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Stone

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Posts posted by Stone

  1. Posted

    Hey Lars,

     

    Good points :)

     

    Also:

    Sony can't really be counted as original game company as they started with the PSX, so they were not there from the beginning.

    Don't forget the Playstation started off as the SNES CD ;)

     

    Stone

  2. Posted

    However this does not mean that nintendo games have bad graphics, because they focus on great gameplay.  

    The graphics are more than good enough for their purpose, sometimes even very amazing, but the main idea is to focus on gameplay.

    The trouble is, this doesn't go down too well with the mass consumer market...I think this is why the GameCube has lots of titles with a 'cult' following, but there's still not that many consoles sold :(

     

    Stone

  5. Posted

    Have you had those 3 Jaguars netwoked yet Stone (maybe at a show)? Or even 2 with Doom? But owning enough copies for your own network is a must(for an extremist). I know you don't care for Battlesphere, especially at the prices it fetches, but Aircars is dirt cheap now in comparison to the originals, and Doom is pretty cheap...

    Only got one of them quite recently...for nothing! Had AvP with it too :D

     

    Doom I have two copies of (one still shinkwrapped), nothing else quite appeals. I'll get some AirCars when I don't have anything better to spend my cash on ;)

     

    Stone

  6. Posted

    You have a very good start, and the "extremist" packs (and the Alpine board ;) ) prove your heart is in the right place, but you need to get the avast majority of released titles too, and at LEAST 2 Jaguars for networking with of course if you get two copies of Aircars and Battlesphere (or pick any pair of the 3 networkable games with 2 copies each), then, and only then will you be well on the way to BECOMING an extremist. This is where I am at, JaySmith2000 is pretty much the king of extremist right now though... 8)  

     

    So, how much of the regular Jaguar library do you have now? And do you have more than one Jag? ;)

     

    On the hardware side it's currently:

    Three Jags

    One JagCD

    2 Alpines

    One flashcart

    Rotary controller

    Lightgun

    Jaglink

    Memtrack

    Pair of Procontrollers

    All the official hookup cables :ponder:

    and about 15-20 games - I won't buy something unless I think I'll find it fun. I don't have them all here either, so I can't really inventory them very well...I think I have all the JagCDs bar Baldies though.

     

    Anyway, collections should be measured by what's hard to get ;) :D

     

    Stone

  8. Posted

    The mesh shielding will do nothing unless it's grounded at both ends. (if it's not, at certain frequencies it'll most likely make it worse!)

     

    Overall shielding is fine (not per-signal) but you need to ground it properly.

     

    Stone

  9. Posted

    You need a shielded cable. Quick+dirty: wrap several turns of tinfoil around the cable and solder it to GND at both ends. Less ugly: use aftermarket cable braid (metal braid sleeving that slips over the cable) and solder it to GND at both ends. Proper cable: use shielded cable soldered to GND at both ends (spotting a trend here? :D) and use diecast shielded backshells for the connectors.

     

    You're trying to suck 130KB/s down that cable; any interference can give you a bad upload. Colors.jag working is a good sign the pinout works, now you just need to stop RF interference from outside :)

     

    Also, a meter is way too long for an unshielded cable. 4" is more likely to work, but it'd still be hit'n'miss. By contrast, I've made properly-shielded cables that are 2m in length which have worked first time...it makes a HUGE difference.

     

    Hope that helped :)

     

    Stone

  10. Posted

    Not tried them yet, just spent half an hour washing up the remnants of my housemate's curry from 3 days ago and trying not to vomit :lol:

    [incidentally, Jeff M gave me that goat ;D]

     

    Stone

  12. Posted

    Tyrant: it is a software bug. That would explain why it's been fixed by the people who were working with the source ages back :P

     

    They said it was pretty easy, too...I'm pretty certain Doom was finished before the network spec was fully finalised, so it could well be something trivial that makes it fall over so much :)

     

    Stone

  13. Posted

    doom over jaglink just isnt worth playing, after 5 minutes you'll just get a connection failed and then end up throwing your jag at the floor!  :x

    Bit optimistic if you ask me. In our game it failed at the slimebridge in the first mission, and I can complete that mission in under 17 seconds on the PC, so I'd say it was a good way under 5 minutes ;) :D

     

    Stone

  14. Posted

    -pirated copies of official releases (there's quite a few copies of "Primal Rage" floating around out there)

     

    Pirated CD's shouldn't need a bypass as there is little to no protection against copying on the CD's anyway.

     

    they can be a pain to copy but it's not impossible and a copy should work fine without bypass.

    If it's a perfect copy, the above is true. When people just knock them out without proper testing, they may well refuse to boot until you disable the verification checks (which are in part designed to stop badly-copied disks!), at which point they'll most likely mostly run. Of course the problem then is that any small glitches will most likely crash the game at some point...:roll:

     

    Stone

  16. Posted

    I'm sure they used the SU2000 Zone Hunter for testing of the Jaguar VR.  One of these days I'm going to get the guts to plug the Jaguar VR into one of the SU2000's.  I'd just hate to blow it out....

     

    Sounds like me just before I take a soldering iron to anything rare :D

     

    Stone

  17. Posted

    Before you do anything else, you want to check if the output from that encoder is the same style as the encoders in the 2600 controllers - to me that looks like a mouse-style one with its own built-in decoder (spinning slotted wheel interrupts an IR beam).

     

    The kind you want outputs as following:

     

    clockwise:

    0000

    0100

    0110

    0010

    0000

     

    anti-clockwise:

    0000

    0010

    0110

    0100

    0000

     

    Personally I'd be very surprised if you could easily hack that into a working rotary if it doesn't follow the above standard - you'd do better buying a mechanical encoder from somewhere like Jameco or Digi-Key and installing it into the existing knob structure on that stick rather than attempting to convert an incompatible encoder format, IMHO.

     

    Would love to see if you get it working though :)

     

    Stone

  18. Posted

    I guess I'm curious about the process of taking the binary with header/footer and converting it to a track. From what I gather, it seems to only add a couple zeroes in front and pad it out to 1MB if it's shorter than that.

    You might want to have a look at this if you haven't already - it's very simple to make a CD out of a BJL-type program, as the JagCD boot ROM will automatically load the boot track to RAM and run it...all you have to do is put the BJL program as the boot track and it works :D According to the dev manual there's a 64KB maximum for the size of the boot track, but this seems to have been intended for future hardware revisions as I've successfully made CDs of programs over 64kb (notably Native, which is way over ;)).

     

    The other oddity is that the digital signature track seems to have a signature of the TOC as well as the tracks themselves. Which makes me wonder, how can they guarantee that the TOC (since it must be a good guess) will match up what's being burnt?

    The dev manual goes into more detail, but as I understand it the TOC is generated on a 'dummy' layout with blank verification-track-size tracks in it, so when the signature track's been generated the TOC that was always present matches up exactly.

     

    Of course, I could be reading things wrong... :ponder: I suppose you could burn all of your tracks except for the signature and then there would be no guesswork involved... :ponder: :ponder: :ponder:

    That's what I thought they did :)

     

    I think you can guess why I want to know (yes, I'm getting close--and that's all I'm going to say about it for now). :D

    Woo! :D

     

    Stone

  19. Posted

    I could buy it, but why bother?

     

    1) I don't have space for all that stuff

    2) None of it's overly rare anyway, unless you chanced on something valuable in the software pile

    3) Quite a bit of it is half-functional or dead

    4) It's expensive! You could spend wisely on eBay and buy one of each of the systems mentioned for probably about £400, and at current prices you'd not get more than a couple of grand out of reselling everything. Plus that would take ages and be more effort than it's worth.

     

    Basically, it looks like someone's found a warehouse of old stuff and is clearing all the dross out after they sold the gems. No thanks.

     

    Stone

  23. Posted

    Are you doing any modifications to the screens on these? Replacing the CCFL tube with a couple of white LEDs can snip power consumption in half on the standard active-matrix-type LCD screens :)

     

    Stone

  24. Posted

    Greenious: That's 100% irrelevant to what he's asking. That info allows you to change between 50Hz and 60Hz framerates; whether the console is NTSC or PAL is determined at its construction and is fixed. If you have a PAL console then all the fiddling with R140 in the world isn't going to make it PAL.

     

    Just so you know :)

     

    Stone

  25. Posted

    With respect to portable Jaguars, as a modification of the original it's not going to end up smaller than a normal Jaguar - if you'd ever taken one apart you'd see how crammed the PCB is, with very little space unused. You could in theory hacksaw one up and then join up the tracks at the edges (if it's not multilayer, which I belive it may well be), but that's still not going to produce anything particularly small.

     

    As for a redesigned mainboard, maybe on several physical layers (with multiple boards connected together internally), I don't think you'd get it much smaller than it already is, overall.

     

    What could work is a completely rebuilt Jag with a new custom chip replacing Tom, Jerry and the RAM - this could remove the need for so much supporting circuitry and make it possible to end up with something much closer to handheld size. However, this would be an extremely expensive way of doing things, to the extent where only a large company could pull it off. If someone saw a profit in doing it I don't see why it wouldn't work, but considering the low sales volume of the Jag it would be a risk I think few would be prepared to take.

     

    Stone

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