Nuon Game System Talk & Discussion

[eltoozero]

These games?

 

http://minotaurproject.co.uk/Minotaur/games.php

Affirmative, that is the wares I seek.

 

I purchased all of them, but like a jackass didn't back them up (cause who backs up iOS apps?!?).

 

Well I do, now.

 

At least I've got Gridrunner and Five-a-Day on on my day one gen one iPad, so I'm not completely out of luck.

 

And there's a %70 chance they're on some media in a box pulled from an old machine that may have device backups, but I've got too many of those boxes right now to go on a safari.

Edited August 2, 2016 by eltoozero

[doctorclu]

There is not a Nuon technical forum, hardly anyone cares anymore, the only thing that will give this system any additional "news" is if we get this bullshit working.

 

Streammaster has a PCI slot, that's all I'll say.

 

One technical forum I came across was this thread:

http://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=100955&page=all

 

Looks like they were getting fairly serious about trying to dump the Nuon rom for a while.

 

As for the PCI slot... nice!

 

There is not a Nuon technical forum, hardly anyone cares anymore, the only thing that will give this system any additional "news" is if we get this bullshit working.

 

Streammaster has a PCI slot, that's all I'll say.

 

 

[eltoozero]

One technical forum I came across was this thread:

http://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=100955&page=all

 

Looks like they were getting fairly serious about trying to dump the Nuon rom for a while.

 

All the shipped BIOSes have been dumped and disassembled as part of the Nuance emulator project from developer Mike "Riff" Perry who unfortunately passed away and nobody has come along to pick up the torch.

 

Source for Nuance (which also includes the disassembler and dumped NUON BIOSes) is available here at DragonShadow Industries along the left sidebar.

 

If you have a login for bannister.org (I'm lazy), then feel free to drop that bit of info on the thread.

[doctorclu]

I will pass that sometime in the near future.

 

Speaking of the awesome people at DragonShadow, we got a gift from them recently: The Yaroze code wrapper for the Nuon.

---------------

Doctor Clu (DC):
... So what I wanted to ask tonight is about Yaroze. Sounds like there is a extensive portable library, and you were all working on a system that would translate things easier during the porting process to the Nuon?

I was wondering where the Yaroze library is, and how to go about porting them?

Scott Cartier (SC):
Greetings!

I've kind of disengaged from the community. Glad to know there are still folks out there interested in Nuon.

The Yaroze-to-Nuon library was something I developed. It's mostly a wrapper for the Yaroze library function calls and thus requires access to the source code for the Yaroze project. It's far from a plug-and-play thing. While you might get something running quickly, tuning it for performance takes a lot of under-the-hood debugging. I had to pull so many tricks to get Invs working satisfactorily!

DC:
Is there any chance I could play with the wrapper, and is the Yaroze source code readily available?

SC:
Sure. I'll need to dig out the code. For the games, you'll need to track down their source separately.

DC:
I appreciate that! Mind if I share that on the Nuon-Dome archives?

SC:
Please do. I'd be tickled if anyone did anything with it.

 

yarlib.c.zip

[eltoozero]

Sup to anyone following along.

 

I'm happy to announce there will be information provided during SCRGE on Aug 20 regarding T3K rotary control.

 

Pray to the llama.

[doctorclu]

That is just amazing. Can't wait!

[NowThereAreNoLimits]

Hey guys! I posted here recently when I was selling my Nuon collection. Turns out, I DO have The Next Tetris! Found it while going through more games in my collection.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/122076924153 - THE NEXT TETRIS

http://www.ebay.com/itm/122076881143- TEMPEST 3000

I've listed it along with a Tempest 3000 I still had. If you interested check it out!

[doctorclu]

Annnndd bought! I hear it is not the great a game but I can't wait to have my American Nuon game collection complete.

[doctorclu]

Hey I'm thinking of getting a N505 from Germany. I know these are PAL units so just a few questions:

 

1) How hard is installing controller ports if you have a N501 as a donor?

 

2) How many of the commercial and home brew games work?

[Thorsten Günther]

Hey I'm thinking of getting a N505 from Germany. I know these are PAL units so just a few questions:

 

1) How hard is installing controller ports if you have a N501 as a donor?

 

2) How many of the commercial and home brew games work?

 

I recently cheaply acquired a 505 and would like to get a defective 501's front glacis including the controller ports, too. And controllers; didn't test mine yet due to lack of controllers.

 

IIRC I have been told everything runs fine by Urs aka QLvsJaguar from Switzerland who has a 504 (which is basically a 505 model, but with the controller ports, which was exclusively sold in Switzerland and therefore is incredibly rare). After all, these are the last models produced, and they feature the Aries3 chipset.

 

That they are PAL shouldn't be too much of an issue if you have an RGB capable monitor (e.g. an old SC1224 or Commodore monitor, or a Mitsubishi EUM-xx91 model), TV set or one of those nifty converter boxes from SCART to HDMI, in fact the picture should be better than that of a 501.

[doctorclu]

 

That they are PAL shouldn't be too much of an issue if you have an RGB capable monitor (e.g. an old SC1224 or Commodore monitor, or a Mitsubishi EUM-xx91 model), TV set or one of those nifty converter boxes from SCART to HDMI, in fact the picture should be better than that of a 501.

 

Sounds like there could be some issues getting it to display. I know that power wise most devices will run at 110 or 220 v. Would be a shame to pick one up and have it shipped all the way to the states only to have it go poof!

[doctorclu]

Looking for some help on loading Next Tetris.

 

I see looking at the file directory on the disc that "TNT" files are on the disc. So how do you get the game to load?

It has the Toshiba sampler stuff, gives clips of games, but Tetris is not listed.

Any help would be appreciated.

[doctorclu]

Looks like there is a game menu...

 

 

How do you get there?

[doctorclu]

So my story tonight was finally getting my mittens on Next Tertris which has been a 15 year journey.

 

I originally bought a N2000, loved it, first DVD player.

Then I ran across someone that was selling a Toshiba SD2300. Got that, was able to play Iron Solider 3 better on that. Problem was, the previous owner never sent for their copy of Next Tetris and the time had already expired.

 

I bought a copy of Tetris and IS3 bundled, which got lost in the mail. That was around 2002. (I made the postal carrier pay for the lost package, but not the same...)

 

14 years later...

 

.. bought copy of Next Tetris. This time it makes it in the mail just fine. Get home, pop it in, and I can't find the way to start the game. This was quite distressing and I managed to contain myself from a complete meltdown.

 

6 hours later...

 

First I made a backup of the Next Tetris. It is a rare disc afterall. The Toshiba SD2300 works fine with DVD-Rs. Just doesn't talk to CD-Rs. Backup went fine. Played as good as the original. And what was crazy, on the SD2300 and N501 I have both worked the same way. I could access DVD, but not game mode.

 

I played with ways of making discs that would focus on the game mode, but produced coasters.

 

Then I realized that there was one thing I had not tried: updating the firmware.

 

Some five coasters later of DVD-R and CD-R (remember, CD-R does not work with the Toshiba SD2300... someday I'll remember that too...) playing with PC Joliet, DVD UDF and DVD Video, I finally got a DVD-R working in DVD UDF format to work:

 

(If you don't have the means to make a disc image but can burn an existing disc image, I have attached the zipped disc image I used tonight. It worked for me, but, well, use at your own risk)

 

When I put the disc in it saw it in game mode, and then you get screens like these:

 

After that, the SD2300 spit the disc out, and you're done. Takes a few minutes at most.

 

After that I put the TOSHIBA SAMPLER DISC (Otherwise known as "Next Tetris") back in. After all these years my Toshiba SD2300 was complete with the sampler disc.

 

Before the firmware update all you saw at the main menu was Nuon at the top, "Clips" which showed video clips of games, "About Nuon" the video you saw at startup, and "Zuma Video".

 

After the upgrade, a red "TOSHIBA" shows up in the lower left hand corner, and you see many more options:

 

 

So now you can select the game menu with the demo versions of Merlin Racing, Tempest 3000, and full version of Next Tetris (compliments of Toshiba!) or from the main menu you can select Next Tetris from there.

 

Was it worth what I paid for it? I actually like the Nuon, so sure, it was. I payed about as much as a home brew game these days, so wasn't as much a shock. And Next Tetris is a solid game of Tetris. Has a twist where colors seem to be attracted to like colors and that can really mess with you. But fun!

 

Anyone who hasn't played Next Tetris but would like to get more details about the game and game play, just write me here on Atariage.

SD2300 Firmware Update.zip

Edited August 12, 2016 by doctorclu

[nicolaspersijn]

Woooo! This is exciting! Big things coming for NUON. Soon....

[doctorclu]

Three more days!!

[doctorclu]

One more day!

[doctorclu]

Excited about the official release of the spinner controller at SCRGE yesterday. Photos and possibly videos would be awesome.

Edited August 21, 2016 by doctorclu

[eltoozero]

The key is putting controller in "CONFIG UPPER4" mode by setting MODE_A to 8.25k and MODE_B to 1.82k, then setting the "UPPER4" bits 5,6,7,8 to low, high, low, high, which produces a properties value of "1000" in hex as seen by the controller dump program.

 

 

I'm completely beat from SCRGE yesterday and I've got another show today. Follow along on Periscope today @eltoozero and I'll get more details posted later on!

[eltoozero]

Legendary Spinner Input for Tempest 3000 on Nuon finally unlocked after 15 years off the market.

Sometime in 2015 I got my hands on an Atari ST, having been previously entranced with Gridrunner and Llamatron (when it was available on iOS) I decided to boot up Llamatron 2112, the familiar shareware screen spoke to me deeply.

I did a little digging, and hey, this Jeff Minter guy has been making really funky really playable games for as long as I've been alive, and I'd only scratched the surface...he did the NEON visualizer on Xbox 360 which was the latest in a long line of "music synths"

Now I love me some electropaint and bought an SGI Indy just to see it on real hardware, so I knew I was onto something here.

I do a lot of goodwill shopping and soon after learning about YaK's association with obscure systems like Konix Multi-System and Nuon, I found a Toshiba SD-2300 for $15.

After enjoying VLM on the Nuon for a bit I began my search for a controller to play some T3K, then immediately gave up when I saw what ridiculous prices they were (are) going for on eBay.

I then stumbled upon a thread and some tidbits on Nuon-dome.com implying that there was rotary control programmed into T3K, YaK said so himself, and there were little hints about the track to follow. The thread was being helmed by a nice fellow, Nick Persijn.

Nick is a Jaguar fan who builds and sells rotary controllers for Tempest 2000 on the Atari Jaguar, a game similarly "crippled" when played without "proper" spinner control.

It looked like there was some reasonable progress on the project but no results, so I reached out to Nick to see if I might help.

Nick gratefully accepted my offer and indeed sent me a treasure trove of information about a proprietary chip inside the Nuon controllers called "Polyface". Nick also supplied me with four, new, extremely rare, Logitech "Brumby" controllers for the Nuon which he had been stockpiling.

I had to travel for work but managed to locate a Samsung N501, which is needed as the Toshiba doesn't boot homebrew.

Upon receiving the gifts from Nick and finally enjoying a round of T3K, my brother Chris and I pulled it apart and saw the "beast" herself, the Polyface1.

By reviewing the spec document we were able to suss out the pinout and luckily we had access to a controller "dump" program which displays the properties of connected controllers.

Of course the supplied dump program distributed as part of a "collection" of Nuon apps on a disc didn't work, even after re-burning the ISO several times.

The controller dump code is part of the SDK floating around, so, downloaded the SDK, compiled and burned a fresh copy which actually worked!

The Polyface is an interesting chip, it handshakes with the Nuon console and exposes various "features" on the controller to the console, managed by drivers in the Nuon system BIOS.

The "features" on the particular controller type are determined by a pair of "mode resistors", there are main modes and config modes; the config modes tell the chip to read a bitmask from 8 digital input pins.

There are pins to connect the rotary per the spec document, but we determined there was a hidden ground plane under the chip grounding the quad input pins, meaning we needed to lift pins...

That was the first major hurdle but not outside our collective capabilities, we busted out the stereo microscope and my Dad re-worked the pins to lift them off the ground plane and hook them up to flying leads for testing.

Luckily the mode resistors were on pads we could easily bypass and re-locate on our test stand.

After getting past a pull down resistor built into the chip we got the encoder talking to the dump program, this was a watershed moment in the project we documented and shared with interested parties.

Unfortunately I got tied up with a lot more work but the whole thing had been floating in the back of my head for a year. When SCRGE dates were announced I decided to book a booth and make it a priority to make or break the rotary by then.

In the meantime we closed down our spacious 2000sqft warehouse and put the contents into a 200sqft storage, but we dug out the needed gear and got (back) to work.

We got our bearings, made sure everything was still in a known state and determined our next steps, test all the main modes, see what crops up.

When we exhausted the main modes that meant we needed to blow through the config modes blind.

Work intervened again and we had long blocks with no access to our equipment; staring at the SDK code determined that we were looking for a properties value with an odd number in the thousandths place...signifying the presence of the encoder in the controller to the system BIOS.

With that new info in hand and with new skills on our toolbelt gained in the last year we lifted more pins and got nothing, no-go, zero.

After doing some probing we decided to work backwards and return to stock config to ensure there wasn't something we missed.

We pulled out the hot-air station and ripped the chip off the board, exposing the ground plane and a pull-up trace going to the highest D7 config bit.

More good info, we took pictures, dropped the chip back on and verified we were back at square one. Still alive.

New strategy, bending the pins is getting tricky because we're currently with 12 total pins lifted and tacked on magnet wire, so we shift gears and decide to cut traces from the ground plane under the chip to isolate the pins.

Off comes the chip, traces are cut, chip restored.

Square one, again.

Had a notion that we could speed up the process by adding a button to simulate a plug cycle, that worked!

Work forward, start testing modes, got some response and some that would "lock up" the port until the system was rebooted, nothing making much sense on the properties field.

Re-group, check a couple things, oh, we're in CONFIG mode, not UPPER4 mode!

Switch the mode resistors appropriately, run through again, ok, properties making a lot more sense now, 800, 808, 1000!, 100f!, 300f!

Getting excited now, we boot into T3K with 1000 loaded up and boom, the ship wiggled!

I had noticed before the dump program would increment reliably but had difficulty decrementing, some troubleshooting revealed we had the encoder mis-wired and correcting that with a positive common lead to a much more reliable twiddling of encoder bits.

But the ship is so slow!

Turns out I bought 12 pulses per rotation and 24 PPR encoders, pretty low for this purpose.

Lucky for us our Dad had an HP Optical Encoder with 360 PPR and we confirmed the pinout, dropped it into the circuit and wow what a difference!

At this point the proof is complete, the controller works and is playable.

If we can we're going to build an enclosure in time for SCRGE.

All Electronics has a nice enclosure that will do the trick, grabbed some arcade buttons and re-configuring the test stand should be a simple process and we have a fully playable controller ready for the show.

Yea right.

So the encoder didn't have a mounting nut, and the barrel of the shaft doesn't match the other rotaries I have with hardware, luckily some scraping around found that an coax retainer nut that actually threaded on.

Edited August 22, 2016 by eltoozero

[doctorclu]

I'm unliking that 20 times so I can like it twenty times.

 

Great news! Please share some videos and pictures when you get a chance.

 

So far I have one logitech controller, but I think I'll want to spring for a retrofit.

 

Does this only work for Tempest 3000 (because of special coding) or will this work with Ballistic?

Edited August 21, 2016 by doctorclu

[doctorclu]

If we can we're going to build an enclosure in time for SCRGE.

 

All Electronics has a nice enclosure that will do the trick, grabbed some arcade buttons and re-configuring the test stand should be a simple process and we have a fully playable controller ready for the show.

 

Yea right.

 

So the encoder didn't have a mounting nut, and the barrel of the shaft doesn't match the other rotaries I have with hardware, luckily some scraping around found that an coax retainer nut that actually threaded on.

 

The prototype picture you show with it all laid out and wires everywhere looks like .. the typical prototype.

 

So if I read the above you are kinda ready for SCRGE. Sounds like it works but not to the stage you were hoping, which is typical for anyone on a timeline.

[eltoozero]

Didn't turn out terrible:

[doctorclu]

Thought the rotary calibration menu was also fascinating...

 

[+Charlie Cat]

 

 

This thread is about the Nuon game systems, the spiritual successor to the Atari Jaguar.

 

So all of you who have or are looking to the get the Samsung N2000, the Toshiba SD2300, the Samsung N501, N504, N591 and all the other variants, this thread is for you.

 

I'm going to post my thoughts on the Nuon, and encourage others to do the same!

 

Well this certainly looks interesting.. I'm not very familiar of them, but I would like to know more as I go along.!

 

Anthony...