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Quake on the GBA


LianneJaguar64

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9 hours ago, Punisher5.0 said:

So whats the CPU and PPUs doing then? Playing checkers?

On SNES, games with SuperFX Starfox, Doom or even Virtuaracing on Megadrive, the console works like a graphics terminal. The size of the screen also depends essentially on the amount of data that you can transmit during the blanking period rather than on the power of the SuperFX

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2 hours ago, DEATH said:

On SNES, games with SuperFX Starfox, Doom or even Virtuaracing on Megadrive, the console works like a graphics terminal. The size of the screen also depends essentially on the amount of data that you can transmit during the blanking period rather than on the power of the SuperFX

The SuperFX can and often does run in parallel with the CPU.  ?

 

Clone TIA Atari 2600 compatible expansion modules for the ColecoVision and Intellivision are better examples of hardware that transformed a console into a de-facto "terminal" when seated in the cart slot, but the word "terminal" is usually wielded as a clumsy smear in this context. Doesn't matter anyhow, because those weren't game carts.

 

I can't think of any individual game cartridges (off the top of my head) that completely replaced the internal hardware of any given console.

 

Investigate for yourself. There are tools to see what's going on:

https://github.com/devinacker/bsnes-plus

Edited by orange808
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I understand how the SFX chips work and all that (at a high level anyway), but to me it's moot. As an end user, you got a SuperFX sticker on your cartridge but all you cared was that you got a game cartridge that looked and behaved like all the others but had killer (for the time) graphics. They all run on the SNES platform without additional external HW, so to me Doom/StarFox/Stunt Race FX/etc. run on the SNES. Nintendo built an extensible console and had the technical and financial resources to pull off the FX chip (I know they didn't conceive or design the chip internals, but they shepherded it through the game design process and likely handled all the marketing and upfront production costs), and they reaped the reward of these awesome games running on their ancient '16-bit' console.

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2 hours ago, cubanismo said:

I understand how the SFX chips work and all that (at a high level anyway), but to me it's moot. As an end user, you got a SuperFX sticker on your cartridge but all you cared was that you got a game cartridge that looked and behaved like all the others but had killer (for the time) graphics. They all run on the SNES platform without additional external HW, so to me Doom/StarFox/Stunt Race FX/etc. run on the SNES. Nintendo built an extensible console and had the technical and financial resources to pull off the FX chip (I know they didn't conceive or design the chip internals, but they shepherded it through the game design process and likely handled all the marketing and upfront production costs), and they reaped the reward of these awesome games running on their ancient '16-bit' console.

Has anyone ever considered trying to build an SOC into a Jag cart?  Microchips are so cheap these days and insainely powerful - here is a ARM Cortex M4 168mhz with FPU for 13$ https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003633816996.html

 

I know we have some serious hardware engineers on this forum, lets make it happen! SFX got nothin' on JFX chip ?

 

 

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It'd be a cool project, but I think you're underestimating the cost. I roughly went through a good portion of this exercise to build the latest round of Skunks, so here's what I learned: $13 is a massively expensive CPU in embedded terms. The Skunk has effectively two processors: The Xilinx FPGA/CPLD and the Cypress EZHost USB microcontroller that cost about $15 total. Besides the microcontroller,  it'll need RAM and supporting passives, likely a crystal to generate a clock, power supply components, voltage translators because everything runs on 3.3v these days but Jag is 5V, etc. Then you'll need some ROM, or more likely, probably some flash to store the actual game on. Overall, You'll probably be looking at around $25 of components minimum, being somewhat optimistic. Then you have to design and manufacture a custom PCB to mount them on. Having gone through that for the Skunk, which is roughly a half-size PCB (A large portion of the PCB pricing is based on board area), that'll cost you roughly $5-10 per board for a quality board at quantities of ~500 or so, and you'll pay more if you want them assembled rather than hand-soldering all of them, so let's just go with the higher number here. That means you're investing $2500-5000 fixed cost and assuming your game sells at least that many copies. It may help that manufacturing is not an exact science and you'll probably only get 70-80% of those boards to work. I don't know what Al and Carl pay for shells in quantity, but they're about $5/ea new on eBay or direct from Mortoff IIRC. Then you need a box, manual, and label, which will be about another $10 total at those quantities.

 

So now you're at $50 of raw materials. Presumably you want to pay the developers something for their efforts (As various people have said, no one's getting rich writing Jaguar games around here), maybe $10-20/unit (I have no idea what people are making here, so just a guess). If the developer isn't the same as the person building the HW, maybe another similar amount to the board+firmware designer for what was probably months in man-hours of work normally billed at rates like $500/hr and up, but the community would be getting for something that rounds to nothing for people with these skills. And as I've found, fullfillment is its own headache best left to the pros, and they'll want their cut, which they deserve. That'll usually be between 50-100% more, probably closer to the latter. I know this seems like a lot given the paltry amounts the others in the chain are allotted here, but trust me, running a storefront, even a digital one is ongoing *work*, while the devs generally get to write the code & HW specs once and be more or less done with it.

 

You end up with something you thought was cheap (A $13 chip) costing an end user over $150 + tax and shipping, conservatively, or roughly twice as much as a standard boxed new Jaguar homebrew game these days.

 

So yeah, it'd be a fun project, but I couldn't resist tossing some frigid reality on your dreams ;-)

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13 minutes ago, CyranoJ said:

We're currently spending multiple years making full sized games like Gravitic Mines.... and you want bigger games? :D

And better!

 

And a side of cold fusion. 
 

Heading to porch to await overnight delivery. 

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  • 1 month later...
On 6/23/2022 at 6:42 PM, cubanismo said:

You end up with something you thought was cheap (A $13 chip) costing an end user over $150 + tax and shipping, conservatively, or roughly twice as much as a standard boxed new Jaguar homebrew game these days.

 

Judging from some of the other rubbish I'm seeing that retails for way more than that (not to mention Jag games...), I'm sure there are a couple of us who would be happy to pay that much for it. I'm not saying it's practical, but a $150 price tag isn't the barrier (impending recession be damned).

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On 8/1/2022 at 11:18 PM, Karyyk said:

 

Judging from some of the other rubbish I'm seeing that retails for way more than that (not to mention Jag games...), I'm sure there are a couple of us who would be happy to pay that much for it. I'm not saying it's practical, but a $150 price tag isn't the barrier (impending recession be damned).

It may not be a barrier to Jag fans who normally spend crazy money on games, but the upfront costs of making this stuff can be a real killer on the developers, especially when there's no guarantee of how many copies they'll sell. The average person just doesn't have $5,000 to throw down on funding a project that's not guaranteed to make them that money back.

 

 

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On 6/16/2022 at 2:41 PM, Lostdragon said:

Cool find none the less. 

UFG18Pg77.jpg

 

In all the years of "Quake & Tomb Raider on Jag" threads ... I've never seen this magazine screenshot. Or even when MK3 is talked about

 

What magazine is this? Is there any credibility to even thinking Quake was started? I thought someone from Id Soft squashed that rumor.

 

GBA "port" is really an awesome programming feat.

Edited by Jagosaurus
Id not I'd - lol
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1 hour ago, Jagosaurus said:

 

In all the years of "Quake & Tomb Raider on Jag" threads ... I've never seen this magazine screenshot. Or even when MK3 is talked about

 

What magazine is this? Is there any credibility to even thinking Quake was started? I thought someone from Id Soft squashed that rumor.

 

GBA "port" is really an awesome programming feat.

Ultimate Future Games a monthly magazine published in the UK by Future Publishing between 1994 and 1996.

 

 

We are not working on any more jag projects at the moment (Quake is
taking up all my time). We gave Atari a lot of our time and effort,
and we are now in a “wait and see” mode. If they hit their sales
projections, we will probably do something else late next year. We
are probably going to license the jag DOOM code to some other
companies though, so you might see a similar game before that.

John Carmack

 

In all likelyhood, there will be no port of Quake to the Jaguar.

-Shawn Green
Project Manager
id Software

6.10.96

 

 

You've also got John Romero and Dave Taylor pouring scorn on the machines ability to run a recognisable version of Quake.. 

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