Phaze Zero - Songbird or B&C Differences

[WIZZARD77]

Is there any difference between Songbirds release and B&C's version or are they both the same. I'm going to buy this soon and would like to get the most complete version of the game.

[the.golden.ax]

Good customer service, nice person to deal with VS. grumpy, don't care about your business, may come crushed.

 

I'd go Songbird

 

AX

[ovalbugmann]

Good question, but idk. Someone needs to ask Carl if his is different. I think I have the B&C one. I am leaning towards both companies PZ are the same PZ Demo. Do you want to ask Carl or should I? He is "Songbird" here on AA I believe.

 

I would also like to know if they are the same.

 

 

 

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From mayatari.com:

 

JAGPHZ Phase Zero Test Cart $45. See below

 

JAGPHZ Jaguar Phase Zero Proto/Demo/Test cart $50.

There has been some great reviews of the unfinished game.

Carl at Songbird hopes to release a finished or more complete

version sometime next year. !!!Good Luck Carl!!!!!

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And from: http://songbird-productions.com/phasezero.shtml

 

Phase Zero Demo

 

2MB cartridge

Atari Jaguar

Available now

 

Summary

 

Phase Zero Demo has been properly licensed by Songbird from the original Hyper Image team. This game is incomplete, but a very solid start on what could have been an incredible game.

 

You pilot your combat vehicle on a variety of missions to retrieve lost personnel and take out enemy targets. The speed of this engine is amazing, and the graphics and audio make for an enjoyable game to explore.

 

Other features:

Four or more fully playable levels (additional levels are incomplete)

Incredible 3D engine

Variety of terrain and enemies

Guidance system, shield management system, selectable weapons, and more!

Animated 3D menu loaded with options and background music

 

CF30B1 Phase Zero Demo $59.95

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Edited September 25, 2009 by ovalbugmann

[BuddyBuddies]

I think they are exactly the same, at least that what i though

[BuddyBuddies]

I think they are exactly the same, at least that what i though

I dont think the source code was ever found, so it wasnt finished. I knew a guy who claimed to possibly have the source code,his name was Jamie Bible and he did the game engine for Phase Zero, he was injured in a car accident very badly. I talked to him briefly a few times long ago,he lived iirc in California. I lost all his information, but id did pass it on to Carl before loosing it. I found him while searching for a catbox.

[ovalbugmann]

Interesting, thanks Buddies. Sucks about the source code and the developers car wreck, but maybe Carl got the source code from Jamie Bible since you gave Carl his contact info - hopefully.

 

Well, I can't find my Phaze Zero receipt, so I don't know who I got my one copy from, either B&C or Songbird. My cart has the Songbird logo on it tho.

 

To further complicate, here are two pictures from myatari.com:

 

With Songbird logo(left side, center, of PZ cart):

And without it:

 

Yeah, I think both companies' PZ carts have the same checksums.

Edited September 25, 2009 by ovalbugmann

[ovalbugmann]

I sent carl a PM, so if he responds, I post the answer. If he doesn't I'll send the question to his site email. Or maybe he will chime in here, possibly.

[WIZZARD77]

Thanx for the info. Sorry it took me so long to respond but its opening day of Oktoberfest here in LaCrosse and my friends and I were tapping the golden keg this morning. I'll probably buy from Carl if they are the same. He's great to deal with and only 1 1/2 hours away in Rochester, MN so deliveries are lightning fast.

[ovalbugmann]

Carl did write me back!

 

Here was my question:

 

My question is concerning this quote from Bruce:

 

"Carl at Songbird hopes to release a finished or more complete

Phaze Zero version sometime next year."

 

Could you tell me if the Phaze Zero cart you are selling and the one B&C are selling have the same rom on it?, are they the same(do they have the same checksums)? And have you done any work on the game yet(as Bruce suggested), making your version more complete?

 

And this is Carls' response:

 

As far as I know, we're selling the same game ROM. That message from Bruce is out of date (several years ago); when I first licensed the rights to Phase Zero, the developer thought he could provide source code as well. He never located it, so at this point I have no plans to work on the game. Sorry! It's a very cool engine and the first few levels are a blast; it really deserves to be completed.

[WIZZARD77]

Cool Thanx. Too bad the source is lost but at least we have what we have of the game.

[ovalbugmann]

I have been playing other Jag games, and haven't Played PZ too much. But concerning there only being the first few levels to play on the cart demo -well apparently there is a trick to accessing all the rest of the levels!

 

You can read about it here!:

 

http://jagcube.atari.org/phasezero.html

 

Also there is a big write up about it(I think) in Carl's "Jungle Guide #2" magazine/book.

[quackmore]

I dont think the source code was ever found, so it wasnt finished. I knew a guy who claimed to possibly have the source code,his name was Jamie Bible and he did the game engine for Phase Zero, he was injured in a car accident very badly. I talked to him briefly a few times long ago,he lived iirc in California. I lost all his information, but id did pass it on to Carl before loosing it. I found him while searching for a catbox.

 

I just happened upon this post, and hadn't seen it before now. I did not program the ATARI Jaguar game engine for Phase Zero. I just wanted to clarify that. I was hired by Hyper Image to do the Sega Saturn version since I had experience with developing pixel-aligned height mapping engine (or voxels) on other ATARI system. This was an in-house project that sadly, was cancelled. As far as having any source code for the original Jaguar version, the guys at Hyper Image (GREAT bunch of guys by the way!) gave me a few parting gifts, but I don't recall if it included Phase Zero source code or not. The other assembly language guy there was Otavio. If you can find him, he may help tack it down. Or, if anybody is still following this thread and has hit dead ends, PM me and I'll make setting up my ATARI dev stuff again a priority to see if any of the code made it into my storage.

[PeterG]

I think you would make a bunch of people here very happy if you find anything regarding this project. This is how to bring old posts back to life.

[VladR]

I think you would make a bunch of people here very happy if you find anything regarding this project. This is how to bring old posts back to life.

Yep, that has got to be the one&only valid necrobump I have seen in last few years.

 

Matter of fact, this is probably the only source code to a jag game I am genuinely curious about and would appreciate peeking under the hood

[PeterG]

 

I just happened upon this post, and hadn't seen it before now. I did not program the ATARI Jaguar game engine for Phase Zero. I just wanted to clarify that. I was hired by Hyper Image to do the Sega Saturn version since I had experience with developing pixel-aligned height mapping engine (or voxels) on other ATARI system. This was an in-house project that sadly, was cancelled. As far as having any source code for the original Jaguar version, the guys at Hyper Image (GREAT bunch of guys by the way!) gave me a few parting gifts, but I don't recall if it included Phase Zero source code or not. The other assembly language guy there was Otavio. If you can find him, he may help tack it down. Or, if anybody is still following this thread and has hit dead ends, PM me and I'll make setting up my ATARI dev stuff again a priority to see if any of the code made it into my storage.

 

Btw how far did you make it with the Saturn version?

[quackmore]

Yep, that has got to be the one&only valid necrobump I have seen in last few years.

 

Matter of fact, this is probably the only source code to a jag game I am genuinely curious about and would appreciate peeking under the hood

 

Even if I don't have exactly what you're looking for, I'm certain I have my own version buried deep in the abyss of my archives. For my ATARI Falcon030 version, this was 16-bit pixel depth, 384x240 and horribly slow. I had just given up on making it playable when I met Jeremy at the 1995 E3 and saw Phase Zero, which was very playable. They got speed by lowering the resolution of the height-mapping. I hadn't considered bringing the resolution down for speed because Nova Logic had Comanche (another voxel-based game engine), which looked like it was at a decent resolution.

[+madman]

Matter of fact, this is probably the only source code to a jag game I am genuinely curious about and would appreciate peeking under the hood

Why do you need source code? Just watch YouTube videos.

[VladR]

 

Even if I don't have exactly what you're looking for, I'm certain I have my own version buried deep in the abyss of my archives. For my ATARI Falcon030 version, this was 16-bit pixel depth, 384x240 and horribly slow. I had just given up on making it playable when I met Jeremy at the 1995 E3 and saw Phase Zero, which was very playable. They got speed by lowering the resolution of the height-mapping. I hadn't considered bringing the resolution down for speed because Nova Logic had Comanche (another voxel-based game engine), which looked like it was at a decent resolution.

384x240 on Falcon ? Why ? This looks like on Falcon you only got a chance to create a few first working prototypes ? I presume you didn't get a chance to refactor the code to use the cache fully ? Falcon's architecture moves choking points elsewhere than, say, jag - where you have opportunity (heavily time-consuming, none the less) 3 chips (GPU, DSP, and few things on 68000) that can each compute different section of the pipeline in parallel, while OP & Blitter are busy smashing pixels on the screen.

 

Comanche was a great game, unfortunately, the datadisks increased the resolution of the voxels (plus added reflections), bringing framerate to sub-5 fps levels.

 

Phase zero strikes a very lovely balance between the terrain's resolution and performance. I honestly don't recall any then-current voxel game on PC that would run remotely as fluent as Phase Zero. I, of course, don't count running Comanche on Pentium 100 MHz as a good example

 

Why do you need source code? Just watch YouTube videos.

Every now and then, there's a game that triggers the curiosity in me. I'm particularly interested in how Phase Zero handled one specific pipeline stage, but it's not worth my time to reverse engineer it from the binary.

[quackmore]

384x240 on Falcon ? Why ? This looks like on Falcon you only got a chance to create a few first working prototypes ? I presume you didn't get a chance to refactor the code to use the cache fully ? Falcon's architecture moves choking points elsewhere than, say, jag - where you have opportunity (heavily time-consuming, none the less) 3 chips (GPU, DSP, and few things on 68000) that can each compute different section of the pipeline in parallel, while OP & Blitter are busy smashing pixels on the screen.

 

Comanche was a great game, unfortunately, the datadisks increased the resolution of the voxels (plus added reflections), bringing framerate to sub-5 fps levels.

 

Phase zero strikes a very lovely balance between the terrain's resolution and performance. I honestly don't recall any then-current voxel game on PC that would run remotely as fluent as Phase Zero. I, of course, don't count running Comanche on Pentium 100 MHz as a good example

 

Every now and then, there's a game that triggers the curiosity in me. I'm particularly interested in how Phase Zero handled one specific pipeline stage, but it's not worth my time to reverse engineer it from the binary.

 

 

You're correct. That's what I had, a working prototype. I abandoned it because of the lack of speed. Why 384x240 screen resolution? I probably should have made it clear that this was the screen resolution (low rez RGB overscan). I received my developer Falcon030 in 1992, and did most of my development on it in the early 1990's before most people, and even before the internet was available. So I'm sure I gave up too quickly on having it run at a decent frame rate.

 

Oh, and about Comanche... I also worked at Nova Logic. They set up the developers with very fast PC's. This ensured that the games had the best looking graphics. But, I speculate that many people may have felt that their frame rate problem was that they needed to upgrade their PC--not that the game itself was too taxing for their system. In other words, I don't think it was just those data disks. It looked to me like frame rate was an issue for the average user even for new releases.

 

After having a conversation here, it makes me want to resurrect my Jag and Falcon dev kits and start coding on them again. If I weren't so busy with my current job and project, I would dig everything out right now!

[VladR]

Wow, you worked at NovaLogic ? RESPECT!!! The Comanche experience remains unrivaled for me, to this very day (it's one of those , maybe, 5 games of all games I ever played). I was a huge fan and to this day hold huge respect for Nova Logic. The framerate was OK on base Comanche on 386 DX40, but the datadisks made it almost unplayable (though had significantly higher details, for sure).

 

Do you recall anything about the dev process there ? How the technological decisions were made ? I'm sure the guys had some amazing looking (but 1-fps running) techdemos. Someone must have made the decision about the target details - just curious about how you went on with that process.

 

Did you actually work on the engine there ?

[Songbird]

The Hyper Image guys offered to send me the source code after they found it as part of my license for Phase Zero, but sadly they never recovered it. So I would be very happy to finally get the source code for this.