Felyx Posted February 16, 2012 Share Posted February 16, 2012 I think it can be made on cart using BPEG image compression. The music in the video is from "mosaik", and not it will not be included, music on cartridge will be minimalistic Considering a CD is easier to duplicate, cheaper and offers far more space than a cartridge, what"s about the idea of releasing the game on both media? It could be a minimal version on cartrdige due to lack of memory space on cartidge so players who don't owe a Jag CD can access the game and a CD version which allows you to include music and hopefully better quality for the pictures as a CD offers roughly 100 times more room than cartridges. If I understood correcly, so far all the pictures shown here are from your PC ie before compression. Eveyone is impressed by the Myst like rendering but any idea of how it will look like on a real Jag and especially with a high compression in a purpose of putting everything in few Mo? I don't know what would be the capacity of the cartridge but anyway don't forget Myst came on Jaguar on CD. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gaztee Posted February 17, 2012 Share Posted February 17, 2012 So will this be on display at AC in April?? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mancity Posted February 21, 2012 Share Posted February 21, 2012 Can I please ask, if this comes out on Cartridge, am I right in thinking that I wouldn't need to mod my Jag at all and it would just play like a standard release game? BTW, this looks awesome! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rush6432 Posted February 21, 2012 Share Posted February 21, 2012 (edited) If released on cartridge you shouldnt need to mod the system to play. The necessary tools to encrypt jaguar cartridges and cd's has been around for some time now and can be used on homebrew games. The publishing rights for the jaguar were released into public domain some time ago as well. Edited February 21, 2012 by rush6432 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atari Smeghead Posted February 21, 2012 Share Posted February 21, 2012 An hour? I don't know what you're talking about... took me 2 min 22 sec to get through that video. I must be super-good at this! Seriously, though, this looks really cool! I'm looking forward to seeing more. Cheers, Smeg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Orion_ Posted February 23, 2012 Author Share Posted February 23, 2012 Gaztee > I hope so, I will try to make a preview for AC 2012, not sure if it will be the Jaguar or Falcon version If I don't have any time to work on this, I will show the PC version (I'm making it on PC first for easier beta test) 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Moss Posted February 27, 2012 Share Posted February 27, 2012 Looks really nice, I liked MYST so this will be going on my shopping list when it is released. Considering a CD is easier to duplicate, cheaper and offers far more space than a cartridge, what"s about the idea of releasing the game on both media? It could be a minimal version on cartridge due to lack of memory space on cartidge so players who don't owe a Jag CD can access the game and a CD version which allows you to include music and hopefully better quality for the pictures as a CD offers roughly 100 times more room than cartridges. I agree that would be the ideal solution, although considering that it has taken two years to get this far imagine how long could it take to produce something of the size and complexity of MYST. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jag_Slave Posted February 27, 2012 Share Posted February 27, 2012 Looks really nice, I liked MYST so this will be going on my shopping list when it is released. Considering a CD is easier to duplicate, cheaper and offers far more space than a cartridge, what"s about the idea of releasing the game on both media? It could be a minimal version on cartridge due to lack of memory space on cartidge so players who don't owe a Jag CD can access the game and a CD version which allows you to include music and hopefully better quality for the pictures as a CD offers roughly 100 times more room than cartridges. I agree that would be the ideal solution, although considering that it has taken two years to get this far imagine how long could it take to produce something of the size and complexity of MYST. CD would be good, not for a deeper game- but at least for a couple frames extra between objectives. And cleaner music. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Felyx Posted February 27, 2012 Share Posted February 27, 2012 (edited) Orion already answered me that it was not so simple to compare the sizes of a CD and of a cartridge: the game on cartridge has to be fully loaded in the Jag Ram. Tools like Jiffi and ULS allow easily to put homebrews on CD but sill up to the size of the ram. Orion said that he tried previuously to put together code and Cinepak on a CD and the result was not reliable as the game was often crashing. Putting the musics on CD as an add-on to the game on cartridge seems to be unrealistic too as there is no existing game like that on Jaguar. Iam afraid the game will be only available on cartridge and without music but let see: Orion is experienced on Jaguar programming and can surprise us even more Edited February 27, 2012 by Felyx 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jag_Slave Posted February 27, 2012 Share Posted February 27, 2012 Orion already answered me that it was not so simple to compare the sizes of a CD and of a cartridge: the game on cartridge has to be fully loaded in the Jag Ram. Tools like Jiffi and ULS allow easily to put homebrews on CD but sill up to the size of the ram. Orion said that he tried previuously to put together code and Cinepak on a CD and the result was not reliable as the game was often crashing. Putting the musics on CD as an add-on to the game on cartridge seems to be unrealistic too as there is no existing game like that on Jaguar. Iam afraid the game will be only available on cartridge and without music but let see: Orion is experienced on Jaguar programming and can surprise us even more http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8_uSbJeVdk Yes you can fully load 2mb at a time, But you aren't limited to just strictly that amount. Battlesphere uses 4mb. By loading the info in 2mb sections or tracks on cd, you can have very large games like myst. Not saying he needs to make it a larger game as far as gameplay content, but extra screen shots as you move from one scene to the next would make it seem larger. Just saying it would be very feasible, but I dont care either way- I will still like to buy and play it no matter what he decides to do Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rush6432 Posted February 27, 2012 Share Posted February 27, 2012 (edited) Orion already answered me that it was not so simple to compare the sizes of a CD and of a cartridge: the game on cartridge has to be fully loaded in the Jag Ram. Tools like Jiffi and ULS allow easily to put homebrews on CD but sill up to the size of the ram. Orion said that he tried previuously to put together code and Cinepak on a CD and the result was not reliable as the game was often crashing. Putting the musics on CD as an add-on to the game on cartridge seems to be unrealistic too as there is no existing game like that on Jaguar. Iam afraid the game will be only available on cartridge and without music but let see: Orion is experienced on Jaguar programming and can surprise us even more building a program to encompass all graphics/music/sound and run out of ram is a waste of useable working ram space... this method is fine for small simple games but really cuts into what little system resources you have. If you load JUST CODE to ram and section off a spot for "working ram" you can cycle graphics in and out of ram as needed (pulling from cartridge or cd). Granted there isn't much ram to work with from the start this is a method that works very well and most of the production games if not all i believe use this method. You can however like i said just create a program that runs from ram and section off a space in that binary file for working ram and include all assets (graphics/sound/ect) in the binary file. Most homebrew games follow this method and just use a wrapper to load that game binary file from cartridge to ram and execute it. this is the easiest method to get started but does come at the expense of sacraficing working ram and space for your game. The issue with CD is that there are some restrictions with it oddly enough. 99 tracks is the limit. you can write 99 2mb binary files which could be loaded depending on the code or.... you can just pull graphics from certain tracks. Only issue is that there is no easy cd dev solution. the official dev kit had an emulator that simulated a cd (Hard-drive) and that only worked on the atari falcon i believe... No one has specifically created a method to easily develop for the jag cd and it is quite hit or miss to get the jaguar cd to cooperate. CD audio embedded into cart games or just cd audio playing by itself with sfx has not been done homebrew wise that im aware of. Someone else may be able to chime in on this. The jag cd dev portion has not been ventured through as much as standard jag development by itself has been. Skunkboard however could definatly help in reguards to simulating a cd and streaming data to test cd games in development. I for one think that cd/cart combo games would be awesome.... Edited February 27, 2012 by rush6432 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chilly Willy Posted February 27, 2012 Share Posted February 27, 2012 (edited) If you've ever looked at the source for Doom for the Jaguar, you'll see they compressed much of the data in the wad file. The game has a heap in ram, and when data is needed from the wad file, it checks if it's compressed or not - if it is, enough ram is allocated from the heap to hold the decompressed data, then the data is decompressed from the wad file into the ram. Compressed chunks are indicated by ORing 0x80 with the first character of the name of the chunk in the wad directory. I'm sure many other games do the same. Decompressing data on the fly into ram has LONG been a trick for keeping roms smaller (and thus cheaper) while still giving a large game. Older consoles with weaker CPUs use simple compression with fast decompression times like lz77. The GPU in the Jaguar makes it possible to use heavier compression - Atari made their own version of JPEG call JagPEG... jpeg is extremely slow to decompress on older cpus like the 68000, but the GPU can handle it. There's a version called BPEG that's available for homebrew as part of the public Jaguar devkit. Edited February 27, 2012 by Chilly Willy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Orion_ Posted February 27, 2012 Author Share Posted February 27, 2012 (edited) I did a JagCD game compilation so I know what coding for JagCD is, a real pain. And If I used the CD I could then use much bigger graphics (like 640x480) and cinepak and all that ... BUT I already tried to mix all those awesomes stuff for another project and it ended up with random crashes ... I still don't know why but High Res graphics + jagcd = instable (and not talking about cinepak player ...) So I will stick with Cartridge (also because I never did a cartridge game, and I think it's quite a challenge !) I just posted a PREVIEW of the BETA version of Elansar that I finished this week. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgxDfMh6x1M (sorry for French text, but this is in beta test with french friends) There's still plenty of stuff to polish, plus the jaguar port Edited February 27, 2012 by Orion_ 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JagChris Posted February 27, 2012 Share Posted February 27, 2012 That is really fantastic looking Orion. Nice job! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rush6432 Posted February 27, 2012 Share Posted February 27, 2012 very nice looking! Keep up the good work! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chilly Willy Posted February 27, 2012 Share Posted February 27, 2012 Really awesome! You've captured that "Myst" feeling rather well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rush6432 Posted February 28, 2012 Share Posted February 28, 2012 If you've ever looked at the source for Doom for the Jaguar, you'll see they compressed much of the data in the wad file. The game has a heap in ram, and when data is needed from the wad file, it checks if it's compressed or not - if it is, enough ram is allocated from the heap to hold the decompressed data, then the data is decompressed from the wad file into the ram. Compressed chunks are indicated by ORing 0x80 with the first character of the name of the chunk in the wad directory. I'm sure many other games do the same. Decompressing data on the fly into ram has LONG been a trick for keeping roms smaller (and thus cheaper) while still giving a large game. Older consoles with weaker CPUs use simple compression with fast decompression times like lz77. The GPU in the Jaguar makes it possible to use heavier compression - Atari made their own version of JPEG call JagPEG... jpeg is extremely slow to decompress on older cpus like the 68000, but the GPU can handle it. There's a version called BPEG that's available for homebrew as part of the public Jaguar devkit. check into ICE or lz77 like you said. there are ported over versions of it on the jag that are much better (in my opinion) than bpeg or jagpeg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chilly Willy Posted February 28, 2012 Share Posted February 28, 2012 If you've ever looked at the source for Doom for the Jaguar, you'll see they compressed much of the data in the wad file. The game has a heap in ram, and when data is needed from the wad file, it checks if it's compressed or not - if it is, enough ram is allocated from the heap to hold the decompressed data, then the data is decompressed from the wad file into the ram. Compressed chunks are indicated by ORing 0x80 with the first character of the name of the chunk in the wad directory. I'm sure many other games do the same. Decompressing data on the fly into ram has LONG been a trick for keeping roms smaller (and thus cheaper) while still giving a large game. Older consoles with weaker CPUs use simple compression with fast decompression times like lz77. The GPU in the Jaguar makes it possible to use heavier compression - Atari made their own version of JPEG call JagPEG... jpeg is extremely slow to decompress on older cpus like the 68000, but the GPU can handle it. There's a version called BPEG that's available for homebrew as part of the public Jaguar devkit. check into ICE or lz77 like you said. there are ported over versions of it on the jag that are much better (in my opinion) than bpeg or jagpeg Faster, maybe, but certainly not better compression. Lossless compressors can only do maybe 2:1 compression... 3:1 at the very best. Lossy graphics compression is typically 5:1 to 100:1, depending on how much loss in detail you can stand. Putting a game like this on cart will almost certainly require 10:1 or better compression. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rush6432 Posted February 28, 2012 Share Posted February 28, 2012 Yeah, it does depend on what your going for.. ive been able to compress 150-160kb 320x240 jaguar rgb binary format images down to about 20-25ish kb compressed all said and done with no loss in quality using ICE. i havnt really messed with jagpeg at all. I have messed with bpeg a little bit but the drop in image quality as you lower it does get quite nasty/hazy looking. Again depends on what your going for really. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chilly Willy Posted February 29, 2012 Share Posted February 29, 2012 Yeah, it does depend on what your going for.. ive been able to compress 150-160kb 320x240 jaguar rgb binary format images down to about 20-25ish kb compressed all said and done with no loss in quality using ICE. i havnt really messed with jagpeg at all. I have messed with bpeg a little bit but the drop in image quality as you lower it does get quite nasty/hazy looking. Again depends on what your going for really. Wow - that's really good with ICE. Didn't realize it compressed that well. As you say, it depends on what he's going for - he can try them all out and pick whichever works best for the quality he desires. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Orion_ Posted February 29, 2012 Author Share Posted February 29, 2012 (edited) no lossless compression can beat bpeg on photo quality pictures... ICE can eventually be better on rather simple graphics with solid colors. Just for testing: 320x240 image 16bits RAW: 150K 16bits RAW ICE packed: 81K 24bits BPEG (quality 90): 30K Edited February 29, 2012 by Orion_ 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rush6432 Posted February 29, 2012 Share Posted February 29, 2012 (edited) for photo quality i can see bpeg winning without question in compression size and having decent quality still. Are you using jagtool.exe to convert to .rgb format and then the Atari ST ICE Packer program? I havnt used photo realistic images for the game im working on but have achieved 25-40kb with just standard drawn 320x240 art that is 24bit bmp converted to 16bit rgb jag format (binary) and then compressed with ICE. Obviously the quality and detail of the original image will play a big role in the overall size of the compressed file at the end. I havn't tinkered with Bpeg in a long time, so i may have to toy with it again soon and see what i can come up with. Excellent work by the way. Very nice quality images for the game! Edited February 29, 2012 by rush6432 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
life_is_pleach Posted February 29, 2012 Share Posted February 29, 2012 Wow. The Beta looks fantastic. Hope that the Jag version will be the same. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paolo Posted March 4, 2012 Share Posted March 4, 2012 Awesome, i'd say! Great job! I'm hoping for the quality of the Jag version, too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arkhan Posted March 10, 2012 Share Posted March 10, 2012 A PCE CD version you say? interesting. got any pictures of it for that platform yet? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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