Neo Geo games to Jaguar? Would be possible?

[42bs]

1 hour ago, agradeneu said:

Why dont you tell us why? Telling half the Story is not a sincere move. 

 

BTW its a really irrelevant fact. What counts is that you can store and render larger graphics data with limited RAM or ROM. And that was the point of discussion. 

Why Native depacks from RAM to RAM: Simply because in 1994/5 there was not SKUNK and not JagGD. So developers like Duranik and me and others were limited to the RAM to hold "everything" which was downloaded. Only a few had access to an Alpine board.

That's the "why". And of course RAM access is much quicker than ROM access.

[42bs]

1 hour ago, agradeneu said:

Because its true. Or dont you see the different architecture of Jaguar and NeoGeo? But please, dont argue with me, but with the Designer of Jaguar. He might be interested to hear you why he was wrong all the time but probably you would be more cautious and sincere with your discussion. 

 

Then I might ask you to build a time Machine, go back to 1992 and tell the Designers how to make a 3D graphics hardware. 

 

 

I am referring to your statement:

 

2 hours ago, 42bs said:

The Jaguar was also designed for 3D graphics

The Jaguar was _not_ designed for 3D rendering. If it were, at least the blitter would be able to draw triangles.

Even a 2D game has an Z axis, therefore a Z buffer helps.

[42bs]

1 hour ago, agradeneu said:

Then I might ask you to build a time Machine, go back to 1992 and tell the Designers how to make a 3D graphics hardware. 

3D graphics hardware at that time was nothing we see today in a GPU. But at least the chips could render triangles.

The Jaguar has some basic support like Z buffer or  Gouraud shading. But it misses the essential feature to have quick 3D: Drawing arbitrary triangles.

 

Sure NeoGeo does not have it either.

 

But what I have seen so far from the NeoGeo hardware is, that games which do not exhaust NeoGeo features might be portable to the Jaguar.

But again: Why? 

If someone has the skills and stamina to do it, (s)he should team up with some artists and write a genuine Jaguar game.

 

[agradeneu]

Mega Drive/Genesis "inofficial" adapation of Metal Slug.

While it is clearly a reduced version of the original, a lot of assets and artwork style are "translated" and intact. You can now measure what would have been possible on Jaguar. 

 

 

There is also a Castlevania SotN project, with quite impressive results. 

[roots.genoa]

Actually I would be interested in seeing a 3D game on the NeoGeo, since (almost?) every machine can technically produce 3D through software anyway. That being said, even though the NeoGeo is very proficient with sprites, I don't think it could use the same approach as the Saturn since the NeoGeo can't deform sprites except for shrinking them. Also, it was really designed to display that specific kind of sprites, so I don't know if it can display dots, lines, etc.

[+CyranoJ]

2 minutes ago, roots.genoa said:

Actually I would be interested in seeing a 3D game on the NeoGeo, since (almost?) every machine can technically produce 3D through software anyway. That being said, even though the NeoGeo is very proficient with sprites, I don't think it could use the same approach as the Saturn since the NeoGeo can't deform sprites except for shrinking them. Also, it was really designed to display that specific kind of sprites, so I don't know if it can display dots, lines, etc.

 

 

[agradeneu]

40 minutes ago, 42bs said:

3D graphics hardware at that time was nothing we see today in a GPU. 

 

This is another example of "moving the goalpost" rhetorics. Comparing Jaguar to modern GPUs is futile and laughable. It does not support your point by any means! 

 

Quote

Sure NeoGeo does not have it either.

 

Are you serious?! NeoGeo is exclusively a 2D machine. You can draw some triangles on it, ok, but nothing near the level of Jaguar. And its not a homecomputer, btw

Edited July 14 by agradeneu

[agradeneu]

3 minutes ago, CyranoJ said:

 

 

You can write 3d on a Gameboy if you want. Does not make it a Jaguar, unf.

[42bs]

32 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

This is another example of "moving the goalpost" rhetorics. Comparing Jaguar to modern GPUs is futile and laughable. It does not support your point by any means! 

 

 

Are you serious?! NeoGeo is exclusively a 2D machine. You can draw some triangles on it, ok, but nothing near the level of Jaguar. And its not a homecomputer, btw

I did not compare the Jaguars's HW with a modern 3D chip. In 92 there were no 3D chips. At least not in cosumer products.

 

And the Jaguar is a 2D machine as well. And not a 3D machine.

[42bs]

43 minutes ago, roots.genoa said:

NeoGeo can't deform sprites except for shrinking them

The Jaguar cannot deform "sprites" in that way either. Any polygon is a set of horizontal lines. Compared to this, the Lynx is more a 3D machine than the Jaguar 🙂

[Mittens0407]

13 hours ago, 42bs said:

The Jaguar was _not_ designed for 3D rendering. If it were, at least the blitter would be able to draw triangles.

IDK, they seem to disagree with you in the JTRM.

Quote

The tour de force of the Blitter is its ability to generate Gouraud shaded polygons, using Z-buffering, in sixteen
bit pixel mode. A lot of the logic in the Blitter is devoted to its ability to create these pixels four at a time, and to
write them at a rate limited only by the bus bandwidth, using the GPU to calculate the Z and intensity gradients
and start and stop pixels on a line-by-line basis. This will give the system the ability to generate realistic
animated 3D graphics

Not so many use cases for Gouraud shading in 2D games I believe 😛 (I've seen some neat 2D experiments in N64 homebrew tho)

 

[42bs]

4 hours ago, Mittens0407 said:

IDK, they seem to disagree with you in the JTRM.

Not so many use cases for Gouraud shading in 2D games I believe 😛 (I've seen some neat 2D experiments in N64 homebrew tho)

 

I already wrote, that Gouraud shading is there. But that allone makes the Jaguar no 3D machine. I for example use Gouraud shading often to generate a gradient for the sky.

Many did 3D programs on the Jaguar. Including me. But the rendering needs a lot of work and takes many many cycles (and not talking of textured polygons).

[LordKraken]

1 hour ago, 42bs said:

I already wrote, that Gouraud shading is there. But that allone makes the Jaguar no 3D machine. I for example use Gouraud shading often to generate a gradient for the sky.

Many did 3D programs on the Jaguar. Including me. But the rendering needs a lot of work and takes many many cycles (and not talking of textured polygons).

All of that if correct, and I wouldn't challenge you on that, still the proportion of 3d games on the Jaguar is high (50% of the official library?) while on its competitor at the time, they can be count on the five finger of your hand (and they needed an extra processor). So maybe not a real 3d game console, but definitely a big step forward compared to the 16-bits era (the missing link?)

[agradeneu]

19 hours ago, 42bs said:

I did not compare the Jaguars's HW with a modern 3D chip. In 92 there were no 3D chips. At least not in cosumer products.

 

And the Jaguar is a 2D machine as well. And not a 3D machine.

Well you did. Imo your criterias are vague, confusing and ahistoric. Maybe discuss this topic with more competent people e.g. hardware Designers and game programmers like John Mathieson, Marc Rosocha or Sebmov.

The whole architecture of Jaguar was designed to process and render polygon graphics. You dong need that complex Hardware for tile based 2d graphics. The NeoGeo is an example for a 2d specialist. 

 

[agradeneu]

8 hours ago, Mittens0407 said:

IDK, they seem to disagree with you in the JTRM.

Not so many use cases for Gouraud shading in 2D games I believe 😛 (I've seen some neat 2D experiments in N64 homebrew tho)

 

Correct, Iam embarassed by the way 42bs tries to distort reality or compeletely dismiss it in the most absurd ways possible.

The CRY/Gourad shading was never intended to render a sky, that is really ridiculous. Gouraud shading is a technique to make 3D shapes look more realistic and its older than texture mapping, which came later.

When Jaguar was designed, even advanced arcade hardware only supported flat shaded polygons, like AM1 boards by Sega for Virta Racing and Virtua Fighter or Namcos tech for Cybersledge. 

Both systems were heralded as breakthroughs for 3D graphics. A little Later came the SuperFX chip and the SVP by Sega, to process polygon graphics on SNES and Genesis. And then came the Jaguar, another evolutionary step.

As 3D tech was new and in its infancy, it was never easy to program that, compared to later hardware or todays GPUs. There is no question about that only a few coders were really good at 3D compared to 2D games.  

 

[+cubanismo]

Yeah, I have to agree with @agradeneu on this one. It's a 3D machine at its soul. I can't find the quote I'm looking for, but two similar ones have been cited already from John Mathieson that make it clear it was intended to be 3D. The relevant quotes linked here so far are:

Quote

 

"The GPU and blitter provide the power you need for 3D. The GPU has the processing power you need for 3D arithmetic, with specialised matrix stuff, and very fast multiply and divide engines. The blitter does the actual rendering, and generates in hardware the shaded (and Z-buffered if you want it) pixels at a rate limited only by the speed of the 64 bit DRAM bus.

[...]

3D is stuff like Cybermorph or a flight simulator where things move in perspective. The definitive reference work is "Computer Graphics, principles and practice" by Foley and van Dam et al., published by Addison Wesley. This is a brilliant introduction to the field, and without it Jaguar would not be what it is.

 

 

From John Mathieson, taken from AEO:

https://www.atarimax.com/freenet/freenet_material/9.JaguarSupportArea/3.ReferenceDesk/3.8NewReleasesandArticles/showarticle.php?61

 

Let's be skeptical and assume he was obediently marketing the hardware at this point in time though. There's also:

 

Quote

The concept for Jaguar started in about 1990 with investigation of 3D rendering pipelines, and colour space. The early design work was all about the graphics engines.

 

From the Toxic-Mag interview

https://strider.untergrund.net/toxicmag/real/articles/mathieson.htm#interview

 

This comes from long after Atari's demise, and John concedes there might be some merit to the idea Jaguar is hard to program for later on in that interview, so I think he's speaking from the heart.

 

He claims here that from its genesis, the Jaguar chipset was about 3D rendering and the CRY colorspace. CRY is very clearly designed to enable efficient gouraud shading and lighting math/hardware. Yeah, you can use gouraud shading hardware or algorithms for gradients in 2D, but I've never heard of someone inventing a new color model just to accelerate 2D gradients. I think claiming that may have been the intent of the blitter design borders on disingenuous.

 

Further, the quote I can't find sort of mirrors the first one above, and I believe it is John saying the process of designing the Jaguar chipset was basically him and Martin reading through Foley and van Dam, writing some 3D rendering code based on that, and then converting as much of that code as they could into silicon.

 

As is agreed above, there were no 3D accelerators to go model the silicon on at that time. Nothing says the only way to accelerate 3D rendering is to have a triangle rasterization pipeline. They built a chip with specialized math functionally to set up triangles (The GPU in Tom) and a span walker (the blitter). Those accelerate very important and processing intensive steps in the 3D rendering process. If you read the referenced book (I have a copy of the 2nd edition), they're broken out as separate discussions. It seems very logical Flare chose to define the boundaries of their 3D acceleration there after reading this text.

 

Recall in early 3D accelerator days, it wasn't even clear triangles would be the primitive of choice. Some chips accelerated quads, like the Saturn sort of did. Some did NURBS. It was the wild West of 3D hardware.

 

Also, John states in one of the above interviews they thought gouraud shading would be good enough, and didn't anticipate texture mapping would be so important so soon. He outlines how tiny hardware changes could have tripled theoretical texture mapping speed. So let's not say lack of better texture mapping means they didn't intend it for 3D. They just intended it for non-textured 3D.

 

So it's clear the intent was to make a console that accelerated 3D. Did they succeed? I.e, is it actually hardware that accelerated 3D rendering engines? I think so. Clearly you can offload large (from a runtime and operation count POV) chunks of triangle/polygon rendering to the blitter, and if you treat Tom as a GPU, yes, you can offload rendering of an entire scene graph (I.e, visibility tree walking, culling, transform and lighting via matmul instructions, clipping, spantree assembly, etc.) to it from the "CPU"/68k. That's a hell of a lot better than a 3DFX Voodoo or NVIDIA Riva TNT that meet the arbitrary criteria of having a full fixed-function triangle rasterization engine in them, but have to be spoon-fed those triangles by a CPU.

 

OK, so Atari try to have it both ways, and alternately describe Tom as the GPU, and also say don't use the 68k for anything besides reading the joysticks. Whatever. It's arbitrary. JRISC works as a general purpose processor if you're careful, and has dedicated instructions and ALU transistors for operations heavily used in 3D rendering. The chipset as a whole is still capable of faster 3D than a naive CPU using the same core instruction set.

 

Is it all super efficient and optimally designed? No. But then, no hardware is. You see 3D images rendered by it at interactive FPS in Iron Soldier, Battlemorph, etc. Some games failed to achieve good results, but that doesn't reflect the intent or capability of the hardware design so much as Atari's marketing, timeline, and financial dreams bumping into reality.

[+Gemintronic]

My poor brain can't handle trying to work around system differences to get 3D.  If I was going dual platform I'd take advantage of all that ROM via pre-rendered assets.

 

UPDATE:  Of course, I'm talking about making an original, simple game.  Not irritating lawyers.

 

 

[42bs]

@cubanismo I stand corrected.

[agradeneu]

3 hours ago, 42bs said:

@cubanismo I stand corrected.

Ok, I should use a translator lol

Edited July 18 by agradeneu

[+cubanismo]

I know I'm beating a dead horse now, but I couldn't stop until I found that quote I was looking for, so...

 

Another example of John saying 3D was the inspiration for Flare II/Jaguar:

https://www.konixmultisystem.co.uk/index.php?id=interviews&content=john

See the last bit.

 

And I finally found the exact quote I was remembering. I couldn't dig it up before because it's in the middle of a damn Youtube video instead of something sensible like an ancient text file now buried behind 3 layers of the internet wayback machine like all my other Jaguar bookmarks:

 

Quote

The fun thing about Jaguar was it was the first time anyone had tried to do 3D for a ... anything at this price point. Up to that point every game machine, every game console was 2D. It was sprites. It was things sliding around the screen. We said, "let's go do 3D! What the heck?" Someone described it as, "No one ever told these guys that 3D was hard, so they did it anyway." We bought a copy of Foley and van Dam, which was like the canonical 3D graphics book. Read it from cover to cover, uhm, coded up a 3D graphics engine in C, and then turned as much of it as we could into hardware. Uhm, we were just, you know, pushing the limits of everything. We, we had to invent our own color space, because one of the things we realized, was that doing doing shading- We thought- We looked at texture mapping. One of our big mistakes on Jaguar was that we discarded texture mapping as a technique. We decided it was too expensive, and that if we could do things with gouraud shading and maybe a little bit of texture we could build really interesting 3D graphics, so the power of Jaguar was all about rendering gouraud shaded triangles, but shading is expensive too, and part of that's the math you have to do to interpolate the shade across the triangle, so we invented our own color space called CRY so we only had to do math in one dimension rather than in three which you do for YUV or RGB, so it was a luminance plus an eight-bit color value, so that meant we needed one third of the ALUs we would have needed otherwise to do RGB shading.

 

From John Mathieson in this interview:

 

 

A generally good listen all around. The link above should be to the start of this particular comment, which is at around 11:20 in the video.

 

This was previously linked in on the forums here:

 

 

[phoenixdownita]

@cubanismo

any chance we can meaningfully combine your 2 posts with quotes (and tech notes on the CRY + discount textures choice) and create a sticky on “The Jaguar was built to play flat/Gouraud shaded 3D games … here’s the proof” ?

 

I think @CyranoJ is a local Jag moderator  forum mod and can help or maybe I just bug @CPUWIZ as I always do when I need moderator help.

 

 

Edited July 20 by phoenixdownita

[+cubanismo]

I don't know how that works, but fine with me if a moderator wants to rearrange my posts, or if someone else wants to just cut/paste it to a new thread or something.

[Zerosquare]

6 hours ago, phoenixdownita said:

create a sticky on “The Jaguar was built to play flat/Gouraud shaded 3D games … here’s the proof” ?

Sure. Let's give clueless people more reasons to go "I knew it! The Jaguar is just like the Nintendo 64!" and "See! It's a 3D powerhouse, it's just that devs were too lazy to use it!". Those conversations are *so* refreshing.

 

 

[+Stephen]

2 hours ago, cubanismo said:

I don't know how that works, but fine with me if a moderator wants to rearrange my posts, or if someone else wants to just cut/paste it to a new thread or something.

Thanks though - pretty definitive evidence for what was stated, straight from the mouth of the hardware creator himself.  Thanks for the insight.

[agradeneu]

5 hours ago, Zerosquare said:

Sure. Let's give clueless people more reasons to go "I knew it! The Jaguar is just like the Nintendo 64!" and "See! It's a 3D powerhouse, it's just that devs were too lazy to use it!". Those conversations are *so* refreshing.

 

 

That is no justification to deny facts, and construct a more convenient story that somewhat serves the purpose to make yourself look better. 

Look, it was not only about 3D, as soon as your 2D game looks ugly or runs poorly, you can use the same.rhetorics. Only clueless people would believe this to begin with!

The problem is more serious,

recently I was attacked again as being a "clueless troll" by some devs that shares the same mindset of yours, Zero, because I challenged their claims with the same evidence that cubanismo posted here. Despite knowing that I worked on several profilic Jaguar games, I found myself treated as the "clueless idiot".

Iam so fed up with this disingenious nonsense and cynism that I left all Jaguar forums on discord and stopped any support from my side 

 

 

Edited July 21 by agradeneu