Neo Geo games to Jaguar? Would be possible?

[agradeneu]

4 hours ago, Stephen said:

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

Iam sure I posted this in another thread some time ago. And it was also on discord.  

[Ericde45]

you can say that Jaguar is 3D oriented, but the truth is that for 3D, PS1 is far better. you have direct instructions in the main processor to handle 3D computations and the GPU is able to draw polygones in 1 instruction. no blitter filling driven by GPU babysitting for each line drawn. just 1 primitive and you have a filled polygone on PS1. this is really far better that what is available in the Jaguar.

 

 

and going back to the main subject, the 3D demo on neo geo is a sprite demo in fact. all angles for every side of a polygone are sprites. the neogeo can not do real 3D. just ask for a circle, an ellipse and so on, in 3D on neogeo , and it won't be possible.

the neogeo has no framebuffer , only a list of sprites read directly from the ROM.

 

 

 

[Lost Monkey]

41 minutes ago, Ericde45 said:

you can say that Jaguar is 3D oriented, but the truth is that for 3D, PS1 is far better. you have direct instructions in the main processor to handle 3D computations and the GPU is able to draw polygones in 1 instruction. no blitter filling driven by GPU babysitting for each line drawn. just 1 primitive and you have a filled polygone on PS1. this is really far better that what is available in the Jaguar.

 

 

and going back to the main subject, the 3D demo on neo geo is a sprite demo in fact. all angles for every side of a polygone are sprites. the neogeo can not do real 3D. just ask for a circle, an ellipse and so on, in 3D on neogeo , and it won't be possible.

the neogeo has no framebuffer , only a list of sprites read directly from the ROM.

 

 

 

Whew! Thanks!  I was worried the Jaguar was gonna get all uppity...

[+Gemintronic]

One strategy might be to take whatever C compiler and libraries the Neo Geo has and compare that to equivalent Raptor functions.

 

Would it be too janky to wrap up similar functions and/or use macros to at least get an example running between platforms?

[jguff]

Everyones posts are moot

 

Atari Jaguar identifies as 3d and 64 bit.

 

Anyone who denies that Atari Jaguar is 3d and 64 bit is:

1) Atari Jaguar phobic

2) and should visit Room 101, until they recognize that O'Mathieson is correct: 32+32+16=64.

 

[jguff]

Neo Geo games could be difficult due to Neo Geo being able to display 4096 colors, using only 4bit indexing (and selection of 1 of 256 colormaps).

Jaguar would have to blow most of those colors up to 16 bits.  ROM size, bandwidth, and memory constraints may make pixel-for-pixel port of Neo Geo to Atari Jaguar difficult.

 

 

[agradeneu]

1 hour ago, jguff said:

Everyones posts are moot

 

Atari Jaguar identifies as 3d and 64 bit.

 

Anyone who denies that Atari Jaguar is 3d and 64 bit is:

1) Atari Jaguar phobic

2) and should visit Room 101, until they recognize that O'Mathieson is correct: 32+32+16=64.

 

The bus is 64 bit wide, it does not measure 3D performance or contradicts with later hardware like the PS1 having better capabilities. Taking into account that Jaguar was one of the first consoles  designed for 3D graphics does not mean it was as capable as later hardware like the N64 or the PS1.

But it was capable of producing 3d animation for games, e.g. Iron Soldier or Battlemorph, with advanced visual effects like Gouraud shading and texture mapping.   

People are oversimplifying things out of context. Or make bad jokes about it that are not really funny.

[agradeneu]

2 hours ago, jguff said:

Neo Geo games could be difficult due to Neo Geo being able to display 4096 colors, using only 4bit indexing (and selection of 1 of 256 colormaps).

Jaguar would have to blow most of those colors up to 16 bits.  ROM size, bandwidth, and memory constraints may make pixel-for-pixel port of Neo Geo to Atari Jaguar difficult.

 

 

Working through the huge assets to edit/optimize them in 4 bit/8 bit palettes and 16 bit would be a lot of work, for sure. 

Edited July 21 by agradeneu

[42bs]

Since Jaguar Objects can be 4 bit/pixel and we have a flexible CLUT, converting the assets would mean some clever scripting. And maybe HBL based CLUT changing.

If someone really wants to do it.

[roots.genoa]

5 hours ago, Ericde45 said:

and going back to the main subject, the 3D demo on neo geo is a sprite demo in fact. all angles for every side of a polygone are sprites. the neogeo can not do real 3D. just ask for a circle, an ellipse and so on, in 3D on neogeo , and it won't be possible.

the neogeo has no framebuffer , only a list of sprites read directly from the ROM.

Thanks! When I suggested NeoGeo couldn't draw geometry, I was afraid I had said something stupid, but according to you I was right. 😇

[42bs]

6 hours ago, Ericde45 said:

you can say that Jaguar is 3D oriented, but the truth is that for 3D, PS1 is far better. you have direct instructions in the main processor to handle 3D computations and the GPU is able to draw polygones in 1 instruction. no blitter filling driven by GPU babysitting for each line drawn. just 1 primitive and you have a filled polygone on PS1. this is really far better that what is available in the Jaguar.

 

 

and going back to the main subject, the 3D demo on neo geo is a sprite demo in fact. all angles for every side of a polygone are sprites. the neogeo can not do real 3D. just ask for a circle, an ellipse and so on, in 3D on neogeo , and it won't be possible.

the neogeo has no framebuffer , only a list of sprites read directly from the ROM.

 

 

 

6 minutes ago, roots.genoa said:

Thanks! When I suggested NeoGeo couldn't draw geometry, I was afraid I had said something stupid, but according to you I was right. 😇

Back in the days, the ZX81 could not "draw" in the sense of setting single pixels. But a clever char set made it possible.

So with a clever set of sprites, drawing should be very well be possible. Given a sprite is 16x16 pixels, you "only" need 256 sprites and you can draw.

Of course only monochrome.

 

[philipj]

9 hours ago, Ericde45 said:

you can say that Jaguar is 3D oriented, but the truth is that for 3D, PS1 is far better. you have direct instructions in the main processor to handle 3D computations and the GPU is able to draw polygones in 1 instruction. no blitter filling driven by GPU babysitting for each line drawn. just 1 primitive and you have a filled polygone on PS1. this is really far better that what is available in the Jaguar.

 

 

and going back to the main subject, the 3D demo on neo geo is a sprite demo in fact. all angles for every side of a polygone are sprites. the neogeo can not do real 3D. just ask for a circle, an ellipse and so on, in 3D on neogeo , and it won't be possible.

the neogeo has no framebuffer , only a list of sprites read directly from the ROM.

 

 

 

Hi Ericde45... The Jaguar predates the PS1 by 2 or 3 years; it has a dedicated "Geometry Transformation Engine" hardwired into the system with the GPU rasterizing the images in 2D... The Jag's Blitter supports "Gouraud Shading" with the JRISC GPU able to do 3D math, but still have to rasterize the images in 2D via the OP. If the Jag wasn't meant for 3D, why was gouraud shading added to the Blitter...? The Jaguar came out compete not only with the 16bits, but with the 3DO as well as the Neo Geo thus we all know the 3DO was built for 3D graphics. If the rasterization of 3D is effective, what difference does it make if the Jag was originally made for 2D via the "Panther" game console...? the 3D stuff came later; if only the Jag had VRAM added.

 

That is all...

 

 

[+cubanismo]

23 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.

FWIW, there are equally compelling quotes detailing how the Flare 1 blitter architecture that was Jaguar/Flare 2's ancestor was designed to make 2D games fast, and the object processor was an amazing sprite machine inherited from the Panther project that I'm not going to bother digging up right now.

 

This was a pretty narrow debate over whether the Jaguar does indeed have hardware designed to accelerate 3D rendering. It does, but I hope people don't read too much into that.

[+CyranoJ]

4 hours ago, philipj said:

Hi Ericde45... The Jaguar predates the PS1 by 2 or 3 years; it has a dedicated "Geometry Transformation Engine" hardwired into the system with the GPU rasterizing the images in 2D... The Jag's Blitter supports "Gouraud Shading" with the JRISC GPU able to do 3D math, but still have to rasterize the images in 2D via the OP. If the Jag wasn't meant for 3D, why was gouraud shading added to the Blitter...? The Jaguar came out compete not only with the 16bits, but with the 3DO as well as the Neo Geo thus we all know the 3DO was built for 3D graphics. If the rasterization of 3D is effective, what difference does it make if the Jag was originally made for 2D via the "Panther" game console...? the 3D stuff came later; if only the Jag had VRAM added.

 

That is all..

 

Also Philipj:

 

[Zerosquare]

3 hours ago, philipj said:

it has a dedicated "Geometry Transformation Engine" hardwired into the system with the GPU rasterizing the images in 2D

No, it doesn't. And you've been told this many times already.

 

1 hour ago, cubanismo said:

This was a pretty narrow debate over whether the Jaguar does indeed have hardware designed to accelerate 3D rendering.

Okay.

 

Let's say I take the exhaust and tires from a Formula 1 car, and somehow manage to install them on a 1993 VW Beetle. Technically, I could claim the result is a racing car since it's got some parts designed for racing, right?

 

Yeah, right. Except pretty much nobody is going to consider a car with a VW Beetle engine to be a racing car.

 

The "3D acceleration" features of the Jaguar are:

- Gouraud shading. Or rather, a 1D horizontal linear gradient in a luma/chroma colorspace. Hey, it's better than nothing.

- Z-buffering. Very fancy, even the PS1 didn't have that! Oh wait, enabling it doubles the bus bandwidth usage... on a machine where bus bandwidth is the limiting factor. Forget it.

- Instructions for matrix multiplication. It's not 3D-specific, and whether it's worth the setup costs is debatable, but let's be charitable.

 

Meanwhile, the most fundamental acceleration features you'd expect to see on anything genuinely designed for 3D are conspicuously absent:

- 3D->2D projection? You're on your own.

- Rasterizing a 2D triangle, then? Nah -- the blitter can only draw single stripes, whose coordinates you have to compute yourself.

- Well, I'll just give it a list and let it work, then... Nope - you have to feed it manually, one stripe at a time.

- Wait. Are you sure this is a 3D machine?! *whistling*

 

When you look at the design in detail, there's no doubt the Jaguar is a machine designed for 2D (and a pretty great one for the time). The few 3D bits are an afterthought, and basically things that don't require too much rework of the 2D design.

 

Now, to be fair to the designers, 3D on video game consoles was in its infancy back then, and everybody was trying to figure out what would work in practice. Even Sega, whose development budget was a lot larger than Flare II/Atari's one, delivered something half-baked with the Saturn.

 

It's very interesting to compare the specs of the Jaguar I and the Jaguar II -- the latter's architecture had been revised to make it much better at 3D, in ways that are actually useful in practice.

 

1 hour ago, cubanismo said:

I hope people don't read too much into that.

Ah! Good one.

[agradeneu]

1 hour ago, Zerosquare said:

 

 

Yeah, right. Except pretty much nobody is going to consider a car with a VW Beetle engine to be a racing car.

 

The "3D acceleration" features of the Jaguar are:

- Gouraud shading. Or rather, a 1D horizontal linear gradient in a luma/chroma colorspace. Hey, it's better than nothing.

- Z-buffering. Very fancy, even the PS1 didn't have that! Oh wait, enabling it doubles the bus bandwidth usage... on a machine where bus bandwidth is the limiting factor. Forget it.

- Instructions for matrix multiplication. It's not 3D-specific, and whether it's worth the setup costs is debatable, but let's be charitable.

 

Meanwhile, the most fundamental acceleration features you'd expect to see on anything genuinely designed for 3D are conspicuously absent:

- 3D->2D projection? You're on your own.

- Rasterizing a 2D triangle, then? Nah -- the blitter can only draw single stripes, whose coordinates you have to compute yourself.

- Well, I'll just give it a list and let it work, then... Nope - you have to feed it manually, one stripe at a time.

- Wait. Are you sure this is a 3D machine?! *whistling*

 

When you look at the design in detail, there's no doubt the Jaguar is a machine designed for 2D (and a pretty great one for the time). The few 3D bits are an afterthought, and basically things that don't require too much rework of the 2D design.

 

 

Wait, the GPU computes coordinates of primitives, the blitter draws pixels line by line (including color shading), the Object processor picks it from the frame buffer - that is fundamentally computing and rasterizing 3d graphics by definition!  And you can read it in the tech manual by the designers themselves too  - bingo!

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasterisation

 

Actually, compared to a SNES or SFX chip, the Jaguar is a racing car, not a beetle! Support for Gouraud shading was huge, doing anything 3D was expensive (PC owners can tell!), before that was flat shading.  

 

Having fully animated 3D at 12-20 FPS was huge too, if you look at consumer level console hardware.

 

The 3D accelation was huge, if you consider how expensive 3D graphics were compared to 2D. Read some feedback from developers, like of Iron Soldier, on the hardware when they first saw it. 

 

Like I said in another thread, you don't need 2x RISC chips at 23 MHZ for computing a tilemapped platfomer, the SNES does that with a RICOH CISC at 3MHZ.

 

No 2D graphics in a game would need a GPU-Blitter-Object graphics pipeline, especially not any 8 bit or 16 bit sprite stuff.

 

Bascially, a 2D game just needs some collision detection, thats it. The computing necessary for a 3D game is huge compared to that. Say like a F1 compared to a bobby car.

 

The crucial part for 2D/sprite graphics is the Object Processor. It was already present in the Panther design - which purpose was to be a powerful sprite machine, nothing more, nothing less. The Panther was dropped in favour for the Jaguar, as we know. 

 

Sorry mate, but I don't buy your story. Honestly, it sounds almost incomprehensible.

Its obvious you dismiss or ignore some fundamental achievements of the hardware designers, while totally exaggarating on missing parts to the point of ridicule.

 

 

 

 

Edited July 22 by agradeneu

[42bs]

3 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

Wait, the GPU computes coordinates of a primitives, the blitter draws pixels line by line (including color shading), the Object processor picks it form the frame buffer - that is fundamentally computing and rasterizing 3d graphics by definition!  And you can read it in the tech manual by the designers themselves too  - bingo!

Well, then the ST is an 3D machine too. And of course my favorite machine is a 3D machine as well. OMG, even my ZX81 can do this.

[42bs]

6 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

No 2D graphics in a game would need a GPU-Blitter-Object work chain, especially not any 8 bit or 16 bit stuff.

The blitter does move data from A to B. With some effects. And some of these are not needed for 3D rendering. But very well for 2D games.

 

The way Reboot uses the OP is likely not what the designers had in mind

[42bs]

9 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

The crucial part for 2D/sprite graphics is the Object Processor. It was already present in the Panther design - which purpose was to be a powerful sprite machine,

OP is not a sprite engine. It has no collision detection. But the blitter has.

[42bs]

16 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

No 2D graphics in a game would need a GPU-Blitter-Object graphics pipeline, especially not any 8 bit or 16 bit sprite stuff.

Hmm, guess @Ericde45 would vote against.

 

The Jaguar's advantage is that GPU/DSP/Blitter are more general purpose than a sprite engine. Not perfect for 2D tile based not perfect for 3D. But good enough to do either.

[+CyranoJ]

14 minutes ago, 42bs said:

The blitter does move data from A to B. With some effects. And some of these are not needed for 3D rendering. But very well for 2D games.

 

The way Reboot uses the OP is likely not what the designers had in mind

 

Well, those designers were crazy....

[+CyranoJ]

The Jaguar hardware can do exceptional 3D compared to what came before (Provided the programmers create their own entire 3D pipeline), but absolutely crap 3D to what arrived almost immediatetly after its release (which did most if not all of that in hardware).

The problem is, the 3D that came before was... shite... and the 3D that immediately arrived after it was groundbreaking.

 

 

2D its a MONSTER.

 

Why make a compromised and janky 3D game when you can make a 2D marvel?

 

 

[agradeneu]

2 minutes ago, CyranoJ said:

The Jaguar hardware can do exceptional 3D compared to what came before (Provided the programmers create their own entire 3D pipeline), but absolutely crap 3D to what arrived almost immediatetly after its release (which did most if not all of that in hardware).

The problem is, the 3D that came before was... shite... and the 3D that immediately arrived after it was groundbreaking.

 

 

 

 

I thought X Wing, TIE Fighter and Iron Soldier were all groundbreaking and impressive stuff.

 

[+CyranoJ]

5 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

I thought X Wing, TIE Fighter and Iron Soldier were all groundbreaking and impressive stuff.

 

 

They are, but none use 3D acceleration, they're all software renderers (which is what the Jaguar does) - And the first two need a 486. Don't say they run on 386, I had a 386 when they released, they crawled.

[agradeneu]

Let me address the negative spin on the Blitter "not drawing triangles" but  "line by line".

IMO it makes perfect sense to draw line by line, if you want to render the full frame/image into the buffer, especially if its sample and FAST.

 

In a 3D scene for a game, you need the whole image, not just some triangles.

 

The point is how a primitive/triangle or a line becomes visible via rasterisation - by defining the COLOR of each pixel. So the Blitter not only does that, it also can do more complex stuff like shading.