phoboz

This seems to be an unique prototype that you have got your hands on, congratulations. I don't know about non destructive cartridge dumping devices. I have managed to de-solder intact Jaguar ROMs using a professional desoldering station (which uses a vacuum pump to suck up excess solder). However, there is no guarantee with such operation... Anyway, I am glad that you able to enjoy something unique... Please let us know if you find a way to dump the ROM in the future?

No what I mean is that the only one I find on atarimania is Tiny Toon Adventures - Plucky Duck in Hollywood Hijinks [Prototype] This one does not even look like the one on the pictures here. This is a completely different game, where you can only walk forward, and backward, nothing more. - Does anyone know where to find the ROM for the Tiny toons prototype in the pictures above? (not the one in the picture below)

The one I find on atarimaia is the other Tiny Toons prototype, where you only can walk forward, trough everything. This one looks like you can jump, and do a lot more stuff.

Looks like a fun game. Does anyone know where to find the ROM for this prototype, I want to try it out? It must be available somewhere, if some person was able to burn it on EPROM.

Maybe we do a BOSS that utilises some cool effects? Can we expect to see some sprite scaling, and rotational effects in Odynexus for the Atari Jaguar?

Exactly, no need to care about palettes, and a very large BOSS can also take advantage of using many colors. If you use pre-rendered sprites, it a great advantage to be able to use more colors as well. For tile maps, I don't think that there is anyone who can that take much advantage of more than 256 colors. For that, it's probably better to use a large image instead.

On the Jaguar, this is all what you program it to be. The object processor is capable of drawing a large number of arbitrary sized sprites, with selectable color depth (e.g. pseudo color, 1,2,4, or 8 bpp, indexed palette mode out of a 256 color palette, with arbitrary start index), or high color (65536 direct colors), and I think the Jaguar even supports 24bpp (16,777,216 colors) So we programmed the GPU to draw a tile map using a large number of sprites (e.g. 20*12 = 240 individual 16x16 pixels sprites), in this case 8bpp out of a 256 color palette. The high color sprites, are on top of that, plus the parallax background. However, unlike the NeoGeo (which is actually 2 separate computers with completely separated memory spaces), on the Jaguar all system resources share the same bus. So if you blast way to much graphical data trough the bus, the audio will be suffering (because the DSP has lower priority than the object processor) So everything had to be tuned, like the sample rate of the audio, and what color depths to use for the different layers, and sprites. Also I wanted flexibility for the game sprites, so that's why I choose to use high color (direct color, e.g. no palette) for these. Another solution is to use only one very large sprite for the tile map, and have the blitter copying the individual tiles to that sprite. However, we didn't mange to get good performance on that, because the blitter blocks the system for each and every tile to be drawn, unless you can find an intelligent way to do whole screen in one blitter job. PS. We did manage to get good performance using the blitter by drawing only new columns, or new rows as the map scrolls. However, scrolling could occur only in the vertical direction, or in the horizontal direction for one loaded map. However, it turned out to be very difficult to be able to scroll both in the horizontal, and vertical directions (with different speeds) on the same map. This was a requirement for Kings of Edom, and now also used in Asteroite.

Currently sprite scaling is used for the explosions (e.g. see the drone crash sequence). First some smaller explosions, with random placement, and size appear on the drone, then it falls down down, and a larger explosion is displayed when it hits the ground (or a wall). It saves quite a lot of cartridge space to only have one explosion animation that can be displayed at arbitrary sizes

Cromple it is then!

The nice thing with the Jaguar is that it is possible to mix hi-color (65536 direct colors) sprites, and pseudo color (256 indexed colors) graphics in the same display. So the tile map foreground layer uses a 256 color palette, but since the sprites use hi-color (65536 direct colors), I don't have to care if different palettes are used on different levels in the game, the same sprites can be used on all levels independent of the palette. Also I can fade in/fade out the tile map, while the sprites are unaffected by the fade. There are a lot of other nice effects you can use besides than palette fades (look at the intro screens of Kings of Edom), which dissolves the images, and gradually reveal them. In my opinion, I think that palette fades are a little bit over-used on the regular 16-bit consoles, since they are so easy to implement.

You can propose a name for him?

No palette fades possible as the sprites are hi-color (65536 colors, and no 256 color palette) However, what is not captured properly in the video is the flashing/blinking animations (most of the time the sprites just disappear in the video capture) So the effect when the enemies disappear, just like when you have been hit, is that the sprite appears fainter because it is flashing very fast.

A new video, mainly to showcase some new music and artwork by Krauser. Also thank you to @SlidellMan for the "loading sector" dialog.

Currently the GD seems to be available only for a select few. Sine we don't have access to that, it will be very hard to make something for it...

Yes, as described in post 133 PS. Trying to answer some previously unanswered questions earlier in this thread.

Yes I have also seen some games that have a combination of both, for example, when you have a town with houses etc. you most likely want them to end up in the same place every time. This is a good reason for having pre-defined maps. Also you can draw much more nice looking environments using pre-defined maps (however, some games can actually draw quite nice random maps as well), but it will never be at the same level as if you have a completely pre-defined map. Asteroite (which is a completely different game) have pre-defined maps, but it takes very much more time to make a complete game using pre-defined maps. So this approach will be exercised for the next project, which will take much longer before there will be a release.

There are actually a few messages that use all 5 rows of text, so these would become unreadable with a smaller console. Also, in some menus, all 5 rows are needed (e.g. if you are under the influence of hunger, poison, burn, freeze, bleed, and curse at the same time, in addition to an indication that a crown is near), so yes, this game does provide some text that is intended to aid you on your journey. You can see it as 80% graphical adventure, and 20% text adventure. Just a side note to the other viewers (you already know about this @agradeneusince you are the guilty one) I remember that someone asked if the monsters can cast spells also, and now there is such an evil magician in the game. He is also not easily wounded by magic himself, but more receptive to melee strikes. However, his staff might curse you if you stay to close to him.

Kings of Edom is approaching release, so I thought I might give you an update showing a little bit what the final game will be like:

I am quite happy with the way music sounds now, I will post a new update soon a very cool tune for the ice levels. A person called Sergio Enrique Nuñez Stolles is helping me with music, sound fx and graphics, also @SlidellMan has supported with some graphics.

In this video you will be able to see a little bit more of the gameplay in Asteroite. (@SlidellMan, please note your title logo, and the save-tube in this video)

My favorite was a person who claimed to sell his whole game collection on a Swedish auction site. "I am now practically giving all of this stuff away, because I want to invest in life instead" (each item had an individual auction, so he must have spent some of time on putting up the auctions at least?) - I really don't understand that you cannot invest in life, and have games? Even if you don't play them today, you might play them tomorrow. (or some child, or anybody else who might be interested?)

I think a sd drive is something that misissing for the Jaguar, but in the end such device is of little use unless there are many great games to try with it (sadly the GameDrive itself does add any new games to the system) Perhaps most people who were quick to get in the queue for a GameDrive were the same people who were also quick to get the hottest games? So we just have to wait until this becomes accessible to everyone (both players, and developers), in order to see any new games released for it. So until then it seems that people will be playing the same games as before (and perhaps reduce the wear a little bit on the cartridge port)

I would not call Hyper Force amazing, but it's decent in the same category as Zool 2. Bubsy looks quite nice, but unfortunately totally unplayable (I am very sorry for this, as it looks better than the SNES version of Bubsy, but the SNES game is much more playable) I feel a little bit sorry that many Jaguar games were more like technology demos intended to display to true 64-bit power of the system, rather than being great games. So an exclusive, playable platformer is definitely a goal. Graphics will be what we, as home-brewers are able to come up with. The limitation is mainly the people who are willing to contribute, and not the system's capabilities. What I truly long for are playable platform games, and not more (very nice looking) Bubsy games...

Very cool @DrTypo, there hasn't been many 3D homebrews. I have been fantasizing about making a game similar to the 1979 Tailgunner (Cinematronics) Vector arcade game with flat shaded polygons. (would look a little bit nicer than the original wireframe graphics) The polygon count would not need to be high, but I haven't been able to find a library that I can use with C for this (most open libraries for the Jaguar focus on 2D graphics)

I would like to order one, please.