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Feature Requests


SainT

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Please post any feature requests for the Jaguar Game Drive cartridge here. I will consider implementing any technically possible improvements.

 

Open Requests
Spinner control for the menu or numpad support for dpad directions.

Reset back to the menu from within a game.

Auto scroll left and right file names if highlighted and no joypad input after a few seconds.

Keep track of last selected ROM.

ROM test / known good ROM notification on launch.

Launching of ROMs from JagCD unit.

Edited by SainT
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Ah was going to ask about reset back to the menu to avoid having to turn the Jag on and off. Saturn and Dreamcast have that useful feature. I noticed Power Drive last night can reset back to the start Menu at least.

 

Couple of other thoughts from my 3hrs of testing (and hand pain from the pad lol) last night.

 

Auto scroll left and right file names if highlighted and no joypad input after a few seconds

 

How does the flashing work, is it lost on a power off? If not then how about if you hold down a certain button(s) as you power the Jag on, it auto runs the loaded Rom from last use?

 

If the resident Rom is lost on a power off then you could perhaps write a file to the root of the SD which has the file name/path of the last loaded Rom then when the Jag is turned on and certain button(s) held down and the Menu loads, it then auto loads and launches the last loaded Rom

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In no particular order of interest:

 

1. Jag CD support - especially given this does not work through the Jag CD slot

2. Support for use THROUGH Jag CD port. I know i asked for this before in twitter and you said you can run an interrupt based poller or something like that as a fallback, that will load things slower, but will kill CD support. Fine with killing CD support, as long as you have the unit installed. I just do not feel like selling the CD add on because the cart loads CDs off the SD and also hate having to install and uninstall the add on seeing what kind of pain it is to install it 'right' (if you have one, you know what i mean). This way, i will be able to play roms through the cart and cds using the unit. :)

3. In game reset, ability to go back to the JaguarSD menu from a game. At the moment i have to power off/on.

4. Seeing as i am getting red boot screens (and you confirmed this is a bad dumped rom), perhaps some sort of 'rom test' to see that it is indeed a valid rom, if that is even possible?

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1 hour ago, SlangeUG said:

The only “extra” functionality I personally care about is the ability to play Jaguar CD ISOs. No matter if one or all play properly, just being able to play any of the CD games at all would be ginormous. Thanks. 

+ 1 for this. I also do not care if some CD games do not have music or have some graphic errors, i just want play with CD support. For example i am ready to pay 200$ for JagSD who will play only Highlander and nothing more, even without music/sounds, and i waiting for news about this game to purchase JagSD.

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3 hours ago, geodeath said:

4. Seeing as i am getting red boot screens (and you confirmed this is a bad dumped rom), perhaps some sort of 'rom test' to see that it is indeed a valid rom, if that is even possible?

While testing different game roms we did end up using CRC32 checksums so we were all using the same known working  roms. Games were playtested on K and M series PAL/NTSC consoles. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to implement but I can post up the CRC32 list. 

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46 minutes ago, neo_rg said:

While testing different game roms we did end up using CRC32 checksums so we were all using the same known working  roms. Games were playtested on K and M series PAL/NTSC consoles. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to implement but I can post up the CRC32 list. 

I'll be looking into having a message popup just saying "KNOWN GOOD!" or something when the ROM is loaded up, just to confirm it should be working. As we already have the CRC's, may as well use them! :)

 

Oh, and I appreciate people want CD support, there's no need to keep asking. ;)

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3 hours ago, SainT said:

I'll be looking into having a message popup just saying "KNOWN GOOD!" or something when the ROM is loaded up, just to confirm it should be working. As we already have the CRC's, may as well use them! :)

 

Oh, and I appreciate people want CD support, there's no need to keep asking. ;)

Instead of a confirm of a good CRC popping up, I'd rather it only occurred on unknown CRCs. Thought being more often than not the CRC would be good, and the pop up would get annoying quickly. 

 

But this way the user is still warned if it's unknown, and could investigate further on correcting the issue.

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1 hour ago, nick3092 said:

Instead of a confirm of a good CRC popping up, I'd rather it only occurred on unknown CRCs. Thought being more often than not the CRC would be good, and the pop up would get annoying quickly. 

 

But this way the user is still warned if it's unknown, and could investigate further on correcting the issue.

Wouldn't it be easier/better just to do it like some Mame interfaces, which mark them as green/red if it matches/doesn't match CRC instead of something that pops up?

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This may become (mostly) pointless once full access to the SD opens up but could offer an alternative option in some cases while using Rb+ to make a much larger homebrew game while possibly requiring very little or no alteration to the current Rb+ package. Since load times in .ABS form could be ultra-fast (I'm not sure what they currently are but would guess around 5-8 seconds if loading a full 2MB directly to RAM, please correct me if I'm wrong since I have no first-hand experience with it yet) loading another "level" would be similar to that of what you would have seen using a Jaguar CD.

 

The idea is to treat a nested folder as an individual game with ABS files as modules hidden/accessed by save game states upon exit/entry to each one. Each module would clear save game info in case you power off the Jaguar when loaded but saved again when exiting any ABS so it knows which file to load upon software exit call with silent loading in-between (or possibly a different loading icon like data accessing/loading). Loader checks for the number in the saved-game file and then auto-loads that file next to give it a seamless experience upon in-game software exit call. If you want to exit the game completely then it would simple write a flag to exit the autoloader after software reset and kicks the user back out completely.

 

The amount of things you could offer at that point would seemingly be completely limitless, with the exception of being capped at 2MB of RAM of course. There would be a few disadvantages to that model like stored music ROM assets no longer being a thing but overall the amount of freedom gained would quickly overshadow that benefit in most cases I feel.

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On 8/28/2019 at 9:37 PM, leech said:

Wouldn't it be easier/better just to do it like some Mame interfaces, which mark them as green/red if it matches/doesn't match CRC instead of something that pops up?

It takes something around 10 seconds to read the ROM from the memory card, so it would take a while to scan through a large set. But you could have a scan option which would then mark ROMs as good or not. 

 

To be honest, it would be far better to have something along the lines of the smokemonster packs for the jag and have validation / renaming / mrq matching via a script on the PC and then just have a set which works.

Edited by SainT
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On 8/29/2019 at 3:10 AM, Clint Thompson said:

This may become (mostly) pointless once full access to the SD opens up but could offer an alternative option in some cases while using Rb+ to make a much larger homebrew game while possibly requiring very little or no alteration to the current Rb+ package. Since load times in .ABS form could be ultra-fast (I'm not sure what they currently are but would guess around 5-8 seconds if loading a full 2MB directly to RAM, please correct me if I'm wrong since I have no first-hand experience with it yet) loading another "level" would be similar to that of what you would have seen using a Jaguar CD.

 

The idea is to treat a nested folder as an individual game with ABS files as modules hidden/accessed by save game states upon exit/entry to each one. Each module would clear save game info in case you power off the Jaguar when loaded but saved again when exiting any ABS so it knows which file to load upon software exit call with silent loading in-between (or possibly a different loading icon like data accessing/loading). Loader checks for the number in the saved-game file and then auto-loads that file next to give it a seamless experience upon in-game software exit call. If you want to exit the game completely then it would simple write a flag to exit the autoloader after software reset and kicks the user back out completely.

 

The amount of things you could offer at that point would seemingly be completely limitless, with the exception of being capped at 2MB of RAM of course. There would be a few disadvantages to that model like stored music ROM assets no longer being a thing but overall the amount of freedom gained would quickly overshadow that benefit in most cases I feel.

 

There are a couple of options for bigger games. One is the banked memory — we have 16mb available, so you can do 16 carts straight away (bad apple GD for one!).

 

Other than the way to handle level loads will be opening and loading data directly from the memory card. I don’t see any benefit in chaining abs loads externally. Especially as there will be access to the memory card features from RB.

Edited by SainT
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1 hour ago, Austin said:

I'd be interested to know if save states would be possible. Some of the Everdrives (and the Power Pak) have this functionality, but I'm not sure what it would take to get it functioning here (if it's even doable).

No, not possible.

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38 minutes ago, Gummy Bear said:

Rotary support in the menu would be very nice in my opinion. 

Either switchable or auto (a la Rebooteroids).

Oh, interesting. I hadn't thought of auto-switch. But I guess you can assume if L&R are both down, it's rotary.

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1 minute ago, Decoryah said:

Make direction left act as 'Page Down' and direction right as 'Page Up' in menu view. I think that's how it works with most other flashcart solutions too.

Not overly bothered about making it work like other carts. I have my own interface choices which are consistent through the carts I make.

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I don't know how the JagCD implements CDDA mixing, or if the JagSD was planned to support CDDA on CD images? 

 

If it was/does then I can imagine some interesting homebrew/patches if it was explained to Jag Scene exactly how it works?

 

I don't know if you followed the AtariSTe scene but a few years ago Pera Putnik did patches to several STe titles to add "CDDA" (or rather downsampled versions of CDDA) being played instead of the normal soundtrack over STe DMA sound.

 

http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=27444

http://atari.8bitchip.info/SCRSH/cannonf.html

 

I can think of 3 native Jaguar cartrige games where CDDA exists on other platforms : Cannon Fodder, Tempest 2000, Zool 2 and I am sure there are more.

 

If they could be patched to play CDDA tracks instead of music, I can imagine that being cool don't you?

 

I don't know much about the AtariST->Jaguar ports but there are CDDA tracks for ST games on other platforms out there (e.g. Amiga CD32)

 

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=26552

Edited by alexh
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8 hours ago, SainT said:

It takes something around 10 seconds to read the ROM from the SD, so it would take a while to scan through a large set. But you could have a scan option which would then mark ROMs as good or not. 

 

To be honest, it would be far better to have something along the lines of the smokemonster packs for the jag and have validation / renaming / mrq matching via a script on the PC and then just have a set which works.

That's more along the lines I was thinking, a scan option for if you added new ROMs to the set.  But you're right, even on my massively fast PC, the MAME/MESS library takes a long time to scan through everything.

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Are the saves logged somewhere so you can go back to them? I read above that save states are not possible (mid-game pausing/saving and coming back to it) but I mean as in saving high scores. So if you decided to load a ROM say for Tempest 2000, would you load it from the one in your list or once you have previously loaded THAT rom does it save it to where when you reload it the high scores are there still? I'm not all that computer savvy but I guess that would require it to edit the rom itself to keep those high scores in there, or does it save an additional copy of the rom in a folder with the new information and then you'd rand to load that one instead.

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On 8/29/2019 at 4:52 PM, UHATEIT said:

Are the saves logged somewhere so you can go back to them? I read above that save states are not possible (mid-game pausing/saving and coming back to it) but I mean as in saving high scores. So if you decided to load a ROM say for Tempest 2000, would you load it from the one in your list or once you have previously loaded THAT rom does it save it to where when you reload it the high scores are there still? I'm not all that computer savvy but I guess that would require it to edit the rom itself to keep those high scores in there, or does it save an additional copy of the rom in a folder with the new information and then you'd rand to load that one instead.

The EEPROM (save game) is stored in a file on the memory card named the same as the ROM, but with an .E2P extension. You can back these up as you like.

 

I had thought of being able to have multiple save slots and choose when loading a game, but this seems pretty unlikely to be used in all honesty!

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