Does Jaguar have 3d geometry ? 3D Graphic GPU?

[Lost Dragon]

On 6/29/2020 at 5:28 AM, Agent X said:

 

I hadn't seen that review (likely because I'm in the US), but that seems extremely harsh. I'd say that the Jaguar version is of NBA Jam Tournament Edition is the best home version of that game. (For reasons why, see this post that I wrote here many years ago comparing it to the PlayStation version.)

 

Heck, I'd even take it a step further, and say that outside of the arcades, it might even be the best overall game in the entire NBA Jam series until EA's revival a few years ago.

 

The coders personal view point on it:

 

 

The Jag version just blows away all the other cart versions
and IMNSHO is as good as any other home version including the PSX (there
are some trade-offs where the PSX version is better and some where the
Jag version is better but they are very comparable).  
adisak pochanayon - Programmer @ High Voltage Software
WMCJ / NBA JAM TE -- you'd think I'd know how to play basketball

[Lost Dragon]

On 6/29/2020 at 9:53 PM, JagChris said:

Can you look in the credits of the PlayStation and or Saturn version of NBA Jam and see how big the teams were that ported them? Because the Jaguar only had Adisack coding and Eric Nofsinger on sound/music I do believe. 

 

I'm just curious.

 

'That was the project from HELL for me. 1 Programmer and 4 months to port 400,000 lines of assembler. I still have no idea to this day how I was porting 3,000 lines of production quality assembler for 4 months straight.'

 

-Adisak Pochanayon

 

I averaged over 2,000 lines of assembler per
day (debugged final code!) when I wrote NBA JAM TE on the Jaguar.  And
my co-worker Keith Enge was coding over 3,000 lines a day on the port
of Open Ice we are finishing for Win95.  900 lines a day is for wimps!
(Just kidding but I find it really hard to believe it when I see industry
statistics like 10-50 lines of debugged code per day per person when
people I work with including myself regularly write 20 times that much
for the sustained period of an entire project).

adisak pochanayon - Programmer @ High Voltage Software
  Lead Programmer - White Men Can't Jump Basketball / NBA JAM TE (jaguar)
  Lead Programmer - Williams/Midway NBA HangTime for Win 95
  Win95 Tech Prg  - Williams/Midway NHL OpenIce for Win 95

[Lost Dragon]

On 6/27/2020 at 9:28 PM, JagChris said:

This is a digression from the main topic, however their tools, however you feel about the VERY subjective reviews of their games( I believe one magazine rated NBA jam worse than the SNES version). If Atari had paid attention to what HVS was trying to tell them they could have had these tools and gotten them into the hands of designers more to your liking.

 

Though the subject is about 3D on the Jag.

When you talk of their tools, are you referring to this? 

 

 

First of all, Atari has had a GNU C compiler for the 68000 for quite
some time.  It's not that hard to do.  However, there really aren't any
useable libraries (memory manager [malloc/free], sprite routines, etc)
provided so you must write these yourself.

     There is a new GNU C (not C++) compiler for the RISC chips.  It has
a few serious bugs and quirks and since it is unaware of the RISC cache
limitations, it is worthless without a lot of work.  However, I have
been able to get up an overlay manager for the C compiler and the
compiled code running through the manager in C is about 3-4 times faster
than highly optimized 68000 assembly (plus easier to write!).  When
I get the RISC libraries cleaned up (Atari's libs have a couple bugs such as
((long int)-1)*((long int)1)==-2 !!!), I plan on doing quite a bit of future
work in C on the RISC chips which will be a major boost to development
speed and probably speed up the overall projects (because I will no longer
have to rely on the 68K for anything when I can do it faster and easier in
C on the RISC CPU's).

adisak pochanayon -- programmer for WMCJ (available any day now)

 

 

Or this? 

 

 

You can store things compressed in RAM and decompress them on the fly.
This can give a 3 to 4 times increase in number of frames (with fast lossless
decompression).  Lossy compression would give more frames but is so slow it
would be hard to use on the fly.  Atari provides a compression package
called LZJAG free of charge to all developers which provides decent
compression and decent speed.  At High Voltage Software we use a much
better compression algorithm I developed called SLZ (prounounced "sleaze").
It always gets better lossless compression than LZJAG (sometimes by a
factor of two!) and decompression is considerably faster not to mention
it has the capability to remap palettes on sprites and other features.

   Since Keith (TRF programmer) is using SLZ to compress sprites, you can
be assured that there will be more than 2 MB of sprite data.

adisak

 

 

All of the above? 

 

Saying these tools is a little vague to try and get an idea over what tools HVS had in their possession that would of seen the kind of Triple A games the platform needed, if only Atari had used them. 

 

The latter post came from a discussion about Thea Realm Fighters, a title which would not of been what the Jaguar needed, it needed Mortal Kombat 3,not yet more M. K Clones. 

Edited July 1, 2020 by Lost Dragon

[Lost Dragon]

On 6/20/2020 at 6:09 AM, JagChris said:

In fairness to Adisak he never actually said that he stopped using the 68k but he did say that he used the GPU and DSP together. It was my assumption that he used Corley s techniques. However Scott Corley did say that he eliminated the 68k McGroarity insinuated that he used it from Ruiner onward. But Scott never clarified when exactly he started using it. It would be interesting to check Ruiner and vidgrid and see if how much 68k were used in those.

I can find him saying this :

 

 

 

 

I use STOP when I know the bandwidth is going to be
clobbered by something like a massive render cycle that benefits from
burst mode accesses on the custom chips.  Then I simply send an interrupt
to the 68K to restart it.  You get about a 5-10% speed increase in
certain operations by killing the 68K and the interrupt processing
continues normally even while the processor is halted.

    A "NOP" loop is an incredibly foolish waste of a processor because
the instruction fetches drain bandwidth and nothing is done.  STOP
is much better.

    As for the memory "chunk", there is none specifically.  The Jag
processors share memory globally and have access to RAM, ROM, and
internal cache memory of themselves and other processors.  Access
times may vary from cpu to cpu but there is only one overall address
space.

adisak -- jaguar programmer for WMCJ

 

But he doesn't specify what commercial titles he used it on. 

 

 

[agradeneu]

1 hour ago, Lost Dragon said:

It's completely irrelevant what i personally think of any HVS title on the Jaguar (i am not a fan of basketball games, period) as it was the commercial games press, not I they needed to convince. 

 

The tools themselves aren't the sole issue either. 

 

It's the belief of the coders Vs that of the press. 

 

Take WMCJ as a prime example. 

 

The viewpoint from HVS:

 

 

The game is looking really good right now.  I have optimized and
optimized the game everywhere and right now it runs at about 15 fps
at a resolution of 320x220.  However, this could be faster if I didn't
need to unpack all the character animations on the fly but since there
are 12-15 Megabytes of sprite frames, I need to keep them compressed
and I unpack them immediately before they are displayed.  This amounts
to megabytes of compressed data being slung around which obviously
requires some additional work

    However, the game looks very good and has a very smooth feel to it
with the AI camera tracking the characters and all their moves.  The
entire zooming thing is amazingly non-annoying (I've played games with
continuously moving cameras and most tend to make you a bit dizzy or
simply detract from your ability to control the game).  Finally, I
have been spending a lot of time fine-tuning gameplay and paying
attention to little details (such as the the rim actually bending when
the ball bounces off of it).

    Anyhow, back to work.... gotta get this done soon.

adisak 

 

 

 

And:

 

A lot of Jag DOOM is in C.  It is far from optimized.  WMCJ actually

renders more than twice as many pixels per second than DOOM and I would
have gotten WMCJ to be faster if I would have had time to move the
decompression of sprites from the GPU to the DSP.  The reason I say twice
as many is that they are about the same frame rate while I have a resolution
of 320x220 (higher res in PAL) and they use 160x180.  ID is very good
and they made an excellent Jaguar game but they ported it over from
a heavy "C" base and didn't optimize much in assembly.  The theoretical
texture mapping pixel limit is around 4 MPixels/sec.

adisak

 

And :

 

 

 

     iD wrote their own sound code so they could run tasks in the DSP.
The Atari sound code fairly well takes over the DSP.  Plus the Atari
sound codes is a major drain on memory bandwidth.  The music/sound
driver I wrote for WMCJ and will use in NBAJ-TE uses 4:1 ADPCM compression
and is over 30 times more bandwidth efficient than Atari's sound code
(on average I do 1-memory access compared to Atari's code's 32 accesses
to play back a sample at 1/2 the max sample rate which is about standard
sample rates).  I noticed about a 15% improvement in my frame rate when
I dumped their sound code for mine and an additional 10-15% improvement
because I didn't have to split objects to let the DSP grab the bus more
often.

adisak

 

 

 

So we see the coder feeling confident in it, it's been optimized, running at a solid frame rate, decent resolution, camera system works well, everything looks good, runs smoothly, out does Jag Doom in some areas.. 

 

And he points out both he and Doom coders wrote their own sound code, rather than using Atari's own.. 

 

Come review... 

 

EGM :flag up blocky graphics, a confusing camera perspective, poor animation.. 

 

GamePro:bad graohics

 

Next Generation :occasional erratic camera movements 

 

ST Format :Gloomy colour scheme, players which are hard to distinguish between. 

 

Even if the game had achieved a faster frame rate, the commercial critics comments would still of applied. 

 

Maybe Atari weren't the only ones who needed to start listening, before they started talking.. 

 

Jaguar Doom to this day held up as a flagship Jaguar title, WMCJ is at the complete opposite end of the Spectrum. 

 

Adisak appeared to believe the camera system and graphics in general were above adequate, reviewers felt they needed improving on. 

 

 

12 Megabytes appear like a big waste of data considering how "Meh" the sprites look and animate. Probably they are 16 bit but ugh....the artwork is so uneven.

His remarks about Doom seem quite a stretch, compared to WMCJ it renders some rather complex pseudo 3D world with many objects, also it runs at 20 FPS on NTSC not 15?

With a little more refinement the game could have been really decent, it is not another 16 bit port, but an exclusive and appearently the programmer put some hard work into it to use some of the systems advanced capabilities. Back in the 90s, I was quite hopeful about this game, until I read the reviews. ?

 

Edit: So it looks like the game does some impressive things techically unfortunality it does not translate to players enjoyment.

 

Edited July 1, 2020 by agradeneu

[Lost Dragon]

7 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

12 Megabytes appear like a big waste of data considering how "Meh" the sprites look and animate. Probably they are 16 bit but ugh....the artwork is so uneven.

His remarks about Doom seem quite a stretch, compared to WMCJ it renders some rather complex pseudo 3D world with many objects, also it runs at 20 FPS on NTSC not 15?

With a little more refinement the game could have been really decent, it is not another 16 bit port, but an exclusive and appearently the programmer put some hard work into it to use some of the systems advanced capabilities. Back in the 90s, I was quite hopeful about this game, until I read the reviews. ?

 

Edit: So it looks like the game does some impressive things techically unfortunality it does not translate to players enjoyment.

 

I've put forward  the Adisak quotes to try and give some examples of the tools HVS software had at their disposal (and give a direct quote of Adisak talking about the STOP tech stuff and what level of performance boost it gave), but the technical talk is way over my levels of understanding. 

 

I just find it an interesting point of discussion that the Doom development team who  wrote their own audio code, produced a game with no in-game music and which in ran in the machines lowest resolution mode, yet has cemented itself in history as one of the best conversions of Doom and a flagship title, loved by press and gamer alike. 

 

Giving Jaguar tools far better development tools a lot earlier on would have been a godsend for all, but not a silver bullet for developing games the majority would enjoy. 

 

When you have a case as it appears here, where Adisak believed the camera system simply worked, yet general consensus appears to be it was flawed, what's the answer? 

 

 

I will try and see if I can find how he viewed criticism of the game then or in the years since. 

[Lost Dragon]

On 6/29/2020 at 5:37 AM, JagChris said:

Jenovi did an analysis of all of them you might find interesting.

 

 

Adisak himself commenting:

 

 

Adisak L. Pochanayon

    The PSX version of NBAJ TE is not "better" than the arcade version...
it is "different".  For people who enjoy the arcade version, it's
a pain to play the PSX version which is very different.

 

 

     The jag version has voice samples for all the players.  Also, the
music in the jag version has been completely redone.  No it's not CD
but it is MIDI-scored on 4:1 compressed 16-bit ADPCM instruments.
There are megabytes (about 7-8 uncompressed MEGABYTES not MEGABITS)
of samples for instruments and voices.

 

 

 

(On subject of Playstation Vs Coin-op A. I) 

 

     Basically, COMPUTER ASSISTANCE is boosted a lot more and blocking
and stealing and shoving abilities of the computer players are boosted
tremendously.  In my opinion, that actually unbalances the game some.
It makes the game tremendously more aggressive and much more of
a joystick olympics game than one requiring a gameplay strategy.

 

     The PSX version is excellent.  I just wish they wouldn't have changed
the play mechanics soooo much from the arcade and wouldn't have fudged
the statistics (stealing/shoving/blocking/etc) which unbalances some
teams.   Also, the load time is incredibly long (15-30 seconds before
every quarter)!!!!  In these respects the Jaguar version is much
better.  The PSX does have slightly better graphics overall than the
Jaguar version but the graphical differences are negligible.  The
PSX has some unique modes like MAMMOTH heads but the Jag has some
unique features of its own.

adisak @ high voltage software
programmer: wmcj / nbaj te

[agradeneu]

5 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

I've put forward  the Adisak quotes to try and give some examples of the tools HVS software had at their disposal (and give a direct quote of Adisak talking about the STOP tech stuff and what level of performance boost it gave), but the technical talk is way over my levels of understanding. 

 

I just find it an interesting point of discussion that the Doom development team who  wrote their own audio code, produced a game with no in-game music and which in ran in the machines lowest resolution mode, yet has cemented itself in history as one of the best conversions of Doom and a flagship title, loved by press and gamer alike. 

 

Giving Jaguar tools far better development tools a lot earlier on would have been a godsend for all, but not a silver bullet for developing games the majority would enjoy. 

 

When you have a case as it appears here, where Adisak believed the camera system simply worked, yet general consensus appears to be it was flawed, what's the answer? 

 

 

I will try and see if I can find how he viewed criticism of the game then or in the years since. 

Because Doom is a state of the art pseudo 3D engine and pushes the Jaguar really hard with a very complex fully texture mapped 3D world (for its time). It's also really well designed, runs well and plays well. 

 

[Lost Dragon]

Other than Adisak saying he wished reviewers would read game manuals, before reviewing WMCJ, this is best i can find :

 

 

 

     I think the "losing" a character in the crowd has more to do with
getting used to playing in the perspective than with choppy animations.
This happened a lot during testing so I added an option to make it
easier to get used to the game.  You can select from the options screen
an option to permanently turn on the arrows above the players.  This
makes it nearly impossible to lose track of your players.  I think once
you stop "losing" players and getting used to the game's perspective, you
will enjoy it much more.

 

     The frame rate is between 12 and 18 fps.  It averages around 15.
The overall game runs at about the same speed as JagDoom with the exception
that WMCJ has more than twice the resolution (320x220 vs 160x180).
The framerate for the backgrounds and cameras is the same as the framerate
for the game.  I find it hard to believe that you find the camera
view and backgrounds smooth while the game is choppy???

 

 

    There is a lot of features in the control of WMCJ that take getting
used to.  You can pick up the basic features of the game immediately but
getting good takes a little while.  For example, timing your shots makes
them more accurate, using your energy to boost speed but maintaining
enough to pull off dunks, and switching control of players can be
fairly complicated.  Add to that the control changes in passing, blocking,
pulling off plays, using the computer AI controlled teammate to pass
to you, etc. and you have a lot to learn in two hours

 

    To be honest, WMCJ has more actual play depth than NBAJ.  You have
more control over the game and features like the AI in WMCJ are considerably
stronger (in NBAJ-TE, the AI simply boosts computer stats and cheats when
the computer gets behind).  WMCJ has a much more complicated 3-D texture
mapped game-field and overall is a better game IMHO.  NBAJ does feature
60 fps play but only has parallax scrolling and no rendered 3-D.  The
biggest appeals of NBAJ are actual NBA teams and lots of hidden features...
plus the simplicity of having automatic dunks (rather than special moves
for dunks like WMCJ).  Either way, they are both good games.  You might
note that NBAJ will use the Team Tap which comes with WMCJ.  As far as I'm
concerned you should buy both

adisak pochanayon -- Jaguar Programmer for WMCJ,- current project NBAJ-TE

 

 

Not  unsurprising to find him defending WMCJ as it was his work but he does love the Doom comparisons it seems ?

[Goochman]

ADisak missed the point - if the gamer wanted to brak down stats and timings he would've played Civilization - for a basketball game which is based upon a simple silly movie, the gamer wants to pick up the controller and kick some bball butt.

[JagChris]

I'll try once more. Subjective reviews irrelevant. Get their tools in hands of other developers. See what other developers can do with them.

[JagChris]

I agree with Adisak. My friend just picked that game up and quickly had a blast with it. He kept hearing me but we had a blast.

 

My roommates ten year old son has no problem playing it. He enjoys it. 

 

i think it's just a game fashionable to bash on.

[alucardX]

39 minutes ago, JagChris said:

i think it's just a game fashionable to bash on.

On a system that is fashionable to bash on.

[+Sauron]

8 hours ago, JagChris said:

I agree with Adisak. My friend just picked that game up and quickly had a blast with it. He kept hearing me but we had a blast.

 

My roommates ten year old son has no problem playing it. He enjoys it. 

 

i think it's just a game fashionable to bash on.

The way I see it, if I can get any kind of enjoyment from the game, then it's worth playing, even if just for a few minutes. WMCJ is highly flawed, but also quite playable. I've shit on it myself from time to time, but it's far from being the worst game on the planet (or even on the Jag for that matter).

 

[JagChris]

My roommates son should be throwing rocks at everything I show him with his Xbox one and PS4 etc. Only ten years old he's never seen anything else. 

 

He likes WMCJ, NBA Jam. Doom.  Samurai Showdown on 3D0. He loves that. 

 

Only one he didn't care for was a WrestleMania game on the 32X

[Lost Dragon]

12 hours ago, JagChris said:

I'll try once more. Subjective reviews irrelevant. Get their tools in hands of other developers. See what other developers can do with them.

I will try one more. 

 

Adisak talks of 4 specific tools, as far as I can see. 

 

A cleaned up/bug free version of Atari's RISC Libraries 

 

An overlay manager for the C compiler. 

 

These it appears would speed up development time and save teams an awful lot of otherwise frustrating, time consuming work. 

 

He then talks of his own custom sound driver, which he used in WMCJ and NBAJ-TE which was far more efficient than the one Atari provided, but he also admits the creators of Jaguar Doom wrote their own sound driver code, which was more efficient than Atari's..

 

 

So the sound driver tool is null and void here as other developers did  build their own sound drivers. 

 

That just leaves the SLZ sprite compression software, ready at a time Atari were getting 2D games canned and asking developers like Imagitec Design etc to put texture mapping into games like I-War, putting pressure on ATD to do full screen texture-mapping in Battlemorph, so Jaguar could be seen as being able to compete with games on 3DO, Saturn and Playstation. 

 

More efficient sound driver code, sprite compression code, reduced development time, bug free RISC libraries would all of been most welcome without a doubt by small, limited budget development teams there is no doubt. 

 

But when you have said teams saying Atari wanted more texture mapping, even though they knew it would kill the frame rate and Atari paid the bills, I don't see any of the tools HVS had at their disposal doing anything to rectify a key issue on Jaguar titles. 

 

Atari interference. 

 

Nor would it do anything to change issues such as poor game design, poor game art etc. 

 

Battkemorph a far more efficient use of Jaguar hardware than Cybermorph, but game features a giant floating mallet as a weapon. 

 

Reviewers weren't concerned with how HVS had gotten WMCJ running in a higher resolution mode than Doom, but was it fun to play? 

 

For the vast majority the answer was simply no, it was too flawed from a design point of view. 

 

Jeff Minter's Defender 2000 was more efficient use of the Jaguar hardware, but again for reviewers and gamers alike, it's not held to same high regard as Tempest 2000.

 

Some areas were beyond Jeff's control, but an awful lot of what ruins it, falls on the gameplay aspects Jeff included. 

 

We saw what developers did with improved coding routines on Jaguar and it didn't equate to better games every time. 

Edited July 2, 2020 by Lost Dragon

[Lost Dragon]

13 hours ago, JagChris said:

I'll try once more. Subjective reviews irrelevant. Get their tools in hands of other developers. See what other developers can do with them.

This also raises a question. 

 

 

Adisak :

 

I have a very simple algorithm to doom in texture mapping floors and walls in 65536 colors with light

shading to enhance depth perspective and it runs at about 40-50 frames per second!!!

 

I have texture mapping routines on the jaguar capable of drawing floors with depth shading and texture mapped walls at any angle which is basically a doom graphics engine. I do not have any of the player-player interaction, collision, mapping,

etc. that doom uses...

 

 

So assuming this is Adisak's own code and interlectual property, not that of his parent company, HVS, why didn't he give it to a development team so they could use it to bring more FPS style games to the Jaguar? 

 

You say THIER tools as in HVS, but when Adisak talks of better than Atari or Doom creators levels of performance he has achieved on Jaguar, it's usually via software he himself wrote and used. 

 

 

What was his code and what was owned by HVS as it had been written by him, specifically with him as an employee and to aid development of their titles? 

 

if HVS never planned any FPS games for the Jaguar, why did he look at the Doom engine algorithm and routines? 

 

The sound driver and sprite compression tools we can see used it titles but the Doom routines seem out of place somewhat. 

[+CyranoJ]

The DOOM sound routines are not great,  and the renderer is highly inefficient, as it is the c code assembled to 68000 and then converted line by line to the gpu.

 

Check out all the converted MOVEM.L commands,  LOL.

[+CyranoJ]

1 hour ago, Lost Dragon said:

Adisak talks of 4 specific tools, as far as I can see. 

 

1. A cleaned up/bug free version of Atari's RISC Libraries 

2. An overlay manager for the C compiler. 

3. He then talks of his own custom sound driver

4. That just leaves the SLZ sprite compression software

 

Lets look at these:

1. The rules for RISC in main ram are now known, and can be implemented with macros. However GPU IN MAIN is not a silver bullet 

2. Once the rules are known, overlays become pointless (codepage swapping on the GPU ram kills performance by wasting cycles)

3. We have U235 and ZeroPlayer, both are highly efficient and flexible

4. Multiple compression options are now available using modern tools.

So, realistically, the only sticking point is a part of the second issue, in that we don't currently have a C to RISC compiler at all.  However... it seems people think they need that to 'get the most out of the system' ... but you'll never get that by coding in C in the first place.

It would seem the passage of time has made all these things irrelevant.

 

[Lost Dragon]

1 hour ago, CyranoJ said:

The DOOM sound routines are not great,  and the renderer is highly inefficient, as it is the c code assembled to 68000 and then converted line by line to the gpu.

 

Check out all the converted MOVEM.L commands,  LOL.

JagChris relies a little too heavily on the work of one development team, to give a commercially realistic viewpoint of what could of been on the Jaguar, for my own tastes. 

 

And i say that with no offence meant to JagChris or anyone from HVS. 

 

It's just that the likes of John Carmack, Lee B (WTR), Battlesphere team, Rebellion etc etc have gone on record stating what they would of aimed for with further ootimised game engines or Doom rebuilt from scratch for the Jaguar and it boils down to better frame rates, increased resolution, higher polygon counts. 

 

But nothing i can see that would of done anything to reverse the situation the Jaguar found itself in. 

 

Companies like Core Design, Virgin, Probe Software, Ocean were treating it as a platform to convert existing Sega CD, AMIGA and PC titles onto, rather than develop exclusive titles for it. 

 

 

ATD couldn't wait to finish Battlemorph, free themselves from Jaguar development and get started on Playstation development. 

 

By the time HVS had the various toolsets etc available, the writing was on the wall for the Jaguar, it wasn't a commercially viable platform. 

 

Chris doesn't give any examples of whom he would of liked to of seen develop what sort of titles and why, using these HVS libraries. 

 

It's great Adisak developed the Doom algorithms etc, but it appears very wasted if he himself never went further with them or gave them to others. 

 

Adisak seems a little too familiar/quick to stress his code is better than others at times, but better code didn't equate to the games the Jaguar needed. 

 

 

I just struggle to get any sense of just what type of games and from whom Chris thinks would of appeared had Atari as he puts it, listened and handed out tools by HVS. 

 

Documents show Atari secured the Doom engine for Imagitec Design to make Freelancer 2120 development on Jaguar easier. 

 

Game never got anywhere near completion on the PC and that was using the  Argonaut BRender engine, yet to see any proof Jaguar version was even started. 

 

Good tools are vital for game development to go forward and a cracking pace, but if we look at say Beyond Games.. 

 

Taking everything that they've said over the years regarding Jaguar Battlewheels 2000:

 

The Jaguar Hardware (and consoles after it) just didn't have the power needed to make their concepts a reality. 

 

Atari never really got behind the idea of a Jaguar sequel, possibly due to how poorly the Lynx version sold. 

 

Games are abandoned at various stages for multiple reasons, not just because hardware like Saturn. Jaguar, N64 etc are difficult to work with. 

 

If there isn't a viable market for it, it won't get made. 

 

Points made. 

 

Time to draw a line under it. 

Edited July 2, 2020 by Lost Dragon

[Lost Dragon]

17 hours ago, JagChris said:

I'll try once more. Subjective reviews irrelevant. Get their tools in hands of other developers. See what other developers can do with them.

It's honestly been answered Chris. 

 

Chris Gibb of ATD said it'd take a year or 2 for Jaguar coders to write routines that couldn't be bettered, software routines would constantly be optimized, development would go quicker. 

 

They used the experience gained and time saved from it, to texture map Battlemorph. 

 

We simply didn't need HVS tools to see what development teams did with development time saved and their own routines used, not Atari's. 

 

It resulted in incremental improvements (Hoverstrike cart Vs CD another example) not the gargantuan leaps you seem to imply were possible. 

 

Sticking with ATD look at their post Jaguar era... 

 

Rollcage on Playstation, an amazing title, but critiscm laid at it for it's confusing camera, they addressed this in the sequel, then people complained the game looked mighty impressive, but felt more like a patch to the original, rather than true sequel, it wasn't a particularly satisfying drive etc etc. 

 

Commercial Games Press are a bloody nightmare to please. 

 

 

The HVS Dactyl Joust video footage looks very impressive, but as John Carmack pointed out, there's a gulf between an impressive 3D Demo which as he said, look i've made a little demo in which you can fly around a 3D World in, can i be a millionaire now? 

 

And the architecture you use for a commercially shipped title. 

 

Implementating sound, collision detection, A. I routines, control mechanics etc etc, everything that makes a game tick, demands huge resources. 

 

 

I just don't see HVS tools being made freely available changing the path the Jaguar was headed on since the moment it launched. 

[Lost Dragon]

In the interests of balance, SNES Coders were just as mouthy as Jaguar coders ?

 

 

Software Creations ran down the team behind SNES Super Ghouls n Ghosts, calling them bad programmers, they then went onto boast of how Plok contained exactly the same amount of Graphics Data as SNES Street Fighter II, only due to their compression routines they fit it all into a cartridge half the size Capcom used. 

 

Jez San wanted people to believe their data compression routines were the best out there and he and his team were ready to use them for SNES CD development when time came. 

 

JagChris is missing one important aspect when talking of giving HVS software routines to other commercial Jaguar coding teams... 

 

Ego ?

 

Commercial teams more often than not, used the press to imply their work was at the cutting edge and existing engines inadequate for the type of games they wanted to make, so they wrote their own cutting edge libraries, engines etc. 

 

That went on for years after the Jaguar passed over. 

[JagChris]

Their tools would have helped. You can't put id's dsp engine in with Adisak's. id's engine is severely outclassed. 

 

I seriously doubt it would have saved Atari but we would have probably gotten a few more things out faster and easier and in the end it may have lightened up the Jags reputation. Maybe some of those unreleased games. 

 

There was not enough units available to save Atari. They had manufacturing trouble it seems. Even if some miracle group of Games happened exclusively for the Jag that turned the gaming world in its ear Atari didn't seem to have a way to fill hardware demand.

[+CyranoJ]

3 hours ago, JagChris said:

Their tools would have helped. You can't put id's dsp engine in with Adisak's. id's engine is severely outclassed. 

Citation needed - We don't have source code for Adisak's so that is 100% opinion and speculation.

[JagChris]

All we have is the expert testimony of one Adisak Pochanayon. In lieu of source codes this is what I'm basing my speculation on. He's testified at a 30X efficiency increase. Allowing the dsp to multitask. And since NBA jam has no problem doing sound during gameplay I'm leaning towards their dsp engine.