Checkered Flag just got Awesome

[KrunchyTC]

So what is this exactly? Is this only for emulation? or does this update also function on real hardware?

[Cyprian]

 

Checkered Flag on the latest BigPemu:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikbna9kIKx4

 

[sirlynxalot]

4 hours ago, Cyprian said:

 

Checkered Flag on the latest BigPemu:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikbna9kIKx4

 

Thanks, what's up with the camera/steering?  Did you have no compatible analogue controller?

[Cyprian]

13 minutes ago, sirlynxalot said:

Thanks, what's up with the camera/steering?  Did you have no compatible analogue controller?

It is not mine, I tole this link from BigPemu discord

[JagChris]

12 hours ago, Cyprian said:

 

Checkered Flag on the latest BigPemu:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikbna9kIKx4

 

That video isn't a glowing endorsement. What are they trying to convey here?

[+Stephen]

27 minutes ago, JagChris said:

That video isn't a glowing endorsement. What are they trying to convey here?

Did you watch the video explaining the scripts that enable this?  Do you have any idea of what this can be used for, or do you just not like the not so pretty video of the game?

[JagChris]

1 hour ago, Stephen said:

Did you watch the video explaining the scripts that enable this?  Do you have any idea of what this can be used for, or do you just not like the not so pretty video of the game?

Yes I watched those but I assumed the quoted video was a demo for the new great gameplay and he just seemed to be crashing. 

[doctorclu]

I love what these videos have shown of the enhanced graphics of Cybermorph and now Checkered Flag.

 

Question is, can they patch Atari 50th Anniversary to give players the option to try this?

 

Yes yes, I've already asked about the Mac earlier, but having these kind of graphics also on the PS4/PS5 would also be fun.

 

[+cubanismo]

On 12/20/2023 at 6:45 PM, Sargon said:

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.

I'm a pretty strict real-HW guy myself, except NES/SNES/Genesis(MegaDrive) where the emulation is so good it's basically interchangeable (Even then, I still have a real NES, because Duck Hunt).

 

I still usually play Jaguar games on real HW, but BigPEmu's addons/improvements are more like playing PC games with mods than regular console emulation. It's fun to try out alternate modes, ridiculously shiny graphics, etc. in the small OG game library.

[GrizzLee]

Im not a SW developer, so I ask this with hesitancy....

 

Any chance something of the sort could be done to support the jag spinner controls?

 

Re-release the cart. Or provide a rom.

 

 

[Bratwurst]

7 hours ago, GrizzLee said:

Im not a SW developer, so I ask this with hesitancy....

 

Any chance something of the sort could be done to support the jag spinner controls?

 

Re-release the cart. Or provide a rom.

 

 

 

Quote

Also, no point in adding rotary support, the frame rate is so low the controls will feel disconnected (yeah.. I know...)

 

[Lostdragon]

On 12/23/2023 at 2:46 AM, cubanismo said:

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 😁

I'm not sure if any of this is of help, but..

 

From the limited research I carried out at the time :

 

1) ATD had the job of bug testing the Jaguar Hardware and were given 12 weeks by The Tramiel's in which to do it. 

They talked of there being a couple of unused bits here and there in the Blitter chip and ATD asked ATARI  if they could include a mode where,when Texture-Mapping,you could add a constant value to the pixels, for the depth shading you see used in AVP..

 

 

 

2)Regarding the original specifications for the Jaguar, this old post from Imagitec Design''s Andrew Seed:

 

"At the start of the Jaguar Atari promised a lot but were unable to deliver,
the GPU and DSP were cut back to half speed. The reason was that the chips
could not handle the heat and could overheat and stop working. ( As informed
by an ex-Atari insider ), also you only had either 2K or 2K of instructions
cache in the GPU - back to the days of the ZX81. Ok originally you were able
to run programs from outside the GPU's memory ( and DSP) but production
machines could not. This meant that you had to have code inside the GPU to
load memory from main 68000 memory. This was a pain. Also the GPU and DSP
could read 64bits from main memory but internally it was 32bits - this meant
that 32bits of the lovely 64bit read went into a memory address.
Other problems with the Jag was the more sprites on screen took more time
away from the CPUs. Bubsy ( which I wrote - mainly in 68000 - based on the
Genesis control code) did run at 60 frames a second ( PAL 50 frames - not my
fault 8¬) ) The Ali Baba level had a lot of small sprites per character - to
save memory but crucified the game since it placed a heavy burden on
processor time. But due to having 3 full screen sprites ( background , and
2 for the map - Bubsy could run behind things) I lost about 30% of processor
time. Another problem I had with Bubsy was that updating the visible tiles
meant a loss of 40% processor time - this varied due to the amount of none
blank blocks I had to blit onto the map sprites. This was at most 72 16*16
blocks ( 256 colour). Depending upon how you needed to use the blitter it
could be very fast but in most circumstances it would be slow. Finally the
sound was like the ST, would had create an interrupt and feed the sound chip
the values. Unlike the STE and Falcon where you could just play a buffer
OK you had to create the buffer but that was in a nice fast tight loop)."

 

3)As for when Rebellion had the Jaguar hardware... 

 

 

Sadly the only 2 sources who ever want to talk about Jaguar development from Rebellion, have both established themselves as individuals who much prefer to tell a good story (and a story which often changes), rather than what actually happened. 

 

Jane Whittaker flips between being a Rebellion employee and an Atari one (he was a Rebellion one) and massively over plays his role on the game,but stated the Jaguar hardware was constantly changing.. 

 

Jason Kingsley has made the claim in recent years he and the initial Rebellion team worked closely with the Jaguar hardware team, bringing the hardware to fruition. 

 

But doesn't say what if anything, was implemented at their request.. 

 

He does talk about changing hardware, Rebellion initally receiving hand built, PC-like boxes to start with, then later development kits known as Alpine Boards,which came in horizontally orientated PC tin boxes. 

 

 

 

 

[agradeneu]

 

Quote

( As informed
by an ex-Atari insider ), also you only had either 2K or 2K of instructions
cache in the GPU - back to the days of the ZX81.

 

Iam not sure if equalling ZX81 RAM with RISC cache (SRAM) was a serious remark.;-) 

 

Its like letting a racey car with 200HP compete with a VW Beetle because they had the same displacement of the engine. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 1 by agradeneu

[Lostdragon]

On 12/21/2023 at 12:07 AM, cubanismo said:

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.

 

Regarding being able to see what Rebellion were going for.. 

 

 

I have often wondered if they themselves really knew.. 

 

 

Fair play, they were a small teamit was coder, Robert Dibley's first ever game.. 

 

But whenever the question of the awful controls were put to them, this is what we had.. 

 

 

Jason Kingsley (RVG Interview) I’ve never been much of a racing game player myself so I’m probably not best placed to speak about it. When developing the title we did not noice major differences between north American play styles and European ones. NA players blip the controls, European ones press and hold. Balancing the game for both was tricky.

 

 

And.. 

 

Yes, we have played other racing games at Rebellion.

Beyond that, I can't comment for business reasons; I'm forbidden to do
so by Jason, the MD here. Sorry 'bout that.

-- dan @ Rebellion

It's worth noting that this was work-for-hire for Atari, and due to the
terms of that type of contract, which we signed, the games testers at
Atari have rather more control over the final product than you might
expect.
-- dan @ Rebellion

 

 

Make of it what you will.. 

[agradeneu]

Just some questions that came into my mind regarding the alleged cut back to half speed of GPU and DSP.  (See quote above)

 

Does that mean the first prototypes had them run at over 50 MHZ?

 

And then, how that works with the bus speed and 13 MHZ CPU 68K?

 

Anyway, was there any chance Bubsy had been a better game with a 50 MHZ GPU/DSP? 

I doubt it.

 

You may also ask yourself why ATD and Eclipse were able to deliver proper running 3D games.

Eclipse also reported about overheating prototypes, but nothing of 50% cut backs, which would have impacted Iron Soldier heavily. 

 

BTW Checkered Flag controls just as bad at 60FPS.

 

Racing games prior to it had even lower FPS, but much better controls (e.g. Stunt Racer and Stunt Race FX). 

 

[+cubanismo]

Yeah, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I have no problem keeping supercross 3D bikes on the track at what, 3-6 FPS? And same on World Tour Racing at what also seem like single-digit FPS at times. There's something especially wrong with Checkered Flag's controls.

[Lostdragon]

I did a little bit of digging to see what other developers said about the various Dev Kits Atari gave them for the Jaguar.. 

 

 

Thierry Schembri:

 

Later, at Retour2048, after seeing the prototype of the Jaguar in preview, we did everything to get approved as a developer and obtain a Jaguar development kit . After many discussions and files of all kinds, we finally obtained the coveted item. We were the first in Europe to have a Jaguarat home, it didn't yet have its final body and joypad and there were still quite a few straps on the motherboard. Paradoxically, this pre-production machine will prove to be much more reliable than the one we were given as a replacement a few months later. The development kit cost us 50,000 francs. It included a Jaguar (on which Rodolphe installed a "Bi-TOS", an alpine board (cartridge emulation card connected to a computer via the parallel port) and... the development kit.

The announced performances of the machine were not there, the benches given to the press which produced improbable results were rubbish (in fact, true , but did not correspond to anything usable, example: an impressive number of pixels displayed per second, and for good reason: in 2 bit and taking up all the bandwidth!, graphic resolutions impossible to display because indeed the Jaguarcould display it, except that 2 MB of RAM was not enough to do so, sound capabilities presented as extraordinary, when in fact, unlike other consoles where we had x independent sound channels, there we only had two channels (stereo), all the mixing and the generation of the pitches of the sounds were done by hand, like a soundtrack on Atari STf), the worst of all was the bandwidth problem, all the CPUs were connected to the same bus (slow) and access times had to be shared with tricks and hacks. In short, I won't go over the design errors of the Jaguar , it would take too long, I prefer to remember the rest.

--------------
Note from Rodolphe:
Yes and the sound was made in the DSP and the poor guy also had to manage the famous network which was also bugged at the level of the HARD FIFO of the chip requiring you to capture each byte or risk losing it!
In short, the famous network was never able to serve really well with this hard bug!
And there was no redesign of the buggy chip!

https://www.obsolete-tears.com/anecdotes-atari-dossier-67.html

 

 

[agradeneu]

Which game did they program?

[LordKraken]

French team, so super burnout I assume

[agradeneu]

1 hour ago, LordKraken said:

French team, so super burnout I assume

https://www.mobygames.com/game/6878/super-burnout/credits/jaguar/?autoplatform=true

 

I dont think so.

 

Also, Oliver Nallet was rather positive about the Jag.

 

I guess it was the "Skiing and snowboarding game" team.

 

Oh, it wasn't:

 

https://www.mobygames.com/game/6722/val-disere-skiing-and-snowboarding/credits/jaguar/?autoplatform=true

 

 

Edited March 2 by agradeneu

[agradeneu]

7 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

unlike other consoles where we had x independent sound channels, there we only had two channels (stereo), all the mixing and the generation of the pitches of the sounds were done by hand, like a soundtrack on Atari STf),

 

We have 8 to 12 channels

[Lostdragon]

4 hours ago, agradeneu said:

Which game did they program?

Only had time for a very brief search, literally knee-deep in trying to secure a wedding venue... 

 

But it looks like.. 

 

Zzyorxx II. 

 

 

Developer(s)
Virtual Xperience
Publisher(s)
Virtual Xperience
Producer(s)
Rodolphe Czuba
Programmer(s)
Thierry Schembri
 

 

And Commander Blood. 

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20181202024516/http://jaguar-64bit.pagesperso-orange.fr/FrenchTouch/frtouch/AMWAinterviewhtml.htm

 

Edited March 2 by Lostdragon

[agradeneu]

6 minutes ago, Lostdragon said:

Only had time for a very brief search, literally knee-deep in trying to secure a wedding venue... 

 

But it looks like.. 

 

Zzyorxx II. 

 

 

Developer(s)
Virtual Xperience
Publisher(s)
Virtual Xperience
Producer(s)
Rodolphe Czuba
Programmer(s)
Thierry Schembri
 

 

Can you provide a source for this? Iam pretty sure the Super Burn Out programmer Olvier Nallet did some work on Zzyorx II.

Edited March 2 by agradeneu

[Lostdragon]

3 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

Can you provide a source for this? Iam pretty sure the Super Burn Out programmer Olvier Nallet did work on Zzyorx II.

 

 

Here you go.. 

 

 

Here is the exclusive interview with Thierry Schembri, formerly of Virtual Xperience

And programmer of Zzyorxx II.

 

 

 

Did you have a Jaguar development kit?

We had two development kits to create cartridge games for the Jaguar. This development kit consisted of a cartridge emulation board, which was called the Alpine Board which was plugged into the cartridge connector of the Jaguar and was connected to a PC via the parallel socket.

The software supplied with it was a GPU/DSP/68000/6502 (!) assembler , a debugger and a version of GNU C++ which generated GPU/DSP/68K code . The first versions of the development kit also worked on Atari ST/TT , but this version was quickly abandoned. In any case, whatever the kit, it was quite atrocious, buggy, despite the efforts of Brainstorm (the authors of part of the kit) to stabilize it, and the support from Atari was deplorable.

Did you have a game in the works?

Several games were in development and were abandoned: I had almost finished a shoot'em up (5 levels: 2 vertical, 2 horizontal and one front) called zzyorxx II (if you want, I can send you some screenshots), too bad it was abandoned, it was pretty. I also worked on the adaptation of Commander Blood PC to Jaguar for Cryo/Electronic Arts , it was a CD game, the CD development kit was terrible and a real pain to use. It was also abandoned, although it was well advanced (very advanced even).

Finally, Shen had also almost finished an extraordinary vertical shoot'em up , truly splendid and technically very impressive, I had never seen that on Jaguar (and I have never seen it since!), Atari the refused because they wanted 3D games to "compete with the playstation" (!!!).

 

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20181202024516/http://jaguar-64bit.pagesperso-orange.fr/FrenchTouch/frtouch/AMWAinterviewhtml.htm

[agradeneu]

10 minutes ago, Lostdragon said:

 

 

Here you go.. 

 

 

Here is the exclusive interview with Thierry Schembri, formerly of Virtual Xperience

And programmer of Zzyorxx II.

 

 

 

Did you have a Jaguar development kit?

We had two development kits to create cartridge games for the Jaguar. This development kit consisted of a cartridge emulation board, which was called the Alpine Board which was plugged into the cartridge connector of the Jaguar and was connected to a PC via the parallel socket.

The software supplied with it was a GPU/DSP/68000/6502 (!) assembler , a debugger and a version of GNU C++ which generated GPU/DSP/68K code . The first versions of the development kit also worked on Atari ST/TT , but this version was quickly abandoned. In any case, whatever the kit, it was quite atrocious, buggy, despite the efforts of Brainstorm (the authors of part of the kit) to stabilize it, and the support from Atari was deplorable.

Did you have a game in the works?

Several games were in development and were abandoned: I had almost finished a shoot'em up (5 levels: 2 vertical, 2 horizontal and one front) called zzyorxx II (if you want, I can send you some screenshots), too bad it was abandoned, it was pretty. I also worked on the adaptation of Commander Blood PC to Jaguar for Cryo/Electronic Arts , it was a CD game, the CD development kit was terrible and a real pain to use. It was also abandoned, although it was well advanced (very advanced even).

Finally, Shen had also almost finished an extraordinary vertical shoot'em up , truly splendid and technically very impressive, I had never seen that on Jaguar (and I have never seen it since!), Atari the refused because they wanted 3D games to "compete with the playstation" (!!!).

 

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20181202024516/http://jaguar-64bit.pagesperso-orange.fr/FrenchTouch/frtouch/AMWAinterviewhtml.htm

Ah, thanks, so Shens Nexus Shmup is not the same as Zzyorxx II. I always thought that. 

Olivier Nallet did work on that. But I can remember that several publications used a screenshot of the latter game for Nexus/Stellar X. 

 

A demo/proto of Zzyorxx II was released, but its really really rudimentary.