Checkered Flag just got Awesome

[+cubanismo]

For those who haven't heard yet, Rich Whitehouse just posted a patron-only build of BigPEmu that includes a script to add native-resolution uncapped framerate rendering and analog steering to Checkered Flag.

 

The upresed Cybermorph rendering script that was there before was spiffy, but this literally changes Checkered Flag from mostly useless to a really fun game. The improved visuals are nice, but the game changer is the fixed controls. Racing around each track, putting in flawless lap after flawless lap, you can finally see what the developer must of been going for. Makes me wonder if (1) They really did develop it assuming the Jaguar clocks were going to be double what they shipped at as alluded to somewhere, and (2) if they had an analog controller they were testing with when developing it. It would explain so much. This game rocks now. I've been playing for an hour straight.

 

Please support Rich and further BigPEmu enhancements like this one: https://www.patreon.com/richwhitehouse The new features will be public at some point, but this release alone is worth a few Patreon $$$.

[+Saturn]

Hell yeah. As I posted on Rich's announcement, I couldn't wait to try it out and it's mind blowing. I disabled my camera during 2 meetings this morning and kept playing right through. I know everyone else could hear my keys tapping though

[+Sargon]

I have always been set on playing my Jaguar games only on actual hardware, but man, all these incredible BigPEmu features really have me thinking maybe it's time to give emulation a shot.

[Clint Thompson]

Checkered Flag and Fun in the same sentence? 
 

Stop the madness!

 

[SlidellMan]

Tell Mr. Whitehouse that he has done an impressive and admirable job at making one of the Jaguar's more notorious games actually playable.

[doctorclu]

That all sounds great.  I keep wondering why I am not racing over to try all this... oh yeh, no Mac version.

 

Still, awesome news.

Edited December 21, 2023 by doctorclu

[+save2600]

2 hours ago, doctorclu said:

That all sounds great.  I keep wondering why I am not racing over to try all this... oh yeh, no Mac version.

 

Still, awesome news.

Same here. Was all excited and intrigued... never heard of BigPEmu, so looked it up and  😔

 

Almost makes one want to taint a Mac and finally try a dual-boot scenario. Almost. 😁    

[sirlynxalot]

Anyone feel like uploading a video to show how the game plays now?

 

I can think of many other Jag games that would be awesome with improved framerates, like almost all of the 3d games...

[Senneman]

12 hours ago, doctorclu said:

That all sounds great.  I keep wondering why I am not racing over to try all this... oh yeh, no Mac version.

 

Still, awesome news.

What about running under 'Wine' in MacOS?

Edited December 22, 2023 by Senneman

[doctorclu]

12 minutes ago, Senneman said:

What about running under 'Wine' in MacOS?

Thought about that.  Wine stopped working in the Mac OS world for a while around Catalina, then solutions came about but were crazy expensive (to me at least).   And things working under Wine were a crapshoot anyway.  That said, if anyone gets BigPEmu working under Wine before I do, would love to hear about it.

[prog99]

15 minutes ago, doctorclu said:

Thought about that.  Wine stopped working in the Mac OS world for a while around Catalina, then solutions came about but were crazy expensive (to me at least).   And things working under Wine were a crapshoot anyway.  That said, if anyone gets BigPEmu working under Wine before I do, would love to hear about it.

I’ve been running wine on macOS since at least 2008. It’s come a long way and bigpemu works just fine on an m2 Mac.

I’m away from my laptop just now but the current maintainer “gcenx” has instructions on getting it working. 

 

[doctorclu]

25 minutes ago, prog99 said:

I’ve been running wine on macOS since at least 2008. It’s come a long way and bigpemu works just fine on an m2 Mac.

I’m away from my laptop just now but the current maintainer “gcenx” has instructions on getting it working. 

 

Glad you've had that kind of experience with Wine.   I ran Wine for years up till 2020 for reasons I mentioned above.

 

Also congrats to you on getting a M2.   Would like to hear any stories if anyone has gotten this to work on less posh Macs.     Macs of the seven or so years of age variety?

 

[Senneman]

15 minutes ago, doctorclu said:

Glad you've had that kind of experience with Wine.   I ran Wine for years up till 2020 for reasons I mentioned above.

 

Also congrats to you on getting a M2.   Would like to hear any stories if anyone has gotten this to work on less posh Macs.     Macs of the seven or so years of age variety?

 

BigPEmu also seems to work with Emulation Station. Maybe you can go that route?

... for some regular tasks I still use my Macbook from 2008. It's a beast that will last forever 😃.

[doctorclu]

1 minute ago, Senneman said:

BigPEmu also seems to work with Emulation Station. Maybe you can go that route?

... for some regular tasks I still use my Macbook from 2008. It's a beast that will last forever 😃.

I've check that out, thanks!

[walter_J64bit]

 

 

 

 

On 12/20/2023 at 7:07 PM, cubanismo said:

(1) They really did develop it assuming the Jaguar clocks were going to be double what they shipped

I don't think so because JagDev kit is just a moded Jag the game just wasn't optimized. http://atarijaguar.freeservers.com/develop.htm

[+cubanismo]

5 minutes ago, walter_J64bit said:

On 12/20/2023 at 4:07 PM, cubanismo said:

 

I don't think so because JagDev kit is just a moded Jag the game just wasn't optimized. http://atarijaguar.freeservers.com/develop.htm

The alpine was not the original Jaguar development kit. That was the "production" development hardware.

[walter_J64bit]

3 minutes ago, cubanismo said:

The alpine was not the original Jaguar development kit. That was the "production" development hardware.

That's interesting, so was before the alpine?

[prog99]

10 hours ago, doctorclu said:

Glad you've had that kind of experience with Wine.   I ran Wine for years up till 2020 for reasons I mentioned above.

 

Also congrats to you on getting a M2.   Would like to hear any stories if anyone has gotten this to work on less posh Macs.     Macs of the seven or so years of age variety?

 

Previously it (bigpemu) ran fine on my 2012 mbp if that’s any help. Seems to be very well optimised so old hardware isn’t a problem.

[livingonwheels]

Can this be played on original hardware with a Jaguar flash cartridge (GameDrive) ?

Edited December 22, 2023 by livingonwheels

[zzip]

On 12/21/2023 at 4:03 PM, doctorclu said:

That all sounds great.  I keep wondering why I am not racing over to try all this... oh yeh, no Mac version.

He did promise Mac and Linux ports someday.      But it does work really well under wine in the meantime

[+cubanismo]

5 hours ago, walter_J64bit said:

That's interesting, so was before the alpine?

I don't know exactly. My overall conjecture is just a guess based on three things I read in separate articles.

 

I had read that the Jaguar chipset was originally intended to launch at double the clocks it ended up launching at, due to bugs or unoptimized paths that probably could have been resolved with another spin of the chip. This sort of thing was more common back then, I believe because timing analysis tools were less sophisticated than they are now, and if course, the the Jaguar RISC chips were a completely new architecture, so it's not out of the question that there was one or two paths with questionable timing that could have been fixed up with a few more gates or something. I have minimal understanding of that stuff as a SW engineer, but I work at a hardware company and know that sort of thing does happen.

 

Second, I read somewhere or heard in some interview that the Alpine dev solution was a last minute thing Atari/Flare whipped up after a contractor they had outsourced the development tools to failed to deliver. With that in mind, and having seen the process consoles and laptops go through early in the development process first hand, there was likely some earlier prototype-level development hardware Atari and early partners were using long before retail Jaguar cases existed. Usually these take the form of a bare PCB screwed to a plexiglass plate with standoffs these days, but the pictures I've seen of older hardware always seems to be in some huge PC-looking case or metal box for some reason. Again, I have no direct evidence something like this existed for the Jaguar, but there would have been *something* for people to bring up the hardware and earliest software on.

 

Lastly, I know from another interview or article that at least ATD had very early revisions of the hardware. That may have been the same article that commented the clocks were supposed to be higher, I can't remember. I don't know if Rebellion also had hardware that early. If they didn't, the whole theory/hypothesis kind of falls apart.

 

The idea was just something that popped in my head while playing the modded Checkered Flag, and I found it plausible and interesting enough to share. Maybe it went down that way, maybe not. Also, sorry I don't have links to the actual articles above. It'd be better if I did, but digging around my browser history and Google isn't my idea of a fun Christmas vacation 😁

[Zerosquare]

8 hours ago, cubanismo said:

Second, I read somewhere or heard in some interview that the Alpine dev solution was a last minute thing Atari/Flare whipped up after a contractor they had outsourced the development tools to failed to deliver. With that in mind, and having seen the process consoles and laptops go through early in the development process first hand, there was likely some earlier prototype-level development hardware Atari and early partners were using long before retail Jaguar cases existed. Usually these take the form of a bare PCB screwed to a plexiglass plate with standoffs these days, but the pictures I've seen of older hardware always seems to be in some huge PC-looking case or metal box for some reason. Again, I have no direct evidence something like this existed for the Jaguar, but there would have been *something* for people to bring up the hardware and earliest software on.

Doctorclu recently posted pictures of the Felix and Rapier development systems:

 

The documentation also mentions an older development system called Sylvester:

 

[+cubanismo]

21 hours ago, livingonwheels said:

Can this be played on original hardware with a Jaguar flash cartridge (GameDrive) ?

No, the way this sort of BigPEmu scripts work is they let you intercept execution of the Jaguar game at specified addresses and run some code on the host system to modify some values in the emulated Jaguar memory, then continue on. Sort of like setting a breakpoint in the debugger, messing with some variables, then continuing. The native rendering stuff is quite a bit beyond that, but same basic idea at the core of bypassing a section of the code with some native code.

 

That said, the script itself is a good pointer at where you'd need to start hacking on the ROM to make your own steering fix patch.

[Zerosquare]

4 hours ago, cubanismo said:

That said, the script itself is a good pointer at where you'd need to start hacking on the ROM to make your own steering fix patch.

Or...:

https://www.reboot-games.com/rebootnews/checkered-flag-steering-patch/

 

[sirlynxalot]

Looking really smooth in this video!

https://youtu.be/rLadpoUGcGM?si=ugtQLTjQDH9Cfkpg