ANY NEW JAGUAR DEVELOPMENT?

[Matthias]

Hi!

 

I gave your sample code to two fairly bright nonprogrammers to read the instructions and tell me if they could make a CD. They both called back and told me that they didn't think they understood the instructions and they would have to be more clear.

 

I stand by my statement that someone with no programming skills would find it difficult to make a CD for the Jaguar.

 

I wouldn't say that "programming skills" are necessary. But you need some sense about the environment in which you are working, like how to handle the output of DOS-based tools.

 

I for myself tend to stumble over the SCSI-bus-ID when calling CDRecord , the description i follow says something like "0,3,0", while i have to use "0,0,0" because i do have IDE-drives only.

 

Best regards,

Matthias

[Matthias]

Hello!

 

The music player is 1.5MB, so it appears that perhaps there's a limit to the size one can use.

 

OK, that's quite big. Still...works for Native...

 

Perhaps i should tell the audience that i (and many other hobby developers) have problems using more than just this "BOOT-Track".

So it was good to see that there seems to be no 64KB-border.

 

What bypass are you booting with? Perhaps one bypass handles the limit in ways differently than another. I made a native CD using your methods and it won't with with the B&C bypass or BSG bypass. I tried them both. It won't work in a developer CD either.

 

Well, that's interesting...I'm using a flash cart and the binary cdbypass.rom which has been floating around for a bit.

 

Stone

 

Ah yes, have i told you all that the underground doesn't have a webportal?

It's possible that each underground-worker uses his own CD-Bypass-image, or assemblers, graphics-tools. Which is ok as long as i don't have a problem with "my" environment.

 

Matthias

[Matthias]

Hello!

 

Just out of plain curiosity for a Jag newbie, why doesn't there seem to be as many homebrew/hacks for the Jag as there is for the 2600?

 

One game I enjoyed on the 2600 was Amidar (or Pepper II on the Colecovision). On the ST I enjoyed Painter by Sinistar Developments. I seem to recall reading that there is a version of Painter out for the Jag but that you have to have a modified Jag to play it. Why is this so? Can't a game like this be treated like the 2600 homebrews/hacks are and burnt onto a cart, a lable put on the cart, and sold on AA?

 

I'm just curious as to why there seem to be a lot of hacks/homebrews for the 2600 and 5200 yet I see nothing for the Jag unless you have a modified Jag to play them on?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Mendon

 

I want to add this:

I got interested into the Jag itself an Jag-developing at the end of 1995 when rumours where floating around that it would be possible to develop for the Jaguar after investing only "little" money compared to the official Atari-DevKit-costs of ~5000 USD. Some weeks later i sent in my JagServer to Roine Stenberg which modified it and added his JagServer.

Half a year later Bastian Schick released his BJL-system to the public,

which had the advantage to be independant from the ROM-port of the ST-computer series. But at that time it Atari was leaving the market and stopped producing cards. For about 4 years there was no hope that a game would ever run on a unmodified Jaguar, because the cards and the CDs need to have some kind of encryption to run on stock machines.

I think that this hopeless situation kept a lot of people from developing.

 

Regards

Matthias

[Matthias]

Does anyone know of anything new being developed for the Jag? Is anyone developing anything? Any hints, teasers? I mean something significant, not a copy of pac-man or something. (not that that wouldn't be significant, but could be done on a super nes.)

 

Now i know why nobody is waiting for Jagmania

 

Matthias

 

Not true.... I would love to play it (WAKA WAKA...)

 

Hmm, what keeps you from doing so? Don't you have Alpine, BJL or JUGS? Or a CD-Bypass-card, or an Eprom- or FLASH-card?

 

Matthias

[Matthias]

Hello Lars, Paolo!

 

Hi !

 

Now i know why nobody is waiting for Jagmania

 

Matthias

 

Oh no, no! I just thought it was a programming exercise, so you were leavint it that way. Sure I would like to have it in a complete form, with lots of music, different backgrounds and mazes, more animated sprites...

 

I can't wait for a good compilation of classics' remakes (Lars? where's your ballgame?)

 

Keep up the good job, guys!

Ciao!

 

To Matthias: I'm always surprised when I play Jagmania how much fun it is. I'm not sure why (never played a pac man game much before), but it is very much fun to play. A finished version would be great !

 

I think the fun comes from the "-ia" enhancement (the difference between PacMan and PcaMania): You can beat the ghosts by jumping over them.

 

Matthias

[Matthias]

Hello Dan!

 

Just a few things that you may want to think about Starcat:

 

- I'm a huge Jaguar fan, but have never been able to get my own BJL or JUGS system to work properly.

 

So you are selling things (The BJL-Eproms) which don't work for you?

How brave

 

- Perhaps finishing off Ball Game and talking to some other developers and making a cartridge that would be a combo of smaller, 2600 style games would be a feasible thing.  I'd be interested in purchasing a Ball Game / Jagmania / JagPainter / ???? cartridge or CD for a price.  Maybe a CD with all four for $20.00 or $25.00.  If you are interested, I know some resources to do this

 

What i am always wondering about is: Would people really buy these games when they could have played the 80%-finished versions since months or years for free?

 

Regards

Matthias

[Mendon]

What i am always wondering about is: Would people really buy these games when they could have played the 80%-finished versions since months or years for free

 

As I said in an earlier post, I'd be happy to buy a cart/CD with Jagmania, Painter, Ball Game, etc on it.

 

At the moment, I only have my Jag and Jag CD. I'm purchasing Protector SE soon so will be able to play these games, and will perhaps look into getting a cable also for transferring games from my PC to Jag. But for pure convinence I'd purchase a cart or CD with these games on them.

 

Mendon

[MGSnake15]

Hi,

I'm developing a game called

 

YOUR MOM

 

*runs out*

[MacGurl]

Thunderbird has rubbed off on Matthias, now he's talking to himself

[t.skid]

Thunderbird has rubbed off on Matthias, now he's talking to himself

 

[walter_J64bit]

Is anyone looking at this Thread?

[t.skid]

Does anyone know of anything new being developed for the Jag? Is anyone developing anything? Any hints, teasers? I mean something significant, not a copy of pac-man or something. (not that that wouldn't be significant, but could be done on a super nes.)

 

Now i know why nobody is waiting for Jagmania

 

Matthias

 

Not true.... I would love to play it (WAKA WAKA...)

 

Hmm, what keeps you from doing so? Don't you have Alpine, BJL or JUGS? Or a CD-Bypass-card, or an Eprom- or FLASH-card?

 

Matthias

 

.... Not yet. I wish I have an Alpine, but it's not so cheap, as you know. For BJL, I need to buy a 'dedicated' Jag console, to modify it and let my other Jaguar consoles 'originals' (and, consider I'm not really able with solder...). About JUGS, I hope to have it in next months, as for BS:G

[Thunderbird]

Hi Starcat,

 

Jaguar Community United is a PURE Fan group. It was created after old the website was taken offline. So they decided to move to yahoo.

 

EJagTeam are European coders, but NOT UGD. Afterall UGD also has just as many US members as european.

 

Jaguar Homebrew is the same as the Jaguar Playtesting list. It's for fans with a hobby dev kit that would like to test new binarys that developers release to the group sometimes. It's no developers list.

 

This is the problem I see with the group. If a person interested in programming the Jaguar wants to look for information or mailing lists or groups, he would do the exact same searches as I performed and come up with the exact same results. Those results give a newcomer the impression that very few people are doing work on the Jaguar and very little information is available. I think it is misleading to people to have a group which is not easy to locate. If that's how the members decided to run the group then that's fine, but I disagree with the idea because it would be discouraging to a person who was new to the Jaguar and the Jaguar would be losing potential developers.

[Thunderbird]

Hi again Matthias,

 

1. I didn't knew that JUGS allows to download/upload E2prom-data. This is the first time i hear about it.

2. Do you really want the user to save or to restore the E2prom-content each time he/she wants to change his favorite CD-based or JUGS-uploaded game?

 

This is the first time I mentioned it, since currently only the server side supports the ability. The PC loader utility does not have support for the feature. The concept was that people could make backups of their EEPROM data and have multiple save-games for different users. It was the alternative solution I came up with when the original BS came out and the 2K EEPROMS were not available for us to use multiple saves with. But there was too much work to be done on other aspects of the game and this feature was never exploited. A lot of thought went into these things behind the scenes.

 

Don't forget that even if we would use this upload/download-functionality we would have to change some part of the program to access the 2K-Eeprom instead of the 128byte-Eeprom. And if we change this, why shouldn't we try to solve this inconvinience (the need for upload/download) at the same time?

 

I'm not sure what you mean.BSG has 2K EEPROM support built into it, and no version of BS has a 128 byte EEPROM.

[Thunderbird]

Hey Matthias,

 

At the beginning of February i had contacted you to get you involved in the process of discussing/laying out the E2prom-access-functions. And our email-exchange was quite satisfying for me. At the end we came to a state where i have inivited you to join the mailing-list of the underground and you said that you would consider it. Till now i didn't get a statement about your decision. And if you you just tried to subscribe to the mailing-list and failed, then you could have told me this.

 

I heard about the list from someone else last summer and sent an email to the address to subscribe then. Nothing ever came back, so I thought I had a wrong address or the list was obsolete. When you told me in February I tried a second time with the email you gave to me. Nothing happened for several weeks, so I made another attempt and got no answer. I've seen quite a bit of animosity and venom directed towards me on this site, from some folks claiming to be in the group, so I assumed that the group must have taken a vote decided to ignore my requests.  

 

Since we were abandoned by Atari and screwed by Tom and others along the way, we have become pretty self-sufficient, and so not being welcomed into the group has never been a hinderance in the past, so I didn't pursue this with you. I had put some work into getting together some of the things you said the group was looking for, and since they didn't want me I figured it was their loss.

 

I would like to point out that I have openly discussed the difficulties I have had in subscribing to the group or even finding information about the group online, and thus far nobody has responded with any assistance or links.  

 

I find it very disappointing that you now (8 weeks later) still haven't taken the chance to tell us your objections directly, but have decided to list them here where most of the people don't know about the technical background.

I am coordinating a number of my own projects and trying to assemble a second prototype of the Jag keyboard, develop a final version of the driver and finalize everything for you to use with Contiki, and all these things have taken a lot of my spare time, so I didn't go out of my way to discuss the standard with the group that didn't seem to want me to join. Time is limited, and I was putting it towards prorities. I'm not in a point in my personal projects where I need to apply any EEPROM storage, so it's not high on my list of things to do yet.

 

I hope you understand it's not personal.

[Thunderbird]

Hey again Matthias,

Again, Doug, i can't understand why you insist that you don't know how to become a member of the mailing-list. I can understand that you had your "problems" before february 2003, but not after this.

 

Like I said before. I emailed to the address you gave me and asked to subscribe. Nothing came back. I tired from different ISPs in case that there was a problem with my email. What more can I do?

[Thunderbird]

Matthias and Stone, and Gordon (Since you all asked the same thing in email or on here in the past day),

 

As you say, their might be reasons that Atari has documented the 64KB-limit.

 

But from my own experience (which includes converting homebrew files with sizes up to the size of Native ~= 1080 KB), it doesn't hurt to ignore this limit. And i know a lot of people with the same experiences.

 

My understanding is that the 64K limit is there because there are different Jaguar BIOS ROMS, and they handle memory allocation differently. I worked with Atari and am familiar with the way they do things. They would never have put in such a warning unless there was a reason to do so.

 

Just because you tried it and it worked for some programs you found is no guarantee it won't crash on some combination of hardware that Atari was protecting you from with the 64K limit.

 

Also, there's a possibility that the problem doesn't show up just by luck. Suppose that the BIOS writes some scratchpad values to RAM just after the 64K buffer it allocates for the CD. Perhaps the values that are written there merely write over some code and create changes to the code that don't show up easily? What if the modified code is something that happens only rarely in the program (like if you reach a million points in score). The program can crash after 2 hours of play because it seemed to work when you just tested it out. Perhaps even the modified bytes of code are just some data like a bitmap or a sound sample? You might not notice that a few pixels are the wrong color or a few bytes of a sound sample are wrong at 44KHz playback. Who knows, the data that is corrupt may be inside the BSS segment of the code you loaded and the changed data is not important.

 

The point I make here is that the reason for the 64K limit may be very obscure, and only happen in certain conditions, but I don't want to write code that has an opportunity to fail because I break a rule that was specifically laid out. It might work 99 times out of 100, but the one customer who buys my program and it doesn't work on his setup is going to be left with a bad experience. He might send the CD back and I replace it thinking it has some surface defect and the customer has the same problem with a new CD. Now I have to refund his money and he has a bad experience and no CD to enjoy.

 

The idea that we can violate the 64K limit just because it worked when it was tested is dangerous. It's like overclocking a CPU or running a 9V console on a 12V power supply. It may work a little, but the risk of problems is very high.

 

There's a lot more bypasses out there that follow the 64K spec (BSG, Developer BIOS, B&C, and Bypass for FlashROM) than there are that don't follow the spec (P:SE). So, I'm not sure why anyone would go through the trouble to make a CD and not just put a <64K boot loader in it like the spec says to. How do you think the ScatoLOGIC Demo CD works? It boots according to the spec. At some point I can even make a booter for everyone to use if you can't figure it out. It makes the CD boot on everything.

 

One last thing... if you follow the spec and install the boot loader and do everything as requested by the docs, then when the CD encryption process is cracked there will not need to be any changes to make your CD boot on the standard player with no bypass. It can just have the encryption info added to the last track and you make more CDs.

 

If the specs are violated, it could be possible that it won't pass encryption because it lacks the right number of sessions or tracks or whatever the proper format is for encryption. Who can know for sure? It's best to do what the spec says if there's some doubt.

[Thunderbird]

Matthias,

But if you mean it serioulsy, then i hope you'll remember your own words and don't bash my release of "GameX: Part I" which will come on a PCB looking like a triangle with a single 2MB-FLASH-chip (and an E2prom of course) with an estimated price of 12.95 USD (Sorry, the Dollar is weak currently) send to customers without box, manual or Joypad-overlay.

 

I don't know if you are being serious about this project or not. The concept of selling cheap games with no boxes or manuals is something that people have asked about in the past, but it's not something I enjoy. In addition to the programming of Jaguar games, the fun I get from developing comes from making professional looking boxes and manuals and extras. I don't get pleasure out of making incomplete projects. To me it's like spending years making a custom car and then not painting it. I don't mind that other people wouldn't care about boxes or manuals, but I don't enjoy this and I basically make Jaguar products for the fun of it. If it's not fun for me then I don't do it.

 

 

 

I asked these things to show that a game-production isn't finished when the Eprom-image is ready to be burned.

And if companies would reply with real price-estimations, Jag-fans could see how much money is spent for things from which the developer/publisher can't benefit.

 

It's hard to estimate prices, since you don't have any quantities specified. For example, 100 boxes could cost you as little as $15.00 each. You could probably get 500 for $8.00 each. If you worked with a company that already had the cutting die from a previous Jaguar project, then you could get $3.00-4.00 off the price of each box. If you combined several project boxes into one order, you could cut the price way down. It's all relative to the amount of product you buy at one time, and also the time of year you request printing too. Just after Christmas is a good time that's not busy and you might be able to get a much better deal.

 

You can also look around and try to find a place that will just print and cut for you and not fold or glue. This is a HUGE pain in the butt though, and I wouldn't recommend it. Some people even ask just for printing and cut/fold/glue by hand... this takes FOREVER. If you have no life, you can save this way as well.

[Thunderbird]

Thunderbird has rubbed off on Matthias, now he's talking to himself

 

Hi MacGurl! (Not talking to self)

 

How are you today?

[t.skid]

You can also look around and try to find a place that will just print and cut for you and not fold or glue. This is a HUGE pain in the butt though, and I wouldn't recommend it. Some people even ask just for printing and cut/fold/glue by hand... this takes FOREVER. If you have no life, you can save this way as well.

 

Yeah, you are right. You could do it for your boxless carts, but sure not for release a game. It will drive you mad!

[Thunderbird]

Hello,

 

Now I can see some misunderstanding...

 

I don't know why this group is in "stealth" mode. You'd think they would want to get the word out. In all the Jaguar sites I go to, I don't think I ever saw a link or a banner ad for any of these groups. Nobody ever emailed me and asked to put an ad up on the ScatoLOGIC site.  

Well the group is for developers, and does not "advertise" anything,

we're not selling anything, or boasting about our work. One of the

self-imposed rules is to keep the group "hype free" generally, as

Jaguar fans we've seen enough vapourware come and go. We are

not a team, we are just individual developers helping each other...

Nobody competes with each other, and membership is by invitation.

 

I think this is the problem. Your "invitation only" policy is making the Jaguar development community gather in secret and gives the distinct impression to anyone outside that there's no coordination or sharing of information, no place to gather, and no place for anyone to learn about development...

 

It just takes a simple google search and a person can find all sorts of groups and links to developing for the Dreamcast or the 2600, etc.

 

Why is it that the Jaguar underground must work behind closed doors in secret?

 

I really think it's turning away potential developers.

 

I bet if you asked that Atari Age could probably even host a BB for underground developers. Perhaps it could be set up so people could read but not post unless they were members (like the other boards here).

[Matthias]

Hi!

 

Hmm, what keeps you from doing so? Don't you have Alpine, BJL or JUGS? Or a CD-Bypass-card, or an Eprom- or FLASH-card?

 

Matthias

 

.... Not yet. I wish I have an Alpine, but it's not so cheap, as you know. For BJL, I need to buy a 'dedicated' Jag console, to modify it and let my other Jaguar consoles 'originals' (and, consider I'm not really able with solder...). About JUGS, I hope to have it in next months, as for BS:G

 

No problem, but to be honest: When i started the reply i had only BJL and JUGS in mind and at the end i had a list of 6 different methods (+ agServer, + JagOS (-> the french solution)) which would allow people to play homebrew games which aren't available on cartridge.

 

Perhaps this is the reason nobody burns the games on cartds

 

Matthias

[Matthias]

Hi Doug!

 

Hi again Matthias' date='

 

Don't forget that even if we would use this upload/download-functionality we would have to change some part of the program to access the 2K-Eeprom instead of the 128byte-Eeprom. And if we change this, why shouldn't we try to solve this inconvinience (the need for upload/download) at the same time?

 

I'm not sure what you mean.BSG has 2K EEPROM support built into it, and no version of BS has a 128 byte EEPROM.

 

I didn't meant ClassicBS of course, i meant the common standard Atari PCBs (Alpine, FLASH, game-cartridges).

Developers were tied to these 128bytes for many years, so they wrote highscore-routines which access these 128byte-E2proms. 2K-E2proms need some change (in the low-level-part) to get accessed, that's what i meant.

 

Matthias

[Matthias]

Hello Thunderbird!

 

Sorry if the indention of the Quoting is lost, but i want to comment some multiple-indented things.

 

Hey Matthias' date='

At the beginning of February i had contacted you to get you involved in the process of discussing/laying out the E2prom-access-functions. And our email-exchange was quite satisfying for me. At the end we came to a state where i have inivited you to join the mailing-list of the underground and you said that you would consider it. Till now i didn't get a statement about your decision. And if you you just tried to subscribe to the mailing-list and failed, then you could have told me this.

I've seen quite a bit of animosity and venom directed towards me on this site' date=' from some folks claiming to be in the group, so I assumed that the group must have taken a vote decided to ignore my requests.

[/quote']

 

Doug, do you really think that we are playing games with you?

I told you in that it was a "official" inivitation from the group, do you really think that we give you our "secret" mailing-list address only to watch your attempts to get on it?

 

At that time we both had exchanged two or three mails per day, if it didn't work for you, why didn't you tell me?

 

Since we were abandoned by Atari and screwed by Tom and others along the way' date=' we have become pretty self-sufficient, and so not being welcomed into the group has never been a hinderance in the past, so I didn't pursue this with you. I had put some work into getting together some of the things you said the group was looking for, and since they didn't want me I figured it was their loss.

 

I would like to point out that I have openly discussed the difficulties I have had in subscribing to the group or even finding information about the group online, and thus far nobody has responded with any assistance or links.

[/quote']

 

Ok, but it think this "openly" was only during the last days. You told me all this in our private exchange earlier this year and i gave you the address. Perhaps i should have given you more exact instructions about how to subscribe there, but as said above, i'm always expecting that people having problems with my "hints" would come back and tell me about.

 

I find it very disappointing that you now (8 weeks later) still haven't taken the chance to tell us your objections directly' date=' but have decided to list them here where most of the people don't know about the technical background.

[/quote']

I am coordinating a number of my own projects and trying to assemble a second prototype of the Jag keyboard, develop a final version of the driver and finalize everything for you to use with Contiki, and all these things have taken a lot of my spare time, so I didn't go out of my way to discuss the standard with the group that didn't seem to want me to join. Time is limited, and I was putting it towards prorities. I'm not in a point in my personal projects where I need to apply any EEPROM storage, so it's not high on my list of things to do yet.

 

I hope you understand it's not personal.

 

As said above i wasn't aware that you have tried to get subscribed, and just was expecting that you haven't done your decision. And after 8 weeks it looked to me (and the other members) that you decided not to join. You shouldn't forget that the invitation was especially made to get you involved into the E2prom-access-discussion. About 20 people stopped their discussion and waited for you to join it. And nothing happened.

That's the reason why some of them (including me) got upset about the statements you gave here about the use of the E2prom.

 

Matthias

[Matthias]

Hi!

 

Hey again Matthias,  

Again, Doug, i can't understand why you insist that you don't know how to become a member of the mailing-list. I can understand that you had your "problems" before february 2003, but not after this.

 

Like I said before. I emailed to the address you gave me and asked to subscribe. Nothing came back. I tired from different ISPs in case that there was a problem with my email. What more can I do?

 

Should i say it again?

Tell me about your problems.

 

Matthias