82-T/A Posted January 21, 2013 Share Posted January 21, 2013 I'm a programmer, but I've never really spent a lot of time doing low-level C or Assembly, so I don't know how difficult it would be to port games (aside from dealing with the copyright and licensing issues). But I wonder how difficult it is to port some of these older DOS games to the Jaguar? A couple that I can think of that I know would run AWESOME on the Jaguar... I mean, just awesome, are games like: Ultrabots: Cyber Empires: Realms: DUNE (for CD): Just a few that I can think of that I used to love playing back in the day... would love to see those on the Jag. They more or less "feel" like console games. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fredifredo Posted January 21, 2013 Share Posted January 21, 2013 Realms is very impressive , I played it on Amiga Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MAYAman Posted January 21, 2013 Share Posted January 21, 2013 Panzer General, please make it happen. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marcus Losbjer Posted January 21, 2013 Share Posted January 21, 2013 I would love to see the sega 32x version of Blackthorne, wonder if that game ever was planned for the Jag? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+save2600 Posted January 21, 2013 Share Posted January 21, 2013 Mortal Kombat II and Return Fire. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sh3-rg Posted January 21, 2013 Share Posted January 21, 2013 Pong, Night Stalker, Sabre Wulf, Manic Miner, Spy Hunter, Xevious, R-Type, Nemesis/Gradius, Lode Runner, Hunt The Wumpus... I'm doing it wrong, aren't I...? 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted January 21, 2013 Share Posted January 21, 2013 Every platform needs Manic Miner, Sabre Wulf, Atic Atac and Chuckie Egg. One down and 3 to go! 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CyranoJ Posted January 21, 2013 Share Posted January 21, 2013 I've been saying 'let's make a Sabre Wulf game' for nearly 3 years now..... 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gunstar Posted January 22, 2013 Share Posted January 22, 2013 (edited) Pretty much every 3DO game that was supposed to come out on the Jag, Need For Speed, Road Rash, Wing Commander, Space Hulk, P'Oed, plus a few more. I've finally got 2 of them, Robinson's Requiem and Another World in a few months. Star Fighter, Killing Time and Battlesport that were initially 3DO exclusives (until the system went the way of the Jaguar). There are a bunch of 3D and psuedo 3D Amiga and ST games that should've been updated for the Jag, more sequels to Jag games, if only it lasted another year... Last, but far from least, Iron Soldier 3 for the Jaguar. I really, really want the entire trilogy on the Jaguar, especially since one version is rarer than Battlesphere and requires a rare NUON and the other (which I do have) being on the system that put the final nail in the coffin for the Jaguar: PSX. Edited January 22, 2013 by Gunstar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
82-T/A Posted January 22, 2013 Author Share Posted January 22, 2013 Pretty much every 3DO game that was supposed to come out on the Jag, Need For Speed, Road Rash, Wing Commander, Space Hulk, P'Oed, plus a few more. I've finally got 2 of them, Robinson's Requiem and Another World in a few months. Star Fighter, Killing Time and Battlesport that were initially 3DO exclusives (until the system went the way of the Jaguar). There are a bunch of 3D and psuedo 3D Amiga and ST games that should've been updated for the Jag, more sequels to Jag games, if only it lasted another year... Last, but far from least, Iron Soldier 3 for the Jaguar. I really, really want the entire trilogy on the Jaguar, especially since one version is rarer than Battlesphere and requires a rare NUON and the other (which I do have) being on the system that put the final nail in the coffin for the Jaguar: PSX. What's the NUON? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gunstar Posted January 22, 2013 Share Posted January 22, 2013 (edited) NUON: http://en.wikipedia....(DVD_technology) http://www.thehelper...-discussion.80/ Edited January 22, 2013 by Gunstar Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ACrystal2011 Posted January 22, 2013 Share Posted January 22, 2013 Wild Cup Soccer 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Gemintronic Posted January 22, 2013 Share Posted January 22, 2013 Porting DOS games isn't going to be easy. You might think in terms of "What game was on DOS but also had a version for Atari ST".. For instance, Blood Money would do just fine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted January 22, 2013 Share Posted January 22, 2013 Porting DOS games isn't going to be easy. You might think in terms of "What game was on DOS but also had a version for Atari ST".. It depends if you can get the source and how old the game is. If its a later DOS days game it'll most likely have been written in "C" or PASCAL (in some cases) with assembly language patches for the computationally intensive and speed critical stuff. If that is the case then you need to replace the x86 assembler with jag specific stuff and then profile the rest to see where the bottlenecks are and then coming up with alternate solutions. If its a reverse engineering task (starting from an executable and its data files) its not a job for a novice to convert from one platform to another when they are completely different architectures. Its certainly doable but will be quite time consuming and potentially error prone. It'd probably be easier to analyse the DOS game from playing it and watching slow motion videos of it and then code what you can see from scratch. Then reverse engineer the code and pull out sprite movement tables and AI/logic routines as needed for the things that you can't get right by a visual inspection alone. There is also some work in getting games from the ST or the X68K console going on the jag as well. The amount of work needed really depends on how much you know about the architecture and processors used in the systems. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Gemintronic Posted January 22, 2013 Share Posted January 22, 2013 I'd like to see the wizard that can decompile x86 into 68k and create a VGA driver for the Jag. Not arguing: I really would! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Goochman Posted January 22, 2013 Share Posted January 22, 2013 Virtua Fighter Quake Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyBee Posted January 22, 2013 Share Posted January 22, 2013 I'd like to see the wizard that can decompile x86 into 68k and create a VGA driver for the Jag. Not arguing: I really would! Although its certainly possible to write an emulator for the 286 PC architecture on the jag I'm pretty sure that the frame rate and execution speed of any games running on it would make them unplayable or irritating at best. On a related side note somebody has worked on a Z80 emulator for the 6502 that can run the arcade ROM of Pacman on the C64. The video in that link is a bit misleading because the author engages the emulator's turbo mode . Turbo mode won't be available on the jag . 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moves Like Jaguar Posted January 22, 2013 Share Posted January 22, 2013 Bubsy CD 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtshark7 Posted January 23, 2013 Share Posted January 23, 2013 I would like to see the pc game Blood ported to jag. I'm sure it would take alot of time tho. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ggn Posted January 23, 2013 Share Posted January 23, 2013 Pong, Night Stalker, Sabre Wulf, Manic Miner, Spy Hunter, Xevious, R-Type, Nemesis/Gradius, Lode Runner, Hunt The Wumpus... I'm doing it wrong, aren't I...? Tetris, Helicopter (Flash game), Man goes down, Time pilot, Seaquest, Scramble, Asteroids...... Ohnoes I'm doing it even moar wrong I think! 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sh3-rg Posted January 23, 2013 Share Posted January 23, 2013 A lot of the kinds of games mentioned in this thread, probably made by a team of 5 or more professionals with a year or more of paid employment to invest in them, are simply beyond what's reasonable to expect of the part-time 1 and 2-man teams currently making things for the Jaguar. Some of them are well beyond what the system is even capable of or at best border on "might technically be possible if we do this, this and this instead of this..." kind of scenarios. There's enough time and effort been wasted on what-ifs and what-should-bes concerning Jaguar over the years and it results in nothing productive or positive... that's why these threads are often interesting only in that they show what old games people enjoyed on other platforms (usually PCs with way more resources than a simple Jaguar games console with a 4mb cartridge popped in) compared to what anyone will actually ever produce for our Jaguar. Take a look at some of the more ambitious old game console projects that have been rumoured or announced in the past - there are plenty of examples that barely make it out of the starting blocks or sometimes those that appear to be further along than they actually are when viewing footage or playing an alpha tech demo. Aiming too high is not uncommon and occasionally results in something spectacular...usually, though, it ends less favourably. These are often the types of games with great gameplay depth and/or "wow" visuals that stretch the limits of what already exists or is considered possible of a system and invariably have the fans in raptures. It's not difficult to see why this type of effort fails to materialise so often when you consider the amount of development time that is invested in creating the fun stuff - the "wow" visuals or skynet-rivaling AI or whatever it happens to be to set the game apart. A typical game project would normally see no more than around 10% of time and effort devoted to creating the basic game engine(s) - actually designing the game, balancing it, testing it and producing the tools to make it all happen in an efficient yet creative manner - that's where the vast majority of game development effort really takes place. Unfortunately this is usually something that gamers have little understanding of or ever consider and it's often where some programmers come unstuck due to lack of experience. It's also the reason why many say Jaguar games were "rushed" - instead of adapting or making use of existing game engines, many Jaguar game devs had to spend their time and effort creating the fundamental building blocks of the game. By the time these games were done with and released after a distorted and squeezed development process, there was little chance the tech developed for a game could be made use of future developments and have more time spent actually creating "the game" as the Jaguar had already flopped and there was no 'round two'. This kind of stuff makes a good argument for developing a large or involved game for these kinds of platforms far away from any technical limitations of the archaic hardware itself and instead working within a more creative, comfortable dev environment then re-targeting afterwards. Then personally I'd say why bother, none of that sounds like any fun at all! OK, all that's not directly related to this thread as such, but it covers why many of these styles of games are pretty much beyond what's reasonable to hope to ever see, sitting more in the realms of "I wish". Actually porting these kinds of games is a very different prospect, though. If you have access to all the original code and assets, your job is 'simply' adapting it to a new platform - any compromises and trade-offs should be fairly obvious and your job is no longer such a creative effort, but more about breaking things down and building them back up lego-style... and this is the reason this kind direct porting only appeals to a few coders - most people are not interested if it's something that allows for so little creativity, it's a whole different set of challenges to making something from scratch or even recreating a game from scratch. That doesn't mean that people have to stick to making A8/ST-style games for the Jaguar (as we're quite fond of ). If you want games on the Jag that look technically impressive and show you "Jag Powa" but "2D" (the area everyone knows the Jaguar to be very strong in) does little for you, you need look no further than Dr.Typo's efforts. What that guy does is set the perfect example of how to take on a project that looks the part and also has gameplay to back it up and also results in a released game. And he does all that in a time scale that is more than reasonable. With Tube and Fallen Angels he's taken a couple of what any demo coder worth his salt would call some pretty simple and well documented fx and applied some tight and compelling gameplay to them in a really effective way. Tube's tunnel effect is an adaptation of democoding 101 stuff, but the end result (bar a little level design niggle or two) is really very effective and greater than the sum of it's parts - he clearly understands games as well as programming and that's pretty rare stuff in someone who is doing it just for the fun of it! His FA game takes another tried-and-trusted demo effect, the height-mapped landscape, and couples it with some much-loved Atari 8-bit game play and the results are, again, super effective. Both projects brought about in a reasonable time frame with excellent results by setting out to create something visually impressive but well within the realms of 'doable'. They are both the kinds of games you can pick up and play for 10 or 15 minutes, too, and the kinds of games you can thoroughly test in the same sort of time scale as a more standard 2D game (the gameplay is essentially "2D" - this counts for a lot in development time!). The end result is something that appeals to 30- and 40-somethings who no longer have all day to sit around playing Jaguar like it's 1994. tl;dr version? No point fantasising about what will never be when you can go help create and support what is and will be and have some real fun 9 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sh3-rg Posted January 23, 2013 Share Posted January 23, 2013 Tetris, Helicopter (Flash game), Man goes down, Time pilot, Seaquest, Scramble, Asteroids...... Ohnoes I'm doing it even moar wrong I think! You're reading from the wrong column Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeterG Posted January 23, 2013 Share Posted January 23, 2013 Pong, Night Stalker, Sabre Wulf, Manic Miner, Spy Hunter, Xevious, R-Type, Nemesis/Gradius, Lode Runner, Hunt The Wumpus... I'm doing it wrong, aren't I...? Good list there. So now that the other Bomberman game doesn't seem to see the light of day what about Bomberman/Dynablaster? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drixxel Posted January 24, 2013 Share Posted January 24, 2013 It'd be cool to see some other Amiga games make their way to the Jag, the library would really benefit from more platformers. An arranged version of Turrican 3 with souped up high colour graphics would be... awesome. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christos Posted January 24, 2013 Share Posted January 24, 2013 Amiga games would be much harder to convert than ST ones because one would have to rewrite a lot of the custom chip code. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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