What could have saved the Jag?

[alucardX]

6 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

 

Certainly had some impressive 3D titles to it's credit. 

Notice the changes to the 32x version here. It  does run really nice and it deserves all the credit it gets, no question. But they did lower poly count and true to the original there's no texture mapping. How much faster could Fight for Life had run without texture mapping? There's obviously no comparison gameplay-wise, Virtua Fighter is the superior game.

Edited February 10, 2022 by alucardX
Minor (very) wording change.

[+Stephen]

13 hours ago, JagChris said:

Nah it just had better tools. Those are excruciatingly important. Doom32X is running into a hardware limit of 180x160 for full screen. We already know the Jag can at least beat that. 

Until someone shows the Jag beating that, since it currently has not, it cannot.  People have been speculating about what the Jag could do with it's magical untapped power since 1995.  I can brag and postulate all day long about being able to do a 450 pound bench press.  Until someone sees me actually do it, it's nothing but hot air and bullshit.

[JagChris]

An example would be WMCJ which runs at about 320x200. 

[phoenixdownita]

15 hours ago, roots.genoa said:

I didn't mention it on the topic about moments that wowed us, but I think Star Wars Arcade on 32X was my first experience of 60 fps in a 3D game (at least on a home system). The framerate is of course not always that high mind you, but I think it was not locked so during missions in (empty) space, sometimes you would see a lone Tie Fighter passing by in an incredibly fluid way, and that was quite surreal... ?

are you sure it's even close to 60 FPS? 

 

https://segaretro.org/Star_Wars_Arcade#Versions

 

"When brought to the 32X, Star Wars Arcade saw a significant downgrade in polygon counts alongside the expected drop in resolution. All scenery, effects and spacecraft in the game are affected, with the 32X also struggling to keep a locked frame rate when faced with busy scenes, resulting in noticeable slowdown, particularly in indoor areas (as opposed to the Model 1's, rarely-wavering 60FPS). These cuts can drastically change the feel of certain levels; for example, a lack of asteroids in the opening stage means the 32X version is more empty than its arcade counterpart.

The 3D layer of graphics targets 30FPS, which it usually hits when flying through space. Most of the time, however, the game operates closer to 20FPS, though will drop lower in certain circumstances (such as when flying on the surface of the death star).

Cinematics are generally shorter on the 32X as well. To partially make up for the omissions, there is a special "32X mode" which extends the levels and offers more challenge than the base "arcade" mode."

[phoenixdownita]

On 2/9/2022 at 8:49 PM, Lostdragon said:

What's mentioned in these pages seems to suggest the 32X hardware was indeed designed with 3D in mind, it simply did it in a different manner than the one used by the Saturn. 

 

 

... honestly the thing the SH2 had to help with 3D acceleration is support for multiply-and-accumulate (you know, sum-of-products to help with math mul  https://segaretro.org/images/2/2c/SH7604_Hardware_Manual.pdf mention on Page3, and also a DIVU unit) and of course fast enough CPUs can always resort to SW rendering (Doom ran on a 486, no 3D accel needed, so did Quake although it really liked a Pentium), the Jag had mat-mul support ( check https://www.hillsoftware.com/files/atari/jaguar/jag_v8.pdf page 42, plus of course the Gouraud shading support ... my take on CRY colorspace is just a way to "compress" so one saves on bandwidth  but it appears it helps with Gouraud according to

).

Neither of the above is the 3D acceleration we came to appreciate later on PSX, N64 etc... where more and more of the 3D rendering pipeline was offloaded to HW. But 32X and Jag do have some small primitives ... obviously much more was needed, even Intel tried with the MMX [a set of vector instructions to speed up some parallel computation] but it was a fart in the wind compared to what a Voodoo1 could do (both launched in 1996 btw).

So told yes 32X and Jaguar do show a pointer to 3D support (however in its infancy), I have not looked at the 3DO so I can't tell but I like to assume so (note that the Acorn Archimedes with just the Arm processor was showing a few 3D tricks already).
The CD32 had nothing, then again if you install a 030@50Mhz, a 040@40 or the beast 060@50/75 you can see even the CD32/Amiga line can show off decent software rendered 3D (here is a three way comparison with adding fastmem to a CD32 and then also 030@50, it's timelinked to Guardian but there's other 3D games shown

).

Note that by this time consoles were still targeting 320x200 [or 240] (Saturn has VF2 in high res, and PS1 has Tobal No 1 just as examples of hires), it would take the Dreamcast to move us solid in 480i (the SH4 obviously has specific support for some graphics instructions https://retrocdn.net/images/6/61/SH-4_32-bit_CPU_Core_Architecture.pdf check page 152 worth a quick look as it tells where the instructions described are useful) and of course it had a powerful GPU ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR#Series2_(NEC) ), obviously PC went 480 since 1996 when Voodoo1 launched and the landscape on PC was never the same (there were previous attempts with in-between results, but 3dfx showed the way forward thanks to the beautiful bilinear filtered textures, I was so hooked when I played Tomb Raider).

[phoenixdownita]

12 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

You can look at 32X Doom Resurrection for prove that the original was rushed to market. 

....

Maybe, I look at the 32X doom resurrection as the triumph of 28 years of intervening SW development and the ingenuity of very smart and capable modern developers.
I do not believe the results they are able to achieve now were "commonplace" back then and as such easily obtainable, granted something better could have come out but other than "no windowsbar" the 32X Doom is not so bad imho there's always the 3DO as "worse" which I am sure could get a modern treatment as well (at the smallest windows size it is actually reasonably fast, but what is that? 100x80 pixels?) and I don't really like the SNES port, SuperFX2/GSU2 seemed not enough of an acceleration here.

Obviously I like 32X Doom Resurrection, job very well done indeed.
 

[JagChris]

15 minutes ago, phoenixdownita said:

Maybe, I look at the 32X doom resurrection as the triumph of 28 years of intervening SW development and the ingenuity of very smart and capable modern developers.
I do not believe the results they are able to achieve now where "commonplace" back then and as such easily obtainable, granted something better could have come out but other than "no windowsbar" the 32X Doom is not so bad imho there's always the 3DO as "worse" which I am sure could get a modern treatment as well (at the smallest windows size is actually reasonably fast, but what is that? 100x80 pixels?) and I don't really like the SNES port, SuperFX2/GSU2 seemed not enough of an acceleration here.

Obviously I like 32X Doom Resurrection, job very well done indeed.
 

 

Victor didn't even own a 32X when he started. He wasn't even part of the community. This isn't a guy who had 25+ years to learn the system.

 

He probably got some advice along the way but I don't believe it's  going to explain how he had JagDoom up and running so fast with 3D monsters and more levels. Sega had a team. They just rushed.

[phoenixdownita]

19 minutes ago, JagChris said:

 

Victor didn't even own a 32X when he started. He wasn't even part of the community. This isn't a guy who had 25+ years to learn the system.

 

He probably got some advice along the way but I don't believe it's  going to explain how he had JagDoom up and running so fast with 3D monsters and more levels. Sega had a team. They just rushed.

Sure but there's been quite a few advancements in programming techniques, tools and knowledge on how to deal with multiprocessors etc... since 1994, I am not sure in 1994 split screen doom on a 32x was something they could have pulled out ... again there was some rushing but comparing what we can do today (even with a one man band) is a little unfair, .... afaik the id guys did not develop it to be multiprocessor (sorry this is my speculation, I have not looked at the code but given the PC of the times were single proc I assume the code does not even try to setup multiproc rendering).

At any rate the 32x doom resurrection team did an awesome and very impressive job, and I don't want to minimize their accomplishments one bit.

[JagChris]

@phoenixdownita it's probably a little of both. Perhaps they couldn't have figured split screen but I believe they could have done much better than they did.

[Lostdragon]

3 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

Maybe, I look at the 32X doom resurrection as the triumph of 28 years of intervening SW development and the ingenuity of very smart and capable modern developers.
I do not believe the results they are able to achieve now were "commonplace" back then and as such easily obtainable, granted something better could have come out but other than "no windowsbar" the 32X Doom is not so bad imho there's always the 3DO as "worse" which I am sure could get a modern treatment as well (at the smallest windows size it is actually reasonably fast, but what is that? 100x80 pixels?) and I don't really like the SNES port, SuperFX2/GSU2 seemed not enough of an acceleration here.

Obviously I like 32X Doom Resurrection, job very well done indeed.
 

I'll expand on why everything seems to point to 32X Doom being rushed. 

 

 

1)It was coded in a very short timescale in order to be ready for the essential Xmas market and it shows. 

 

The  BFG9000 is missing in the actual game, yet it is documented in the game's manual, and the number "7" still exists on the status bar.

 

You can I believe access it via a cheat code? 

 

2) This Quote:

 

 

"I  spent weeks working with Id Software’s John Carmack, who literally camped out at the Sega of America building in Redwood City trying to get Doom ported. That guy worked his ass off and he still had to cut a third of the levels to get it done in time.

What amazes me now is that with all that going on, nobody at Sega was willing to say "Wait a minute, what are we doing? Why don’t we just stop?" Sega should have killed the 32X in the spring of 1994, but we didn’t. We stormed the hill, and when we got to the top we realized it was the wrong damn hill.

”
— Scot Bayless, Senior Producer at Sega of America 

3)I can't find my sources now, probably we're on my old ipad which went the way of bionic vs Kung Fu and died ? but seem to remember claims Sega continued working on 32X Doom code after the game was released, which implies they had further plans for it, had the 32X been more successful. 

 

Also aren't there something like 16 different prototypes available for 32X Doom??? 
 

 

 

[Lostdragon]

Slight side note. 

 

I'm not implying this would of done anything to 'save' the Jaguar but.. 

 

Rob Nicholson of Mr Micro (who handled the ST and Amiga conversions of the original), said Elite II:Frontier was definitely portable to the Jaguar and would easily of fitted on a Jaguar cartridge, but David Braben wanted to keep tighter reigns on it, than he did the original. 

 

 

 

I've always preferred the plain polygon Amiga version to the texture mapped PC version myself. 

 

 

 

 

Given that HMS apparently used a version of Elite to test the Panther dev kits and they presented Atari with an early demo of Elire running on the Lynx, but Atari didn't want to pay for the licence, I just so wish they'd been tasked with bringing the game to the Jaguar, instead of wasting resources on Kasumi Ninja. 

 

[ArneCRosenfeldt]

John Carmack admitted that it was a fault to ignore the quad hardware on 3do and saturn .. instead he insisted on a reduced resolution. I bet that quads at full resoulution would not look worse. At least for the walls you can cut them for correct height and the corners, and you can stack them for a repeated texture. The Jag cannot wrap around in texture space and JC stacked the textures here already.

I don't know why JC could not fit the quads into the visiplanes. You start with your column coverage buffer and a grid of the tiles of the texture and then you need to cut the back borders using rectangular tiles. At some point of subdivision it becomes faster just to fill in using the ARM.

Lobotomy software had this all prepared already, didn't they?

[+CyranoJ]

7 minutes ago, ArneCRosenfeldt said:

Lobotomy software had this all prepared already, didn't they?

This bollocks just writes itself.  We certainly could use a Lobotomy around here.

[roots.genoa]

5 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

are you sure it's even close to 60 FPS? 

 

https://segaretro.org/Star_Wars_Arcade#Versions

 

"When brought to the 32X, Star Wars Arcade saw a significant downgrade in polygon counts alongside the expected drop in resolution. All scenery, effects and spacecraft in the game are affected, with the 32X also struggling to keep a locked frame rate when faced with busy scenes, resulting in noticeable slowdown, particularly in indoor areas (as opposed to the Model 1's, rarely-wavering 60FPS). These cuts can drastically change the feel of certain levels; for example, a lack of asteroids in the opening stage means the 32X version is more empty than its arcade counterpart.

The 3D layer of graphics targets 30FPS, which it usually hits when flying through space. Most of the time, however, the game operates closer to 20FPS, though will drop lower in certain circumstances (such as when flying on the surface of the death star).

Cinematics are generally shorter on the 32X as well. To partially make up for the omissions, there is a special "32X mode" which extends the levels and offers more challenge than the base "arcade" mode."

It's impossible to know, of course, but I meant the framerate got quite "high" (for the time) for short bursts. It was probably 30 fps only, yes, but it was already impressive back in the day on a home system I guess.

[saboteur]

28 minutes ago, CyranoJ said:

This bollocks just writes itself.  We certainly could use a Lobotomy around here.

"i'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy"

[Lostdragon]

On 2/8/2022 at 10:49 PM, Bill Loguidice said:

Agreed. I think it's more like kick-ass on the 2D first and foremost (the strength of the platform) and be strategic with the 3D releases (its secondary prowess). As we know, Atari as a corporate philosophy was get the 3D games out there even if they're broken or run in single digit framerates. Combined with mediocre 2D games, that's how you make your system a running joke when it's actively on the market and for years thereafter.

Been thinking back to the very early days after Atari had announced the Jaguar and everyone under strict NDA's, so very little concrete details were coming out about what the Jaguar was capable of and where Atari would be putting it's emphasis on.. 

 

 

Didn't Bob Brodie initially promote the hardware on it's abilty for realtime manipulation high-resolution digitized images over existing systems like the Sega Genesis, Sega CD and SNES? 

 

You'd no longer be faced with grainy, digitised images of sports stars as you might expect on the Genesis for example, but high colour, high resolution imagery would be standard for Jaguar titles. 

 

As for your point about Atari philosophy on broken 3D games.

 

Karl West Imagitec Design i believe stated the I War engine was built to push untextured polygons, it was Atari that wanted texture mapping and since it was Atari that was paying the bills, they added texture mapping. 

 

 

I remember even the recognised serial bullshitter Martin Hooley at the time, describing Atari as going into complete and absolute mental mode, wanting Imagitec to add lots of custom lighting effects texture mapping etc to the planned Jaguar CD version of Freelancer, just so it could compete with first gen PlayStation and Saturn games and Jaguar just wasn't built for that, so project moved onto the more capable PlayStation.. 

 

 

[phoenixdownita]

16 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

...

I've always preferred the plain polygon Amiga version to the texture mapped PC version myself. 

 

 

 

...

 

...but but but to manage expectations, the A500 version you linked is not running on a stock A500, not even close:

 

I know none of the above has anything to do with the Jag, I just want to make sure we keep in mind what was the actual experience back then on barebone HW .... the A1200 fares better but still laggy.

Point being you need acceleration for decent 3D, CPU acceleration alone is not enough although for 320x200 games may go a long way, as soon as you step up to 640x480 you needed a GPU back then and I suspect even now (720p and 1080p games are hell demanding).
320x200 is about 64KB total with 256colors, 640x480 is about 300KB 256colors (4+times) and so on and so forth.

Not sure a 030@50Mhz with dedicated ram (to get if off the bus, like Amiga accelerators did) would have been what the Jag needed .... I have seen and then forgotten about the coJag arcade games which used an R3000 although Area51 seemed to be doing fine with an EC020@25Mhz .. but I am not sure any of the coJag games deal with 3D in the least so unclear we can extrapolate much ... at any rate I doubt it would have hurt.

[+GoldLeader]

Such a simple answer.

 

Atari Needed MONEY.

 

Then they simply needed:

 

GAMES!  (Good Ones!)

 

Consoles (More Available where/when needed)

 

Dev Tools.

 

Developers.

 

A Good Relationship with 3rd party publishers/developers etc.

 

Distribution.

 

Advertising.

 

 

[JagChris]

Red 5 to @GoldLeader I think you nailed it.

[Lostdragon]

9 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

...but but but to manage expectations, the A500 version you linked is not running on a stock A500, not even close:

 

I know none of the above has anything to do with the Jag, I just want to make sure we keep in mind what was the actual experience back then on barebone HW .... the A1200 fares better but still laggy.

Point being you need acceleration for decent 3D, CPU acceleration alone is not enough although for 320x200 games may go a long way, as soon as you step up to 640x480 you needed a GPU back then and I suspect even now (720p and 1080p games are hell demanding).
320x200 is about 64KB total with 256colors, 640x480 is about 300KB 256colors (4+times) and so on and so forth.

Not sure a 030@50Mhz with dedicated ram (to get if off the bus, like Amiga accelerators did) would have been what the Jag needed .... I have seen and then forgotten about the coJag arcade games which used an R3000 although Area51 seemed to be doing fine with an EC020@25Mhz .. but I am not sure any of the coJag games deal with 3D in the least so unclear we can extrapolate much ... at any rate I doubt it would have hurt.

? That was literally the first YT video of the Amiga version I could find, that didn't have someone talking over the footage, it wasn't intended as a performance indicator, just more along lines of texture mapping wasn't the be all and end all for games. 

 

Point I was badly trying to get across was basically you had some very talented coders, Rob Nicholson, being put to work on some very dreadful projects on the Jaguar (Kasumi Ninja) when they could of been working on much better games. 

 

We never saw how the Jaguar could of handled something like Gunship 2000 compared to say the CD32 as the project was killed so early on. 

 

It's always struck me as such a shame that even the CD32 had titles such as Subwar 2050,Gunship 2000 and Frontier, when the Jaguar had no  real equivalents. 

 

 

It just made the numerical pad on the controller seem rather worthless,since it didn't have the type of games that could really of benifited from it. 

Edited February 12, 2022 by Lostdragon

[ArneCRosenfeldt]

3 hours ago, GoldLeader said:

Such a simple answer.

 

Atari Needed MONEY.

 

Then they simply needed:

 

GAMES!  (Good Ones!)

 

Consoles (More Available where/when needed)

 

Dev Tools.

 

Developers.

 

A Good Relationship with 3rd party publishers/developers etc.

 

Distribution.

 

Advertising.

 

 

Could you not get money from the bank? For PSX and X-box the department got money from other departments ( or does xbox succeed zune ? ). So there could have just as well a partnership between Atari ( for the existing game franchise, Konix for the blitter, some banks for the money ). CBM and atari got no money from the banks because they lost against the IBM clones for PCs, and western companies had a problem with their relationship to developers compared to Japanes hardware manfuacturers. I don't really know how Microsoft did it. Maybe their windows business already taught them how to communicate with other devs. AmigaOs nor TOs was widely used for business due to all the quirks.

[Lostdragon]

1 hour ago, ArneCRosenfeldt said:

Could you not get money from the bank? For PSX and X-box the department got money from other departments ( or does xbox succeed zune ? ). So there could have just as well a partnership between Atari ( for the existing game franchise, Konix for the blitter, some banks for the money ). CBM and atari got no money from the banks because they lost against the IBM clones for PCs, and western companies had a problem with their relationship to developers compared to Japanes hardware manfuacturers. I don't really know how Microsoft did it. Maybe their windows business already taught them how to communicate with other devs. AmigaOs nor TOs was widely used for business due to all the quirks.

Off the top of my head, I can't remember how much Sam Tramiel had said had been set aside for marketing the Jaguar, but the sum was peanuts compared to the sums Sega and Nintendo were spending, never mind Sony. 

 

 

There were claims  that  Atari's entire Jaguar budget for a year, was less than the advertising budget Sega had set aside just for the Saturn. 

 

 

Atari did get money, didn't they get something like $90 million due to the patent dispute settlement with Sega? 

 

 

But their resources were an absolute pittance compared to what the other players could bring and had been for years. 

 

 

They went with magazine advertising over TV commercials for the Lynx as it was the cheaper option. 

 

[agradeneu]

On 2/10/2022 at 6:06 PM, alucardX said:

We're not sure that the Jaguar couldn't have pulled this off. That looks really low resolution, low color and the frame rate does look like it's dipping at times. To me that looks like a bunch of flat shaded polygons with really low poly count too. Also, there are very few animation frames when tie fighters explode. That might have been due to cart space...I have no idea. The artists just knew how to deal with those limitations really well. Honestly though, does it look all that much better than this?:

 

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Br3araX_FZw

 

 

Yes, much better!

[phoenixdownita]

On 2/11/2022 at 10:04 PM, GoldLeader said:

Such a simple answer.

 

Atari Needed MONEY.

 

Then they simply needed:

 

GAMES!  (Good Ones!)

 

Consoles (More Available where/when needed)

 

Dev Tools.

 

Developers.

 

A Good Relationship with 3rd party publishers/developers etc.

 

Distribution.

 

Advertising.

 

 

You mean they didn't have much to begin with?

[phuzaxeman]

On 2/9/2022 at 6:18 AM, phoboz said:

The design was very innovative from a technological perspective. 5 processor system with a shared bus. 2 custom RISC cores, as opposed to the path every SoC designer takes today, e.g. to get licensed ARM, or MIPS cores in there.

 

The problem is that there wasn't enough effort, nor prestige in the software development area. I heard (rumors) that a software developer had the same status as a person who assembles a cartridge (e.g. they are both into assembly ?)

In terms of the internals yes, but the nothing was shown in terms of the games.  The whole 64bit advertising was all hype.  But the brand loyalty and hype led me to purchase the jag in its release.