"Practical" Jaguar Hardware Upgrades

[agradeneu]

8 hours ago, JagChris said:

How about a cart with expanded ram? Either for its own use or in conjunction with the CD?

Technically a game cart already works like expanded RAM?

 

The CD is so rare and expensive that it does not make much sense to add a RAM cart.

 

[+CyranoJ]

8 hours ago, JagChris said:

How about a cart with expanded ram? Either for its own use or in conjunction with the CD?

I believe this is what is known as a "Jaguar GameDrive"....

 

Expanded RAM on the Jaguar mainboard would be neat for development/testing - but its not practical to dilute the small user base with hardware requirements like this when releasing games.  Just ask one of the three falcon owners with SuperVidel and CT63

[agradeneu]

So how would extra RAM benefit games?

I think not much:

 

- I wouldn't do anything better for 3D games, obviously 

 

- for  2D games, the cart/JagGD system is already a "monster"

 

[roots.genoa]

Sorry for asking a noob question but since Jaguar is a "monster" in 2D, has it been explored to do 3D with quads instead of polygons like the Saturn? (maybe it's already the case, I know very little about the Jaguar)

[agradeneu]

1 hour ago, roots.genoa said:

Sorry for asking a noob question but since Jaguar is a "monster" in 2D, has it been explored to do 3D with quads instead of polygons like the Saturn? (maybe it's already the case, I know very little about the Jaguar)

SAT renders quads instead of triangles, but its still not sprites, but polygons IMO 

 

[IntelliMission]

I'm also a noob, and I also would like to see more 3D stuff in Jaguar homebrew.

 

However, I understand this is quite complex due to 2D being much more easy for 1-person teams to handle, especially in an architecture so complex/bottlenecked as this.

 

Maybe what's needed is some joint effort to create a simple and evolving universal 3D engine for the system. Starting small, with a cube that jumps through different rooms "Alpha Waves" style, and then adding polygons and texture slowly to avoid bad framerates.

 

I personally like the look of early 3D games, both without textures and with pixelated textures, but many people keep repeating they "haven't aged well" and all that stuff, so that also may be part of the problem. What I personally believe is that, with the exceptions of racing/simulation games, some 1st person games and some 2.D plataform games, 3D games usually control worse and play worse (so I don't think they have "aged bad", it's just that maybe many of them were not a good idea gameplay wise from the start).

[agradeneu]

25 minutes ago, IntelliMission said:

I'm also a noob, and I also would like to see more 3D stuff in Jaguar homebrew.

 

However, I understand this is quite complex due to 2D being much more easy for 1-person teams to handle, especially in an architecture so complex/bottlenecked as this.

 

Maybe what's needed is some joint effort to create a simple and evolving universal 3D engine for the system. Starting small, with a cube that jumps through different rooms "Alpha Waves" style, and then adding polygons and texture slowly to avoid bad framerates.

 

I personally like the look of early 3D games, both without textures and with pixelated textures, but many people keep repeating they "haven't aged well" and all that stuff, so that also may be part of the problem. What I personally believe is that, with the exceptions of racing/simulation games, some 1st person games and some 2.D plataform games, 3D games usually control worse and play worse (so I don't think they have "aged bad", it's just that maybe many of them were not a good idea gameplay wise from the start).

Making a high standard 2D game is even challenging for a 2-3 person team.

I would not say it's easier per se, it's different. 

[roots.genoa]

1 hour ago, agradeneu said:

SAT renders quads instead of triangles, but its still not sprites, but polygons IMO 

 

I was told it was precisely deformed sprites, yes, which makes sense considering the hardware.

[agradeneu]

18 minutes ago, roots.genoa said:

I was told it was precisely deformed sprites, yes, which makes sense considering the hardware.

Let's assume the way the Saturn draws polygons (quads) is quite different to Jaguars sprite engine. 

[Atariman]

7 hours ago, CyranoJ said:

I believe this is what is known as a "Jaguar GameDrive"....

 

Expanded RAM on the Jaguar mainboard would be neat for development/testing - but its not practical to dilute the small user base with hardware requirements like this when releasing games.  Just ask one of the three falcon owners with SuperVidel and CT63

Yeah, I know that this isn't largely practical.  It's one of the reasons why I was leaning toward not pursuing this as an upgrade since existing software wouldn't benefit from it (unless there would be a performance boost from being able to use faster RAM, which... there isn't) and it would require specific efforts to benefit from having more RAM.  At this point I'm pretty much doing it to do it and share it with anybody else that wants it.  I expect that as I work my way through concepts some will be more palatable than others.  Adding 8MB of RAM does get me closer to a hazy goal in the future of something that I'd like to port to it, but it's such a pipe dream at this point that I'm hesitant to even tell anybody what it is for fear of sounding like an overly-optimistic noob...

 

...and no, it's not Area 51 or any of the CoJag games.

Edited November 27, 2021 by Atariman
Because I never get it exactly right the first time

[Atariman]

7 hours ago, agradeneu said:

Technically a game cart already works like expanded RAM?

 

The CD is so rare and expensive that it does not make much sense to add a RAM cart.

 

I actually don't mind creating something that won't be widely used.  If it adds functionality that's interesting to somebody or allows someone to do something that has never been done before, I'm game to give it a shot... It might just take awhile to get to every concept.

[+neogeo1982]

7 hours ago, CyranoJ said:

its not practical

We need to stop bumping this to the top and get GM back into everyones minds?

[Atariman]

Another sidetrack, but what ever happened the ambitious stuff that Buddy was working on?  I thought there was a project to work on the JagDuo and maybe some other stuff, but lost track.

[+neogeo1982]

Maybe try asking in the Programming thread up top. Or the homebrew thread since this sounds like homebrew hardware ?.

[Atariman]

13 minutes ago, neogeo1982 said:

Maybe try asking in the Programming thread up top. Or the homebrew thread since this sounds like homebrew hardware ?.

I fail to see how this detracts from any other thread in the Jaguar forum... ?

[Clint Thompson]

2 hours ago, agradeneu said:

Making a high standard 2D game is even challenging for a 2-3 person team.

I would not say it's easier per se, it's different. 

^ Particularly since the Jaguar is known to not be a very good 3D machine, it would seem to make more sense to work on more polished 2D stuff anyways.

 

The idea of creating 3D stuff on the Jag is awesome but there’s also a reason it took VLADR literally 20 years to create a single stage 3D tunnel polygon demo while no one else had created any 3D anything for the Jag from a homebrew standpoint. At least not anything nearly as complex.

[+neogeo1982]

7 minutes ago, Clint Thompson said:

while no one else had created any 3D anything for the Jag from a homebrew standpoint. At least not anything nearly as complex.

No, remember the Atari Owl project from 12 years ago? That was fully 3D voxel proof of concept. 

[+neogeo1982]

38 minutes ago, Atariman said:

52 minutes ago, neogeo1982 said:

Maybe try asking in the Programming thread up top. Or the homebrew thread since this sounds like homebrew hardware ?.

I fail to see how this detracts

I'm saying your putting all your eggs into 1 thread that others might not even see. Expanding to more than 1 you might get more people to bounce ideas back and forth with ?

[Clint Thompson]

40 minutes ago, neogeo1982 said:

No, remember the Atari Owl project from 12 years ago? That was fully 3D voxel proof of concept. 

You’re right, I forgot about that but just like VLADs project, it never materialized beyond concept or tech demo. 
 

*not that I have any room to speak since I’ve only started even attempting to code in the past 4 years in the lowest form possible and certainly nothing on a 3D level 

Edited November 27, 2021 by Clint Thompson

[Atariman]

Clint and Chris... Out of curiosity, is there opportunity to merge RAM and bankswitching into the same concept?  Like... say a bankswitching scheme that incorporates a 2 (or 4MB) window that can be switched along with the remainder of the address space dedicated to RAM?  Or is that basically what the GD does already?  I've got some spare cart PCBs that would be good for experimentation for this kind of concept and would be willing to give it a try at some point, I just need some guidance as to what would be most useful.

 

EDIT:  I think I answered my own question, but I'm not 100% certain.  Looks like the Game Drive is what I would have expected it to be, largely there to switch between ROMs loaded onto an SD card... Not sure whether there are clever things you could do in a specially developed game to utilize the hardware any differently from that...

Edited November 27, 2021 by Atariman
Durr hurr?

[agradeneu]

1 hour ago, Clint Thompson said:

^ Particularly since the Jaguar is known to not be a very good 3D machine, it would seem to make more sense to work on more polished 2D stuff anyways.

 

The idea of creating 3D stuff on the Jag is awesome but there’s also a reason it took VLADR literally 20 years to create a single stage 3D tunnel polygon demo while no one else had created any 3D anything for the Jag from a homebrew standpoint. At least not anything nearly as complex.

 

Vlad has not created anything decent on other systems as well, so he is not a solid reference by any means. The guy is a boaster, what he actually produced was embarassing. 

 

 

 

 If you want a reference, look at AtariOwls 3D demo. That one should give you a hint.

 

Edited November 27, 2021 by agradeneu

[agradeneu]

1 hour ago, Clint Thompson said:

You’re right, I forgot about that but just like VLADs project, it never materialized beyond concept or tech demo. 
 

*not that I have any room to speak since I’ve only started even attempting to code in the past 4 years in the lowest form possible and certainly nothing on a 3D level 

 The last sentence is a perfect explanation for that conclusion.?‍♂️

Edited November 27, 2021 by agradeneu

[Atariman]

Well, I will keep experimenting. I have some hardware coming in within the next month that should help me try out a variety of different concepts and if it garners any interest, cool. I just don't want to be accused of not sharing stuff that I find.

[+cubanismo]

Yeah, nothing wrong with sharing progress/ideas. Regardless of whether or not it ends up being useful, it's fun to read about the experimentation, process, and any intermediate findings from my point of view.

[Zerosquare]

On 11/27/2021 at 5:42 PM, Clint Thompson said:

 no one else had created any 3D anything for the Jag from a homebrew standpoint. At least not anything nearly as complex.

 

 

Edited December 1, 2021 by Zerosquare