Questions about the Jags Max Resolution

[kool kitty89]

But an actual Hard Drivin' (or Race Drivin') port to the Jaguar would have been nice to see as well, particularly given it was an Atari Games release, maybe even with some enhancements with 2D scaled scenery -it that fit, the Saturn port did that.

My vote's for S.T.U.N. Runner! It uses the same basic hardware as Hard/Race Drivin'/Steel Talons. And in all those games, the main gameplay runs on a 68K with basic DSP assistance. To me, they always seemed like a good fit for the Jaguar, although I'm sure the games were considered pretty old fashioned by 1994.

 

Yeah, for some reasont hat slipped my mind when tniking about my response in spite of reading it in the preceding post. And they may have looked a bit dated, but not much worse than some other stuff on the Jag (especially if framerate was decent), and if they played well it would compensate at least. (opposed to Club Drive or Checkered Flag).

If they added 2-player split screen to either game (Race Drivin' or Stun Runner) that would have been really cool, even with the necessary performance drop. (framerate could be moderated with detail/poly count drop for 2-player)

 

Adding Gouraud Shading to either game would have upped the look a fair bit, but I'm not sure what kind of perfomance impact that would have.

 

 

The "Stun Runner Hardware" use Texas Instrament DSP that runs a little faster then the Jags DSP's. However I'm sure the Jags blitter can make up for whatever would be lacking if use properly.

Huh, I didn't think the Jaguar had any DSP (digital signal processor), the 2 custom RSIC processors being general purpose CPU type microporocessors. (witht eh "DSP" in Jerry standing for "digital sound processor" not the conventional meaning -rather like the MCU Creative used in its soundblaster line they labeled as "Digital Sound Processor")

 

Also, looking at:

http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=770

 

STUN Runner uses 2x 50 MHz TMS34010s, so clocked a lot faster than the Jag's RISCs. (givent he discription, one is dedicated to polygon rasterization while the other to in-game math calculations)

[kskunk]

STUN Runner uses 2x 50 MHz TMS34010s, so clocked a lot faster than the Jag's RISCs. (givent he discription, one is dedicated to polygon rasterization while the other to in-game math calculations)

Clock rate is not a fair comparison. The TMS34010 only executes 1 instruction per 8 clocks, while the JagRISC can execute 1 instruction per clock. I.e., it's 6.25 MIPS in the TMS34010 vs 26.6 MIPS in the JagRISC.

 

But that's still not a fair comparison, because the TMS34010 instructions are more powerful in some situations than that JagRISC's, and less powerful in others. In general it's not easy to compare parts like this!

 

Suffice it to say, that one of the two TMS34010 (doing rasterization) is a poor match for the blitter, and the other (doing polygon work) is a fair match for the GPU.

 

So I think the port is quite achievable. I wonder if it was ever discussed.

 

- KS

[philipj]

The "Stun Runner Hardware" use Texas Instrament DSP that runs a little faster then the Jags DSP's. However I'm sure the Jags blitter can make up for whatever would be lacking if use properly.

Huh, I didn't think the Jaguar had any DSP (digital signal processor), the 2 custom RSIC processors being general purpose CPU type microporocessors. (witht eh "DSP" in Jerry standing for "digital sound processor" not the conventional meaning -rather like the MCU Creative used in its soundblaster line they labeled as "Digital Sound Processor")

 

Also, looking at:

http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=770

 

STUN Runner uses 2x 50 MHz TMS34010s, so clocked a lot faster than the Jag's RISCs. (givent he discription, one is dedicated to polygon rasterization while the other to in-game math calculations)

 

Yea... Sigh... I got it mixed up. It's been a while since I looked at the specs on the "Stunrunner," but I did remember that both DSP's did run faster then the Jag thus was able to do more specific task based operation that wasn't quite as broad of a spectrum the the Jaguar "J-RISC" could do. I think the Jag proved that it can handle simple polygon draw and fill pretty nicely with "Cybermorph or even Battle Morph" if the M68K didn't slow it down, but when you look at the Jaguar PCB and the Stunrunner PCB it's pretty obvious that Stunrunner probably didn't have the bottlenecks that the Jaguar have.

 

Suffice it to say, that one of the two TMS34010 (doing rasterization) is a poor match for the blitter, and the other (doing polygon work) is a fair match for the GPU.

 

Well I really wasn't comparing... I was simply pointing out the Jag can probably pull off what the Stunrunner game could do using the blitter; specifically to do polygon draw and fills through rasterization. Definetly a game I'd like to see on the Jag... It's the original "Wipeout" before it even became a franchise.

Edited February 2, 2010 by philipj

[kool kitty89]

Yea... Sigh... I got it mixed up. It's been a while since I looked at the specs on the "Stunrunner," but I did remember that both DSP's did run faster then the Jag thus was able to do more specific task based operation that wasn't quite as broad of a spectrum the the Jaguar "J-RISC" could do. I think the Jag proved that it can handle simple polygon draw and fill pretty nicely with "Cybermorph or even Battle Morph" if the M68K didn't slow it down, but when you look at the Jaguar PCB and the Stunrunner PCB it's pretty obvious that Stunrunner probably didn't have the bottlenecks that the Jaguar have.

Both Cybermorph and Battlemorph take advantage of the Jag's gouraud shading capabilities, STUN Runner and other Hard Drivin' arcade boards all used flat shaded polygons, so more like Club Drive, Iron Soldier, or Checkered Flag in that respect. (not that a Gouraud Shaded STUN Runner wouldn't have been neat )

 

Suffice it to say, that one of the two TMS34010 (doing rasterization) is a poor match for the blitter, and the other (doing polygon work) is a fair match for the GPU.

 

Well I really wasn't comparing... I was simply pointing out the Jag can probably pull off what the Stunrunner game could do using the blitter; specifically to do polygon draw and fills through rasterization. Definetly a game I'd like to see on the Jag... It's the original "Wipeout" before it even became a franchise.

Kskunk does make the point that the higher clock speed comparison isn't so straightforeward, and more importantly that good ports of those (or similar) games should have been possible on the Jag resonably (well, as easy as anything on the Jag the way it is). There are a lot of other simple (untextured or minimal textured) games that should have been good for the Jag, especially some PC games and should have been reasonable to fit on a 4 or 6 MB cart. (like Alone in the Dark or X-Wing -that's one good thing about the jag's keypad, it would facilitate soem PC games reqiring numberous keys which would otherwise be akward on a console)