Can the Jaguar do what the Neo Geo did?

[+Gemintronic]

Does the 64 bit bus mean one could add, say, a big arse 1gb DIMM to a cartridge to allay the 2mb constraint? Of course figuring out the DDR2/3 standard and adding a memory controller to the cart etc..

Edited July 5, 2012 by theloon

[Zerosquare]

Simply put : no.

[Punisher5.0]

I'm sure the Jaguar can do the earlier releases but some of the later one's like Mark of the Wolves or SVC Chaos I don't think so.

[Willard]

But with D2K you can't see all that parallax scrolling much since the playfield scrolls up and down so much; I mean really, how often do you get to see all the cool graphics down at ground level when most of the action happens way up above?

 

What does that have to do with anything? The Jaguar can either do it or it cannot and in the case of D2K the Jaguar does it regardless of how often you see it. The skill of the player determines how often you stay close to the ground and actually a large part of the game is saving the humanoids so if you are good enough you'll keep close to the ground and nobody gets mutated.

 

I'm not attempting to discount D2K or Native

 

I'm not sure what you're attempting but I'm just expressing my opinion on D2K and the ways in which it demonstrates the capabilities of the Jaguar in ways that compare to the Neo Geo.

[Duranik]

i think native and perhaps defender 2000 look alot better than fast striker. other neo geo shmups like blazing star look better than fast striker. much of fast strike is just the same cg background looping for an entire level (similar to blazing star stage 2) as far as i can tell. i think it was a decent idea but nothing that really amazes me.

 

Those jag games don't have the depth of field (parallax scrolling or similiar) that Fast Striker has, which really makes it look impressive. Neither do they have the level of animation on those huge end-level bosses that Fast Striker has. Could somthing like Fast Striker be done on the jag? Yes, if it were CD based to make up for lack of cartridge space, and if you had a huge development team with a huge budget.

 

Fast striker has about 1/1000 the number of colors as d2k and about 1/20 the speed without as many bg art assets. D2k also has some decent physics and a mode 7 effect. It's also about 5-6 layers of scrolling (not counting the starfield) with some large enemies like the camel and large objects like the falling tombstones. Fast striker really doesn't impress me but that's just me. It's a looping bland grey cg background.

 

Relax willard, I'm not attempting to discount D2K or Native, they are more impressive in their own ways, though the large inanimant tombstones aren't impressive, they are a lot better in many ways. But with D2K you can't see all that parallax scrolling much since the playfield scrolls up and down so much; I mean really, how often do you get to see all the cool graphics down at ground level when most of the action happens way up above? And Native is amazing, for what is there, but there just isn't much there and the programmers abandoned it becuase adding sound and music to it would have ruined the frame rate. not that the Jag can't handle it, but their programming wasn't optimised enough and they didn't want to re-write it all for a failing system, so it was abandoned.

 

It certainly wouldn´t have had any effect on the framerate to add some music and sounds, don´t know where you get that from And it wasn´t abandoned because we didn´t want to do a rewrite to add sounds, the only

reason there are no sounds is that there was no mainmemory, all the game data is sitting in the memory which would not be the case in a normal game mode.

 

As for Fast Striker, it is displaying a static prerendered background loop, the "parallax" is coming from the prerendered image not any fancy neogeo magic. As others have pointed out here, its all a matter of cartridge

space.

[+rdemming]

According to the Fast Striker webpage the cartridge is 1560 Megabit thus 195 Megabyte. Compare this to the maximum 6 Megabyte address space of a Jaguar cart (of course extendable by bank-switching).

With that amount of memory, it seems €439 for a cart is cheap. I wonder what kind of memory chips they are using especially since the cart can be updated via USB.

 

Robert

[MAYAman]

Listen, if I wanted people to be snarky I'd be an asshole. I wasn't so lets not get crazy here. I asked a simiple question. I am totally aware of who the dev team is for striker. I'm just putting out a question to the community. when did this place become NeoGaf? Please people get a grip. For those of you who aren't uptight and take this as life or death, thanks for the responses. Its conversation, this is a message board.

 

Riiiggggghhht..

 

Indeeeeeeed.

[+Gemintronic]

So, Zerosquare says that adding RAM to a cart isn't possible. And people point out that massive ROM sizes aren't possible. Can't the RISC processor in the Jag act as a lossless decompressor for sprites? Do the scaling and rotation that the NEO GEO used ROM space for?

[the.golden.ax]

The better question is, why would you want to? The Neo Geo does a good job with what it does. Can't the Jaguar just be a Jaguar and do what it does?

[MAYAman]

The question is basically looking back at the Jag and just wondering if it could do what the Neo did. The Neo is still alive and kicking and has a HUGE community. I still don't understand why people get annoyed at questions like this. I have a pretty huge Atari jaguar collection, I actually interviewed Jeff Minter and the Tramiels back in the day several times, so I'm not a Jaguar basher. Its just fun talk on a forum. Or should I ask if anybody thinks Battlesphere is worth it for the 1,000,000 time. C'mon guys, lighten up.

[Rex Dart]

The better question is, why would you want to? The Neo Geo does a good job with what it does. Can't the Jaguar just be a Jaguar and do what it does?

 

Maybe not everybody's satisfied with Bubsy & Ultra Vortek.

[Zerosquare]

Can't the RISC processor in the Jag act as a lossless decompressor for sprites?

It can, and some games do that, but it has its limits ; even with compression, 32 MB of graphics aren't going to fit in a 4 MB cartridge. Not to mention it's not going to be fast enough to decompress in real time.

Do the scaling and rotation that the NEO GEO used ROM space for?

The Neo Geo video chipset can do shrinking and mirroring/flipping in realtime (the Jaguar can do it too, and supports zooming in as well). Everything else needs to be precomputed and thus use ROM space. Edited July 6, 2012 by Zerosquare

[Jagman]

It would have seemed as though the Jaguar is technically much better, with some obvious shortcomings hold it back.. but I think the main difference really is the quality of games. Neo Geo had some of the best quality games that continually pushed the limits as the years went on - and it was amazing to see what he system was doing 10 years after it was released. It would have also been interesting to see what the Jag could do potentially with the same level of developers programming it - but that being said most of the games on the Jag were just awful, clunky 3D games that seem rushed and unfinished and don't really hold up over time, or just old Amiga ports.. where Neo Geo games even the early ones hold up beautifully for the most part because it was only sprite based. Jag just came in a weird middle period of technology and and awkward one and did some amazing things though, but yeah it's hard to compare them head to head as cart based consoles because of the upperhand the Neo Geo naturally has that has been pointed out.

[+Gemintronic]

Is the addressable ROM limit a hard one? Sort of like the 4gb limit on 32-bit Windows?

 

I'm thinking of what we can do with the Jag now rather than when both systems were competing.

Edited July 6, 2012 by theloon

[sh3-rg]

The question is basically looking back at the Jag and just wondering if it could do what the Neo did.

 

What you actually posted was "The last released SCHMUP Fast Striker is astounding, I mean incredible looking. Why can't people program stuff like this for the Jag?" and that's the question people answered.

 

Its just fun talk on a forum. Or should I ask if anybody thinks Battlesphere is worth it for the 1,000,000 time. C'mon guys, lighten up.

 

I dunno but for me it seems like fun was the last thing on your mind when you went off about "neogaf" and "assholes". You got some decent replies that were straight to the point.

 

Is the addressable ROM limit a hard one? Sort of like the 4gb limit on 32-bit Windows?

 

Have a look back at some of kskunk's posts - he covers this stuff really tidily in a way pretty much anyone can take enough from.

[+Gemintronic]

Is the addressable ROM limit a hard one? Sort of like the 4gb limit on 32-bit Windows?

 

Have a look back at some of kskunk's posts - he covers this stuff really tidily in a way pretty much anyone can take enough from.

 

The guy has over 390 posts. I'm not savvy enough to pick out the ones specifically referencing my question. Are there any links? guess the question is: What's the maximum addressable ROM size for the Jag? It sounds like 4meg.

 

UPDATE: Actually, this link was much more helpful

http://www.atariage.com/Jaguar/faq/index.html

The Jaguar contains two megabytes (16 megabits) of fast page-mode DRAM, in four chips with 512 K each. Game cartridges can support up to six megabytes (48 megabits) of information, and can contain an EEPROM (electrically erasable/programmable read-only memory) chip to save game information and settings. Up to 100,000 writes can be performed with the EEPROM; after that, future writes may not be saved (performance varies widely, but 100,000 is a guaranteed minimum). Depending on use, this limit should take from 10 to 50 years to reach.

Edited July 6, 2012 by theloon

[MAYAman]

sigh.

 

OK, but seems to me some of you aren't following your own rules as per the EULA.

 

I've edited this post because I don't want the mob metallity to take off.

Edited July 6, 2012 by MAYAman

[sh3-rg]

and are condecending as if this were NeoGaf.

 

I'm guessing something really frightening must have happened to you at NeoGaf the way you keep going on about it I'll make a note to steer clear though, thanks for the tip.

 

There are certain people on here that seem to be annoyed that this question was even asked.

 

That's not what's most annoying about this thread. To be fair to everyone who took the time to reply to you, it was a dumb and almost insulting question the way you posed it for obvious reasons. Your subsequent posts suggest you failed to ask the question you wanted answering anyway, and that seems to have upset you rather a lot. At least you now know much more about the differences between Jaguar and NeoGeo...

Edited July 6, 2012 by sh3-rg

[MAYAman]

Nobody was upset, this is an internet message board. No one was trying to ask dumb or insulting questions, hence the reference to NeoGaf as everyone there is uptight and takes all this way to seriously, like you're doing right now. It was a simple, maybe to simple a question about the capabilities of the Jaguar. Even now in your response to me you're trying to be witty and condecending. Whatever makes you feel better. To be honest, I still don't understand why you're annoyed, if anything I should be annoyed with you for derailing the thread by attacking me to begni with. And for the record, again, I'm probably one of the bigger Jaguar fans out there, have actually met the Tramiels, and several of the original programming team in Sunnyvale and have almost every Jag game except BS G which still eludes me. I'm just tired of always having to answer to people who take all this so serious as to insult someone because they didn't present their question to their lofty expectations.

 

And yes, I now know more about the Jag than I did before.

Edited July 6, 2012 by MAYAman

[sh3-rg]

To be honest, I still don't understand why you're annoyed

 

Because your question was answered pretty well. Then for whatever reason you chose to go off on one about people "getting a grip" and comparing AA Jaguar forum to some forum you clearly don't think too much of. That was probably it.

[Austin]

I'm guessing something really frightening must have happened to you at NeoGaf the way you keep going on about it I'll make a note to steer clear though, thanks for the tip.

 

Yeah, they are pretty harsh over there. The Jag community has got nothing on them in that regard!

[+Gemintronic]

To be honest I never thought to compare the Jag to the Neo Geo. I don't think the Neo Geo could do CyberMorph. I don't think the Jag could do Samurai Spirits. One is pure Arcade hardware and one is pure processing power - DSPs, object processors, etc..

[+rdemming]

So, Zerosquare says that adding RAM to a cart isn't possible. And people point out that massive ROM sizes aren't possible.

 

 

Is the addressable ROM limit a hard one? Sort of like the 4gb limit on 32-bit Windows?

 

RAM on a cartridge is possible but not with the cheap DDR-3 ram chips of today. You need the expensive SRAM chips. The Alpine development cart uses SRAM.

 

The linear address range of the Jaguar cart is 6MB but it is not a hard limit. Using bank-switching you can have in theory multiple giga bytes on a cart if the costs would not make it prohibitive.

 

Even the 4GB limit of 32-bit Windows is not a hard limit. Many processors support Physical Address Extension (PAE) which makes it possible to give each process its own logical 32bit address space in 56bit physical address space.

 

 

B.T.W. The Jaguar chipset supports 4MB of DRAM (2 banks of 2MB and the Jaguar uses only one bank). However adding a second bank of DRAM to the Jaguar is not an easy solder job.

 

Robert

[MAYAman]

To be honest, I still don't understand why you're annoyed

 

Because your question was answered pretty well. Then for whatever reason you chose to go off on one about people "getting a grip" and comparing AA Jaguar forum to some forum you clearly don't think too much of. That was probably it.

 

My gripe to be completely blunt was aimed at you. Nobody else in the thread. And you're proving me right.

 

Again, I don't have anything against you but you're devils advocate alternate viewpoint guy. You did the same thing in the "They don't make games like they used to thread" basically thinking people were to stupid to realize that not all new games suck and that not all old games were great. We know that, it doesn't need to be hammered home. Just pointing out the trend I'm seeing in your posts. Nothing personal.

[+Gemintronic]

Completely unrelated, but, I think I found the perfect image for a Jaguar Troll!