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Not finding any sources that mention the different abilities of Jaguar console with and without the CD expansion unit attached

oky2000

By oky2000
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oky2000 River Patroller

oky2000

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I found loads of sites about stuff specific to Jaguar console motherboard but I couldn't find any info on what the extra goodies are that the Jaguar CD added to the party?

 

I notice World Tour Racing, a very impressive game, is a Jaguar CD title and was wondering if that used the extra abilities?

 

Any links in laymen's terms appreciated.

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Lostdragon Stargunner

Lostdragon

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3 hours ago, oky2000 said:

I thought it added extra features to the existing custom chips Tom and Jerry, is this not the case then?

 

Is the full motion FMV just firmware using the Jaguar console chipset only too?

My limited understanding has always been that despite speculation within the press at the time, that Atari were at one stage considering adding some form of custom chip, to help beef up the Jaguar's texture-mapping abilities, in face of newer hardware like the Saturn and PlayStation.. 

 

 

They deliberately kept it as a dumb storage system, in order to reduce costs. 

 

The only custom chip per say would be a CDROM interface chip. 

 

The CD storage allowed for more varied textures in things like Hoverstrike:U. L. 

 

Increases in framerates came from better coding routines. 

 

The late Lance Lewis for example, said:. 

 

 

"... technically speaking, the CD version had a few extra perks. For instance the engineering crew managed to boost up the frame rate by a stunning 2-3 fps... And some of the terrain textures we were able to load as high res. Oh and the soundtrack was CD-quality instead of MIDI"

 

WTR coder stated it was 

originally conceived as Virtua Racing on the Jaguar, but as the project 
progressed that look became dated and he  received pressure to include heavy 
texture mapping.

 

 

The game contains some texture mapping, but also 
includes lots of tricks involving scaled sprites and bitmaps to make the screen look more interesting. 

 

You can find a  few commercial Jaguar developers from the time, talking about Atari putting pressure on them to include texture-mapping in their games, even though the hardware was never 'beefed - up' to provide better support for it. 

 

 

Edited by Lostdragon
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Gemintronic Quadrunner

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23 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

Because there is none .It is a CD drive like you would buy one for a PC.

 

So, you're saying Butch was replacing a bog standard part in a PC CD interface?  I'm wondering why they would go the ASIC route instead of already available controllers.

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42bs Stargunner

42bs

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2 minutes ago, Gemintronic said:

 

So, you're saying Butch was replacing a bog standard part in a PC CD interface?  I'm wondering why they would go the ASIC route instead of already available controllers.

Because ... ;-)

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42bs Stargunner

42bs

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6 minutes ago, Gemintronic said:

 

Was hoping there was something understandable and cool like the ULA chips on Spectrum computers.  Ah well!

You need glue logic between the CD and the console. Since there is no "north bridge" in the console, you need it in the CD unit => BUTCH.

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42bs Stargunner

42bs

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49 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

Because there is none .It is a CD drive like you would buy one for a PC.

Not quiet, it is is only the "raw" logic. Butch is needed to control this. A PC CD drive at this time had an IDE interface (glue logic) between the PC and the drive.

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oky2000 River Patroller

oky2000

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Not sure why Atari were pushing for textured polygons when in 1992/1993 arcade F1 games were pushing the super sprite scaling hardware and it looks better than most polygon racing games before PS2 sort of era. Looking at Super Burnout I am sure they could have done something similar to F1 Super Lap in the arcade instead. 

 

Guess it was a specs war wanted to fight asking teams to texture polygons instead of doing spectacular arcade quality 2.5D which looked better than F1 on Saturn anyway. Oh well.

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cubanismo Stargunner

+cubanismo

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Even the VLM is just firmware, so really the only HW feature the CD unit adds beyond being a CDROM is the ability to crash more often.  The FMV support does indeed consist of a blob of code Atari provided that you load on Tom. You feed it data from the CD (Which incidentally requires another blob of code the CD BIOS loads on Tom to act like a sort of DMA engine) using the 68k, and it spits out decoded frames.

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Stephen Quadrunner

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54 minutes ago, oky2000 said:

Ah well it looks better than stuff on Novastorm for my 486 PC, maybe the excessive Youtube compression makes it hard to tell. Won't be long before I can check it out myself on a 150 inch projected image :)

Oof - I had issues with it on a 30" CRT back then so good luck!

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Clint Thompson Quadrunner

Clint Thompson

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5 hours ago, Stephen said:

It's just shitty Cine-pack.  MPEG-1 which was VCD format as used on PSX was sub VHS quality, and Cine-pack is worse than that.

Compared to the $2k multimedia PCs they were touting as so great at Radio Shack during the time that were playing back Weezer videos in 256-color, that Cinepak shit was the shit!

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oky2000 River Patroller

oky2000

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I remember only one other game's FMV around the mid 90s impressing me (Rebel Assualt II on PS1 cutscenes) vs what I was exposed to on my PC up to that point. PC was probably the worst due to lack of ability to change screen modes or do any kind of raster tricks, at least on the CD32 you can render 320x100 videos and use the copper to do a roughcut upscale to 320x200 and keep it full screen, on a portable TV via RF it's not that bad.

 

Of course if you can't manage proper FMV you could always fake it, clean static fixed background with overlaid actors as transparent/green screen videos as  animated objects overlaid, useful back when you had single speed CD-ROM drives in machines. I'd love to try that on a CDTV, it's the sort of thing that would have been used for something like CDTV It Came from the Desert had they done it.

 

The actual video content may be tacky as hell on that game but technically it did look impressive to me and it's better than PC games that relied solely on software decoding before the MMX era from what I remember. 

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