Stone

Yep, you're right. 56K sucks, region 2 sucks, having all the cool jag stuff / people over there sucks. Btw livinabin, you know Rag Freak in Brighton? My fave shop for a quick spending spree I liked Brighton, I'm stuck out here in the 'countryside' *ironic laugh*. Basically means all the pubs are crap and you have to walk a mile to the station before you can get anywhere good. Yes, my life sucks Still, I have a Jag to play with, I can take out my frustrations on OP code. Stone

Take a look at a Jag pad schematic. It makes things a lot clearer. I reckon you could still do it, but it'd take a fair bit of engineering to do so. I'll take a look sometime and see if I can work something out Taking a second look, if you OR'ed everything (either the button was pressed from the Jamma stick, OR the connected pad, OR both) then it'd probably work. You'd need 3 OR gate chips to do so (4 gates per chip). Think that would work; what I really need to do is construct a breakout box for the Jag pad (pin-to-pin through connector with gaps allowing each line to be monitored). But right now I have WAY too much stuff on my plate (look what happens when I go on holiday for a week! suddenly 4 Jag projects pop up!). Cheers anyway though; sorry if that went over anybody's heads, it's boring when people talk over you Stone

Cheers for that sg Well, looks like a few people are interested; I'll see what I can do. There'll be a small delay while I get my shiznit wired (new MP3 player took a fair bit of the $$$) then I'll see what i can do. As for shells, I don't know if the carts will fit into a standard cart case, since I'll almost certainly be putting sockets on them (to prevent me frying the chips as I solder them in). Look on the bright side; you can't erase the chips with static and you'll be able to buy chipsets of other unreleased stuff (assuming they're ever released, lol). There's not much point in me putting a case on them if I'm going to have to cut most of the front of it off anyway. Walter: yes, it'd be a cart PCB with 4 chips on it. No case planned, no label either (unless you want me to hand-write PZ on it ) Actually, if I use my own design of cart it has a big fuji silkscreened on it, so it'd look cool enough anyway. Watch this space. Stone

quote Still a lot :-) Makes more numerical sense though. quote Not true, from a coder's perspective anyway. Apparent quality is probably preserved (it doesn't *look* different, as long as you pick the compression ratio appropriately) but you wouldn't be able to store anything but gfx and sound with it, since it is a lossy compression format. Lossless compression has to be used to store code; a modern example would be the ZIP or RAR formats; both of which compress data using statistical techniques. A format like MP3 wouldn't be suitable for storing code, since it uses a very complicated algorithm to determine exactly what to throw away from a sound clip to retain apparent quality (based on a study of how the brain perceives sound - a loud sound will overshadow a soft one so the soft one is removed during encoding). Hope that answered whatever question you never got around to asking Stone

Flashback is lovely on the Jag. Got it a coupla days back (thx to JI2 Monkey) - it's a direct port of the Genesis / MD version, with a few slight differences: the title screen features a rotating 3D model of the main guy (forgot his name, still so did he so I'm in good company...lol) and the gfx are all a little spruced up; higher res, and better quality (he's wearing a red T under that jacket now!). It's brilliant if you liked the Genesis one, I can't remember how to do all the puzzles though so it's a little frustrating...for example in the first real puzzle (when you reach the screen with a guard and two of the little drones, and a door) what the hall are you supposed to do? I'm hoping I don't have to trek back to where the holocube was and drop the rock over there...dammit that's harsh! Still, a love/hate game; you'll probably hate the bits later on with the disintegrators, but then I played it on KGEN and you can save anytime My £0.02. Stone

That gfx compression btw Gunstar; the JagPeg code is lossy. The ICE compression routine isn't though...what's used in Native. Disadvantage is that it ties up the DSP (although maybe the code can be ported to the GPU instead?). Way beyond me though, so I've left it a LONG way out of my code for now Stone

Well, you can call me lucky then. It's not exactly the same releasing a full-blown game (with which you obviously care about providing what I'd see as relative luxuries - box, manual etc) given that proto carts are just that; carts. I could mock up a box image and get a couple printed through friends of mine, but obviously there's little point if there's only going to be 4 or so people interested. As for plastic, well, if I can fit a cart in a shell with the PROMs attached I can always rip up some Cybermorphs. Otherwise, who's bothered? Personally I think it's noble of you to even attempt to supply the associated gubbins that came with the original games, but I'm not planning on wasting my time with it in these quantities. As for 'bulk', well, my chip sources give standard electronics discounts - 1+ = $x, 5+ = $(x-y), 10+ = $(x-(2y)) etc etc. Obviously 27C160s aren't the most common of chips (you'd be damn lucky to get deals like that) but I'm not tied to a particular chip type (pretty much just size) so I have some flexibility. Using PROMs helps too; I wondered whether there was a 27C160 equivalent that was OTP but it's probably even more costly, knowing your luck. Well, have fun with the suppliers anyway, give them a good slapping from me if you get the chance Stone

quote: If it makes you feel any better, the Goat Store would love to make Jamma sticks that could be daisy-chained together, but the cost would be astronomical. You would either have to add another JAMMA button for every button (and at $2.00 / button before casing and wiring, this would be a $24.00 build cost alone) or put in a special in-line plug, which would cost around $40-50 addiontial dollars. *sigh* Sorry. Erm...what I thought he meant was to have an HD15 socket ($0.20) on the back with all the keypad lines (can't remember how many...7?)connected to the actual plug used on the JAMMA stick. As you don't have a keypad on the Jamma sticks, it shouldn't be hard to wire up the keypad to your plug (leaving off the d-pad etc connections on the actual Jag pad) - the user would then just plug an original pad into the back of the Jamma stick, use the keypad for whatever, then unplug it again (or just leave it there). Any holes in this idea? Stone

Ooops, in that case my cart port schematic is missing an address line See your point about bankswitching...honestly thought it was limited to 6MB though, thought I saw someone important saying it a while back. I know you can run anything from anywhere, (although I just run everything from RAM) but the original question was whether you could dialup to existing games and play them, which isn't possible without a cart emulator. AFAIK. Argh, drowning in my own ineptitude *screams* Stone

I never said they were expensive for what they were, just too expensive for me Everything's cheaper if you buy in bulk (ok, almost everything) and buying 3 of something (number of interested parties so far) is obviously going to be way more expensive per unit than buying a couple hundred of them. (How many carts were in that display with the Jaguar you did anyway?) Still working on getting my EPROM burner, among other assorted helpful schemes (exporting Lynxes, SCART cables etc) so this won't be happening for a little bit anyway. As for your first comment, it's definitely easy but I never said it was cheap Stone

quote Well, I'd guess this was perpetuated by Atari, who wanted people to do their 'look at the big numbers!' act. As it is though, no carts are 6MB since it'd be such a pain to sort out I'm not even sure if Atari designed cart PCBs to support 6MB games; I know they had a standard design for others. Stone

quote There's the first error; carts can be up to 4MB; 6MB is only possible with bankswitching hardware. Which nobody ever used. You'd have to modify an Alpine to develop 6MB games in full anyway, and you wouldn't have been able to distribute it on Flash carts either, since they're only 4MB. quote The answer is none You spool things into RAM instead. Now, onto marialover's questions: quote Because there's a bug (actually a design flaw) in the Jag which prevents the use of a standard modem to connect to the DSP port. quote Trust me, you wouldn't want to do this. Not only is it (highly) unlikely you could get standard RAM to interface with the Jag (and you could only add 4MB at that), you'd have to include a PROM to hold boot code for the Jag, and before long your cart would look more like an Alpine than a standard cart. Not to mention the sheer cost of having 4MB of (old, to fit the Jaguar cart port spec) RAM AS WELL as the cost of designing and making the modem board (which I've already mentioned isn't possible) you'd be looking at WAY too much money for most people to spend, and you'd instantly have a customer base of 1 or 2. The same purpose is served much better by a BJL Jag and a Net-connected PC, I'm sorry to say (although a Flash cart does even better, it's way rarer). Hope that helped out in some way. Stone

As you said, the Jag runs stuff from cart space and copies chunks to RAM as required. Many (most?) homebrew games run exclusively in RAM, since that way you don't need to burn a cart to play the game. If you need more (2MB - however much your demo ooccupies) then you have to use a cart. As for the DSP port, you could do something similar to the BJL loader, but you'd have to code it to accept the standard serial connection from your modem. And iirc, BSB was saying that the Jag can only transmit over a normal modem (bugs mean it can't receive). So that idea won't work, sadly. Stone

quote Yeah, ASM = assembly language / assembler (not the same thing, but use them interchangably like everyone else ) My advice would be to give it a go, play with a demo (Starcat's examples are very good for this) or something similar, grab a decent 68K manual (there's a great one at http://technoplaza.net and get going. Once you've read and understood the code, make some small mods; add similar things left undone (like putting up/down support in the joypad example, which only supports left/right as supplied). Then work from that basis, adding more and more stuff, displaying more objects, doing gfx effects, (hell, add sound if you're up to it, I did ). There's a lot of helpful people out there who'd be happy to help. Personally I don't know a lot about things that I haven't tried yet (surprise!) but you can always ask me or Starcat if you need help. Stone [ 02-08-2002: Message edited by: Stone ]

quote He has both? I love this guy! *fires up email* Stone

quote Don't use C son, use ASM. ASM is for real men God that grin looks cheesy. Still, learn ASM. You'll get a stupidly large speed increase compared to C, and you'd have to use a Cross Products devkit, the only one which I know of belonging to Gordon Gibson of Sinidev fame. And don't EVER think about running C on the 68k, it's a crap enough processor without bogging it down with an extra interpretation layer. And added to all that, the C compiler blows, by all accounts. And since I can't code C, I chose to learn ASM since it's better supported So...make your choice Stone

Gods, what's with all these monkeys? *screams* You're right though, it was the Monkey on JI2, he was kind enough to sell me those three Looking forward to my package Stone

Nothing lasts for ever - get one while you still can. The JagCD is pretty solidly made, and given you don't smoke (or not near it), don't let pets drool on it etc it'll be fine for a good many years. 2) is more of a real reason, but if you've watched Battlemorph, Vidgrid (one of my personal faves, definitely a 'isn't this cool' to the friends game) and Primal Rage you'd dive at the chance. Personally one of the main reasons I got mine was because I was interested in getting some of the rarer stuff first, then moving on to the commoner things (the correct approach as it turns out...I've only seen 3-4 Rayman copies on eBay since I got mine, ditto for some others). Still, your choice. But I'd say the (imminent) release of ProtSE is likely to do *something* to the market Stone

Ah. I was under the impression that the JagFree code was on the flash cart in the CD and it was being played off CD. Ah well. Cheers for setting that straight. Stone

There were 2 working VR headsets made and 2 empty plastic shells. One headset (the blue one) is owned by Clint Thompson, and has higher resolution and slight bugfixes compared to the other (red) one (that was in the auction). MC3D apparently (from conversations I've had with the owners) fully supports a VR headset (not the same as the VR mode) in which the direction you point the headset in determines the direction the game "looks" in, and the display is streamed to the video display in the helmet. Firing and so on is via a standard joypad, the VR system plugs into the DSP and video ports and occupies the second controller port too. Cool, indeed. Although I can think of more useful collector's items to have...(I'm thinking Alpine). Stone

Don't get a JagCD unless there's a game you REALLY want to play on it (Battlemorph, VidGrid, Highlander maybe and definitely IS2). Just remember you can get 8-10 cart games for it, and there *are* only 13-15 games out on JagCD, so you'd be better served *right now* by buying more cart games. Of course, you'd lose out on the whole point of ProtSE, but hey Not a problem for me...my JagCD cost me £90 (about $130) but that was with 6 games (VidGrid, Battlemorph, Highlander, Hoverstrike, Myst [+ demo] and Blue Lightning). Since then I've got Primal Rage, which is definitely worth it, but other than that there aren't that many games to buy a JagCD for. (remember you'll want a memory track too, I got lucky and got one for $10 but your mileage may vary). And the VLM's pretty too So...go for it if you have the cash, otherwise (ie if you're short on games) then don't. There's quite a few places with units left if you decide to put it off for a while. Stone

I gave AvP a good hour and got bored stiff. I went immediately back to Rayman, and everything was good again And I own HoverStrike on CD...if the cart version is truly worse then I can't believe why they wasted carts on it Stone

Well, your choice. Someone wants my one anyway, so I'm gonna have to make up another for me... finally realised how cool it is Now I just want to play FreeSpace with it...I can pretend it's a Jag game...lol. Stone

Sorry Jess, didn't know about your plight earlier Monkey was selling some games for $5 a while back; mail him and see what he has left. I'd be happy to sell you some stuff, but I don't actually have any bad games (lol). Since I don't get to buy games that often (when I beg my parents enough, when something *really* cheap comes up on eBay etc) I try to pick up the good ones or ones that I've wanted for a while. I only got WMCJ for the TT Anyway, I just bought Flashback, NBA Jam and IWAR off Monkey for $5 each...should be coming soonish...excited Hate to say this Gunstar, but you're still wrong wrong WRONG with Hover strike...quit wasting your time Actually I remember having this conversation before on JI2, so I won't start it again now (wrong, wrong, wrong! wrong...*mutters to self*) Back to crappy games...well...PDR has been quite cheap recently and that's AMAZING! IS1 was cheap, WMCJ was cheap but awful...they were the last three I bought, most of my others are rare or cool: Rayman, AvP, UV, T2K, Doom are the 5 I'd be most proud of, although AvP's shockingly bad I've been meaning to pick up another copy of Doom for a while (got a jaglink, just no linkable games)...anyone got an unboxed version to dispose of? It does mean I'll be able to test linking with my own code when I get my ProtSE though (BJL support on 2 jags...yay!). But I'd rather fix my current project first Still...blathering...need coffee...ok I'll shut up now. Cya, Stone [edit: fixed typos] [ 02-06-2002: Message edited by: Stone ]

Total carnage: how about making one of those phone-joysticks that were released for mobile users to play Snake? You could stick it over the keypad and use a joystick to control gun direction... OK, I just think up the ideas, it's your job to make them work - get to it dammit! Stone [edit: Just saw Jason's post...I thought TRF *was* on CD, someone offered me a copy a while back, and I thought it was being played on JagFree at JF2k1, I could be wrong though. Carl?] [ 02-06-2002: Message edited by: Stone ]