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Upcoming Jaguar Game Drive Cartridge


SainT

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The 16MB RAM on the cart is no faster than any other ROM access -- it will be able to be accessed as 32bit and most likely at the fastest setting (5 cycles) for external ROM. I'm not sure if I'm going to support DMA from the SD to the cart RAM as yet. It may well act like the CD system, so reading from the SD will go via I2S to one of the RISC's.

 

I've got the PCB's through today, so I'll start building one up in the next couple of days. Fun is nearly here. :)

 

Great to hear and look forward to this!

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So, if I interpret it correctly, in terms of data transfer speed, it's going to be the same as if jag had a 16 MB cartridge. While it makes sense (the cart interface is the gate/point of entry anyway), I was hoping this could be engineered as fast as possible.

 

Which it probably is, as some jag game carts had 8-bit pin interface, if I recall correctly.

 

 

Can you remember to post some data transfer benchmark, once you advance to that stage ?

 

Thanks!

 

It is as fast as possible.... the Jaguar is the thing which reads from the cart. A 32bit ROM interface which is accessed at 5 cycles is as fast as is possible with the Jag's memory management.

 

I can certainly post some useful benchmarks when I have things running.

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Will it have the cute little handle too? That would be awesome.

 

Lol, I'm not really sure on the cart shell design. I personally like to make things look modern / clean rather than mimic the original, however I am aware a lot of people like things to look like the original carts.

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Lol, I'm not really sure on the cart shell design. I personally like to make things look modern / clean rather than mimic the original, however I am aware a lot of people like things to look like the original carts.

Im sure you'll come up with something that fits.

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Any idea what kind of price your going to be looking at ? Also how many do you think you'll be able to make, I mean I'm expecting a big demand for this, I can see massive fire sales on eBay incoming too.

 

I will make as many as people want to buy. :) I'm going to try and move to injection molded shells for this cart as the biggest time constraint in making them is actually 3D printing the cart shells. As they get larger, the more time it takes -- the Lynx wasn't too bad, the NeoGeo Pocket is pretty time consuming, but the Jag would just take forever.

 

As for price, I'm really not sure yet. My current guess is around £100 (UK pounds). But I've not priced up the tooling or production costs for injection molded shells, PCB production costs or even part costs yet. So it really is a complete guess.

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Ok, the cart reader / writer part has been built up and is working -- at least it passes preliminary tests of being able to read a couple of different addresses from White Men Cant Jump correctly. Next is building up the bare minimum of the actual memory card to get the flash booter working. Hand soldering lots of tiny chips is mind-numbingly dull! :sleep:

 

post-37728-0-73862200-1501788158.jpg

Edited by SainT
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Hmm, hardware pr0n.

 

Ha, I initially thought you'd sacrificed a White Men Can't Jump cartridge, and thought that may not have been a terrible thing... Really looking forward to the release of this.

 

This is probably too late in the game, but I know there have been a lot of ST ports recently, I wonder how hard it'd be to get an ST emulator layer in this so it could read .ST images off the SD card? I should probably just start buying some of the cartridges that have been ported!

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Hmm, hardware pr0n.

 

Ha, I initially thought you'd sacrificed a White Men Can't Jump cartridge, and thought that may not have been a terrible thing... Really looking forward to the release of this.

 

This is probably too late in the game, but I know there have been a lot of ST ports recently, I wonder how hard it'd be to get an ST emulator layer in this so it could read .ST images off the SD card? I should probably just start buying some of the cartridges that have been ported!

 

Oh no, there's a reassuringly expensive Jaguar edge connector under there! Shipping from Best Electronics to the UK is stupidly expensive. But worth it. ;)

 

I've been thinking about an ST emulator myself, but I don't think its possible. You could generate an interrupt if an address range is written to or read from, but you'd then have to analyse the code that caused the interrupt to see what it was doing then emulate the behavior. Maybe possible...

 

This would require the extra internal developer connector hooked up to the cartridge as well.

 

Still, nice idea. ;)

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The ST angle raises a good question.

 

With the Skunk boards being pretty rare and expensive (I've never seen one let alone been able to bid on one) it seems that there's some untapped potential for your SD Card reader.

 

Will you support the Skunk format and those of other, similar boards?

 

Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk

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The ST angle raises a good question.

 

With the Skunk boards being pretty rare and expensive (I've never seen one let alone been able to bid on one) it seems that there's some untapped potential for your SD Card reader.

 

Will you support the Skunk format and those of other, similar boards?

 

Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk

 

Yes, of course. :)

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I have no knowledge of how to use a Skunk Drive, also I have not been able to get any Jaguar games to run at all on Virtual Jaguar on the Raspberry Pi, and I cannot get Virtual Jaguar to work at all on my laptop (just get a white screen) so I am pretty excited for the SD cart when it comes out, since SainT mentioned it will allow you to just throw roms onto the SD and pop it into the Jaguar. This will be revolutionary for us Jaguar fans that cannot get anything to work on Virtual Jaguar. I'll likely still keep all my carts anyways, I'm currently up to 54 game carts at this time tho this will allow for easier playability vs taking carts in and out of the boxes all the time.

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Oh no, there's a reassuringly expensive Jaguar edge connector under there! Shipping from Best Electronics to the UK is stupidly expensive. But worth it. ;)

 

I've been thinking about an ST emulator myself, but I don't think its possible. You could generate an interrupt if an address range is written to or read from, but you'd then have to analyse the code that caused the interrupt to see what it was doing then emulate the behavior. Maybe possible...

 

This would require the extra internal developer connector hooked up to the cartridge as well.

 

Still, nice idea.

Yeah, I was kind of thinking a CyberCJ. Auto converting .ST images on the fly to Jaguar playing games. Then he could say, "there is a little bit of me in every SainTly Jag."

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Lol, I'm not really sure on the cart shell design. I personally like to make things look modern / clean rather than mimic the original, however I am aware a lot of people like things to look like the original carts.

 

Well in that case, if you could make it so that the screws don't hide behind the label like official Jag carts that'd be great. Only in the interest of disassembly to thoroughly clean the cartridge contacts, personally.

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Any idea what kind of price your going to be looking at ? Also how many do you think you'll be able to make, I mean I'm expecting a big demand for this, I can see massive fire sales on eBay incoming too.

Yeah, just like the massive fire sales that sunk the NES and SNES markets after the Everdrives were introduced. NES games are like $1/ea now, right? Oh and how cheap Neo Geo games are now that the NeoSD is out. Surely this will tank the Jaguar market too! You are quite the market visionary.

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These carts puts more roms in the hands of players. A lot of them will decide they want a physical copy of whatever game.

 

Game prices have not gone down for most of the desirable titles on any system a multi is available for.

 

There would've been tons of threads devoted to that subject if it were true.

 

madman wins!

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I don't think you will ever see an ST emulator for the jaguar.

 

Each of the ports take a hell off a lot more effort than just loading a disk image, despite what some would have you believe about quick and lazy work.

It was more of a joke than anything. You make it look easy with the amount you've cranked out! That was why I was referring to it as a 'CyberCJ'.

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One of the possibilities I'm excited about is if it'd be possible to hack Doom to play CD music. The aiff files are available for the 3DO soundtrack mentioned here: (interesting vid BTW). I can see the Jag homebrew scene becoming really interesting!

 

Edited by juansolo
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