indeed they were ever as high as I assumed. Sad. Stone

Not to take any particular order: That seems reasonable, given the picture of the SCART cable in the Jag manual with the text 'for France only'. No, there won't be any holes. The top part of the case has a vertical wedge that slips into a matching notch in the lower case: the top case will have a longer wedge in non-RF-conn territories so it's covered over. That's what I figure anyway, since one of my Jags has a slightly snapped-looking tab on the top casing...maybe they just snapped them to fit at the factory? Stone

I'm not sure a 3-chip mod will fit under the shield, but you could use 2 seperate SPDT switches to flick between them to flick between them the same way as with BJL. Easiest would be to use a larger EPROM (like a 27C040) which has a compatible pinout, then pull the 2 extra address lines high with resistors (as with the BJL - pin32 is Vcc = 5V) and switch them directly. As for the bi-color LEDs, I am the 'people' doing it (hehe) and I didn't have any tri-color LEDs lying around, so I didn't use one As for the Stop cable, just remember to put the cable out the back before terminating it if you haven't made the hole right up to the edge of where the two parts of the shell meet. Otherwise you'll kick yourself Looking forward to playing with some of my employer's kit, I'm gonna prototype my EPROM cart and see if it works then burn me some Phase Zero chips Stone

Shareware's a good idea for the BJL releases: as with the older (DOS) shareware one way of preventing piracy is making sure that no copies of the full thing ever leak out. That's where personalisation could come in: by releasing a limited demo and personalising all full copies sold you could easily do well It'd be a nice incentive to buying the game too Stone

I'm sure nobody would mind sacrificing a Memory Track to it, but then you'd need to either encrypt the CD (yeah, right), make a BJL-compatible file of the CD bypass (something I'm sure can be done and am starting to get impatient about cos I nkow I'm not good enough to do it) or make an updated BJL BIOS image containing CD bypass support (very possible). Or someone could form some kinda Borg-oid hybrid of a Memory Track and the Bypass Cart. Or, you could make a hot-swappable cart (prolly could be done, if nothing was going on when you pulled the cart; the Jag wouldn't power-off cos the JagCD would be shorting the CARTIN-A and CARTIN-B pins). OK, I just invent the ideas, it's up to you lot to make them work Stone

SCART is SCART is SCART. The cables work on all TVs that have SCART sockets, the fact that they were once France-only and called Peritel isn't really relevant. If you mean it's a SCART-only Jag (ie no RF modulator at all) then you'll have to get a Jag video cable to plug into the edge connector as Tyrant said. Doesn't matter what kind (Composite/S-Video/SCART/RGB), they'll all work. Personally, I have 2 PAL Jags (one region-switched), both using original Jaguar SCART cables with no problems at all. Stone

I believe Mario Perdue of Breakout 2k offered the rotary controller code to anyone intersted - try mailing him. If he didn't I'm sure he'd be happy to help anyway Stone

They were £9.99 each (about $15?) but not a lot of stores carried them after the first few weeks. Most of their unsold stock gets redistributed to the stores that are managing to shift units via a main distribution centre, so I played a merry game of 'chase the stock' trying to get hold of some of their rarer Jaguar carts and some Lynxes for people in the US. After a while I just gave up; their website is now out of stock. Sorry. Stone

Where'd you get the connector from? I always thought they were custom since they seem to be midway between the IDE and PCI standards (the shorter section the same length as in PCI, the long section the same length as in IDE, iirc). I've been looking for some ever since Cheers, Stone

Mine didn't click, but after I reassembled it I couldn't quite get all the clips to line up, so the plastic bulged alarmingly at the back of the unit. I just left it and it popped back in on its own after a coupla weeks. I found the hardest part was getting the little plastic 'the CD drive is closed' pin through the hole in the casing without snapping it or letting it fall out as you reassemble the unit. And after all my effort (abuot 1hr just opening and shutting it) my JagCD didn't even have a socketed BIOS Such is life Stone

Yes, that's correct; all the commercially released disks I've tested had a very American 'This CD is for the 64-bit Atari Jaguar only' (except Myst, which was different iirc). That's correct. If you play commercially released CDs on a normal CD-audio player you'll just get the first session. If you use the CD Player program in Windows you can play the data too Interestingly, the dev (ie unreleased) CDs I have both use short clips of the T2K music instead of the Jaguar-only announcement. Maybe they just used whatever was to hand Stone

OK, well, maybe there's a reason it was at such a comparably low price. At least I would've had a starting point for repairs tho; definitely easier than scratchbuilding one Stone

Was that eXtreme Rush's one? You sniped me you bastard. *not happy* Stone

If you're in desperate need of a BJL cable I've got enough bits for 2. Mail me. ([email protected]) If not, my BJL FAQ should be up soonish at Starcat's site (if it isn't already). No, not possible. The JagCD format is nothing like the format used for PC CDs (ISO9660) and the CD needs to be in a specific format anyway (you need an audio track first, for some reason, and it just gets more complicated from there). It *is* possible to convert a BJL game to a CD format and play it with P:SE, but you need to spend a fair bit of time on it and you can only have one game per CD (a waste). That's what Carl did with Native. Just use a BJL cable Stone

You may need to give it quite a push in. Mine requires a good deal of force. Try putting the back section loosely into the cart slot first, jiggling it so the little clip on the front fits into the indentation on the Jag's upper surface, then push the back down until it goes clunk. If you find a bit on the back of the JagCD without any give in it you won't put your hand through it when you push. Not in my experience anyway Good luck. Stone

If you're using the edge connector on the back of the jag, then that's correct - the RF output doesn't affect the output when you've got a proper AV cable attached so the switch position doesn't matter. Stone

It's hardly fair to knock everything else just because your product is only one solution. You can either get a set of decent shielded cable hoods which look excellent when made properly (as I used on my cable). Even better from a simplicity opint of view simply buy a 9-way DSUB to 25-way DSUB box, make all the BJL connections between 15-pin male and 25-pin male connectors and use a parallel port extension cable to link it to your PC. If you made the links small enough (ie no huge excess loops) you could probably do without shielding too. A much better solution than a serial loading widget with miles of unnecessary cable which requires a cart nobody can buy at sensible prices. And again, it makes MUCH more sense to just build / buy a cable if you've already bought PSE (as this guy has) rather than spend upwards of $200 for an eBayed BS cart just for the opportunity to use your $50 serial loader. Stone

Don't ever buy a development Jag, you can make one yourself for only a coupla $ more than the cost of the Jaguar. You just need to replace the boot ROM and add a Stubulator cable (10 minutes work with a desoldering pump, 5 mins resoldering the bits, maybe 5 mins cutting a hole in the back for the cable). Costing about $5 maximum. Both. The easiest way is to use the TGA2CRY program to convert your TGA files from Photoshop into Jag-format CRY files, then use the INCBIN command to include them in your program. Simple. If anyone wants me to make them a development Jag BTW I'm more than happy Mail me. Stone

That's odd with the SCART cable - one I bought online turned out to be like that and I sent it back because it didn't look genuine I'll stick with the heavy-duty shielded version anyway, it works much better. Stone