Atari Jaguar Emulation??


Jurrasic posted on Dec 30 2005 at 11:11 AM said:
That pic makes me happy in pants.

Photoshop-job or do you have an inside scoop? :ph34r:

It's T2K, a freeware Jag emulator for the PC that's heavily optimised for playing Tempest 2000 and the VLM/CD BIOS (and indeed doesn't really run much else yet).

I did the Linux port earlier in the year, which I think all of about three people downloaded. :)

I ported my Linux port (if you see what I mean) to the GP2X just to have a play with the tools, see how easy it would be (very!) and as a bit of a joke really, 'cause I didn't think it would move on anything with less grunt than a PC.

It did start out running at only one or two frames per second, but after a couple of tinkering sessions I've got it up to about-playable speed (but not anywhere near the framerate of the PC/Linux version), but that's with sound emulation turned off.

Hopefully soon I'll have time to move part of one of the emulated Jag RISC chips into the second ARM, then perhaps there'll be a few cycles spare on the main ARM to do some kind of sound (even if it's only streaming the background music tracks off the SD card).
 
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Firefox posted on Dec 29 2005 at 10:18 PM said:
Completely impossible...

[image]

[image]

Dude, are you kidding me? That is awesome. We need to test this!
 
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the debate over 64 bit is a never ending battle. On paper, it's 64-bit, but so was the N-64 and we all know the Jag cannot perform at that level, even the CD add on had graphics comparable to maybe the 3DO while the Jag cart system could barely pump out graphics better than SNES and Mega Drive. I have 16 games for my Jag and the only enjoyable games are AvP and Tempest 2000.
 
Angel posted on Dec 30 2005 at 03:36 PM said:
the debate over 64 bit is a never ending battle. On paper, it's 64-bit, but so was the N-64 and we all know the Jag cannot perform at that level, even the CD add on had

There no one thing like a "bitness" - all this talk about this is just marketing numbers game. Big number sell so Jaguar had to be "64 bits" as the "N64". The same way we might be concluding that Pentium1 is 64 bit to because of its 64 bit memory bus. Or perhaps we shoud call it even an 80 bitter because of its fpu's accuracy?

People do associate "bits" with perfomance and advance in technology only because in the early times of cpu manufacturing jumps in clockrates, caches and pipeling had been making very big perfomance improvements. And then also we had processor with wider busses and ALUs at the same time. So if someone was getting 16 bit computer and before had a 8 bit ones then yeah - he got big jump perfomance but it wasn't only to "bits" but higher clock rates, wider memory busses and so on. Then we had the jump to "32 bits" what was also dramatic as then such things like caches and pipeling hitted the mainstream.

In consoles all this is complicated further because they heavily rely on the various custom coprocessors. This is why the N64 or PSX is more powerfull than Jaguar. The Pentium200MMX plus Voodoo1 will be overall more capable than today's cpu in 3d polygonal/z-buffered/texture mapped graphics.

Angel posted on Dec 30 2005 at 03:36 PM said:
graphics comparable to maybe the 3DO while the Jag cart system could barely pump out graphics better than SNES and Mega Drive. I have 16 games for my Jag and the only enjoyable games are AvP and Tempest 2000.

Because it hadn't too good developers and snes was already very competent 2d machine. It's hard too improve when things are already decent especially when rom storage wasn't bigger than it was in the snes. Times were changing then with more and more focus on the 3d gaming too. Lacking any more sophisticated 3d functions Jaguar could only be blasted by PSX/N64/Saturn.

I wasn't surprised that it flopped. Atari should include cd from the start to really offer something new to the snes. Perhaps focusing resources only one project could help too? At one time Atari had many things going - Falcon, Jaguar, Lynx...
 
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Firefox, that is the awesomeness. I promise if you release even your current unoptimized port as a W.I.P./proof of concept version, a LOT more then 3 people here will download it. :D :D :D

Well done!
 
Holy crap who what when where how? The thing's got about 8 billion processors inside? How did you get it running?
 
well, it runs the jaguar's good game, what else would it possibly need?
speaking of emulators, sourcecodes and ports, tempest2000's author is a 2x owner, maybe....he could be pursuaded to part with some code... If somebody properly begged on his forum. Probably asm though.
 
For Pete's sake, people, the Jaguar IS 64 bit. Like I said, the only reason people think it isn't is because old Jag-bashing magazines said it wasn't to discredit it.

This is the Jaguar's chipset:

Processors:
Tom: Graphics Processor (32-bit RISC @ 26 MHz), Object (64-bit RISC @ 26 Mhz), Blitter (64-bit RISC @ 26 Mhz)
Jerry: Digital Signal Processor (32-bit @ 26 MHz)
Motorola 68000 (16-bit @ 13 MHz)

Notice: Tom consists of three cores: 2 of them are 64 bit, 1 is 32-bit.

The other two are 32-bit and 16-bit respectively.

So yes, there ARE 2 32-bit cores, but there are ALSO 2 64-bit cores.

Plus the 1 16-bit core makes is a 5-processor system.

2 64-bit cores make it technically a 64-bit system. (Unless you like to average your bits out, which doesn't work anyway, then it'd be a 42-bit system, or if you think a system is only as strong as it's weakest processor, which isn't true, since the Jag is much more cabable than the Genesis, then it'd be only 16-bit.)

Unfortunately, the reality of it is that due to poor programming it ended up looking more like the world's only 24-bit system. Some of the games are pretty fun, though.
 
The NeoGeo has been described as 24-bit -- but that really was just marketing...
 
jmetal88 posted on Dec 30 2005 at 07:02 PM said:
For Pete's sake, people, the Jaguar IS 64 bit. Like I said, the only reason people think it isn't is because old Jag-bashing magazines said it wasn't to discredit it.

This is the Jaguar's chipset:

Processors:
Tom: Graphics Processor (32-bit RISC @ 26 MHz), Object (64-bit RISC @ 26 Mhz), Blitter (64-bit RISC @ 26 Mhz)
Jerry: Digital Signal Processor (32-bit @ 26 MHz)
Motorola 68000 (16-bit @ 13 MHz)

Notice: Tom consists of three cores: 2 of them are 64 bit, 1 is 32-bit.

The other two are 32-bit and 16-bit respectively.

So yes, there ARE 2 32-bit cores, but there are ALSO 2 64-bit cores.

Plus the 1 16-bit core makes is a 5-processor system.

2 64-bit cores make it technically a 64-bit system. (Unless you like to average your bits out, which doesn't work anyway, then it'd be a 42-bit system, or if you think a system is only as strong as it's weakest processor, which isn't true, since the Jag is much more cabable than the Genesis, then it'd be only 16-bit.)

So my Radeon is making my PC a 96bit system technically as this is bit width at which it can process data (4x24fp vector units). Some people my claim they have an 128bit systems too... Who knows if we would count memory bus then even 256bit or more.

I'm just showing that there many ways to count "bitness".

It isn't even the most important thing to perfomance.
(clockrates, pipeling, numbers of execution units and caches are more important)
The best proof is the PSX and is anyone thinking that is less powerfull than "64bit" Jaguar? No doubt that Jaguar got the bad press about its "64bitness" as there was a fame but no results.

jmetal88 posted on Dec 30 2005 at 07:02 PM said:
Unfortunately, the reality of it is that due to poor programming it ended up looking more like the world's only 24-bit system. Some of the games are pretty fun, though.

Jaguar didn't have more ram than psx, more general processing power and certainly not more 3d rendering perfomance. It could not compete in 3d and for 2d snes was already good enough. The rom was only up to 6megabytes - the same like in the snes. Sure - it could do better than previous consoles but why developers should care when snes was basically an industry standard for 2d and the incoming psx (plus Saturn and N64) were significantly more capable in the 3d graphics.

There is very good entry in the wikipedia.com about Jaguar. I didn't know (as I was reading it moment ago) that Jaguar has many serious hardware bugs. Rushed, bad marketing, no developer support, hardware issues, lack of more sophisticated 3d but technically it has 64 bits. That's great! NOT and consumer shared this view.
 
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Reaperman93010 posted on Dec 28 2005 at 10:39 PM said:
really? What other system did defender 2000 come out for?

Tempest 2000 came out for Saturn, and eventually PC, but I didn't think Defender 2000 ever made the same leap. I wasn't a fan of d2k anyway.

well, defender 2000 wasnt, but the 3 games that are compiled in Def 2000 surely are on other platforms, right?
 
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I must say, I'm most impressed - I didn;t think anyone would get a Jag emu to run under any circumstances whatsoever, barring the 1fps techdemo. Not that it's a system I was ever into, I'm afraid, but nonetheless... a 5 cpu system sounds a wossname to keep in synch with itself, let alone actually emulate the 117 MHz of speed involved. I mean, that's a crazy ammount to try and run on a 200MHz machine! Even if some of it'll be moved over to the second core...

Congrats, Jag debate aside :)
 
If people are looking for worthwhile Jaguar games, I can name plenty of them. I've had a Jaguar since 1995 or so, and am gradually working towards a complete set of games for it (as well as the JagCD).

The Jaguar really does have more power than people give it credit for. Many of the early companies really didn't tap the system very well, and just ended up porting 16-bit games like Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, NBA Jam, and Double Dragon V, which obviously show none of the capabilities of the system. If you really want to see what the system can do, check out these games:

Battlesphere - This game was under development for about 5 or 6 years, and didn't end up coming out until Atari had basically ceased to exist. Because of this, the game is very hard to find (I still don't have a copy myself). However, it's generally considered to be one of the best games on the system. It's a space shooter with 3D graphical effects and gourad shading and all that kinda stuff.

Battlemorph - This is a completely different game from the one above. This is the CD-based sequel to Cybermorph (The Starfox ripoff that was packed with the Jaguar). The game has much better sound, better graphics (higher framerate and texture mapping), and basically just much more variety in the gameplay, adding things like going underwater and through tunnels and such. This is probably my favorite game on the system.

Alien vs. Predator - This one was probably the most sought-after title for the system back in the days, but honestly, it hasn't aged too well. The 3D engine AVP is based on is really no better than Wolfenstein, and can't do many of the effects that Doom does, like windows and elevators and ledges and such. However, the game has a great sense of atmosphere that you rarely see in video games. It's tons of fun to play late at night with the lights off.

Doom - The Jaguar port of Doom was excellent back in the days, and beat out just about all the other versions... unfortunately, it still lacks a lot of the features of the PC version, such as in-game music, lighting effects, and a few other things. Also, some of the level geometry has changed a bit. Since Doom is all open source now, I'm sure we'll see much better ways of playing Doom on the GP2X.

Wolfenstein 3D - I still think the Jaguar has the best version of Wolf3D ever, even beating out the PC version. The graphics are completely overhauled with higher resolution wall textures and character graphics, you get two new weapons (the flame thrower and the rocket launcher), and the framerate is great. Rumor has it that they ported this game over a weekend just as a test before they did Doom, and it turned out so well that they decided to soup it up and release it.

Power Drive Rally - An overhead view rally racing game. The graphics are all 2D, but the game is a lot of fun. The cars control well, the graphics are colorful, and everything scrolls very smoothly. Excellent game overall.

Attack of the Mutant Penguins - Another colorful 2D game that's a lot of fun. Again, no crazy 3D effects here, but the game is very unique. The storyline is that aliens are invading, and (due to a mishap) they've disquised themselves as penguins. Your job is to kill the alien penguins while saving the REAL penguins. This generally involves building traps and such.

Atari Karts - A ripoff of Super Mario Kart. The game has great graphics and is very smooth, but was obviously rushed to market. There is no battle mode, and the selection of powerups in the game is rather weak. It's still a fun game, but honestly, the real Mario Kart is much better.

Iron Soldier - You pilot a giant mech and wreak havoc in cities in order to complete your missions. It's surprisingly satisfying to swat away helicopters and smash huge buildings into bits with your fists! The game seems a little slow paced by todays standards, but this was a big hit for the Jaguar at the time. There's also a sequel available on cart and CD... although I haven't played it, it seems to be more of the same.

Raiden - Well, it's Raiden, the classic arcade shooter. It's basically arcade perfect (minus the vertical screen) and is probably the best home version of the game available, even beating out the Playstation version. Although if we're talking about the GP2X here, I'd go for MAME instead.

Tempest 2000 - Everyone already knows this game is great, so I guess I don't really have to say anything else about it here.

Rayman - This excellent, colorful side-scrolling platform game actually started off on the Jaguar before being ported to a bunch of other systems. Easily the best platform game on the system.

Defender 2000 - This game doesn't seem to get a lot of attention, and although it's not as good as Tempest 2000, I still think it's tons of fun. There are actually 3 versions of Defender here; the original Defender, Defender Plus (Mostly the same as the original with new stuff added in), and Defender 2000 itself, which expands things quite a bit. It has a great techno soundtrack, but the game can be very frustrating at times as you fly around so fast that you'll often hit stuff without realizing it.

Missile Command 3D - Like the "2000" games, this actually has three different versions of Missile Command... the original, a graphically improved one with 3D graphics and a scrolling view of the sky, and a completely different 3D mode where your three missile bases are in a triangular formation around the city... this mode has you taking a first-person perspective from the bases themselves and firing lasers at the incoming missiles. The game also has some truly amazing boss fights in it. Unfortunately, the game is rather short with only a handful of levels in it.

Super Burnout - Basically just a ripoff of Hang-On, but a very good one.

Pinball Fantasies - This used to be the best video pinball around, and is still a lot of fun... although games like Time Shock and the other Pro Pinball games have made it seem a little old fashioned.

Highlander: Last of the McCleods - For some reason, they based this game on the less popular cartoon version of Highlander rather than the movies... The gameplay is basically Resident Evil with a sword, with a lot of cutscenes taken straight from the animated series. Polygon count on the characters is pretty low, but the pre-rendered backgrounds are nice.

Hover Strike - This game was originally going to be Battlezone 2000, but for whatever reason, they decided to give you a hovercraft instead of a tank. Everything is texture mapped, and dynamic lighting abounds... unfortunately, the framerate is pretty poor (back then it didn't seem so bad), and the controls are a little funny (remember, it's a hovercraft... so you slide around a lot). There's a CD version of this game too that has a few new levels, better music, and some graphical improvements.

There are quite a few other games that are worth trying too, like Evolution Dino Dudes (a Lemmings type of game) and Flashback.... but make sure to stay away from games like Checkered Flag, Club Drive and Trevor McFur, as they're pretty bad. Even though I have a Jaguar, I'd love to be able to play these games on the GP2X... I'm doubtful that the GP2X has the power to emulate it 100%, but it would still be cool.

--Zero
 
Radek posted on Dec 30 2005 at 01:18 PM said:
jmetal88 posted on Dec 30 2005 at 07:02 PM said:
For Pete's sake, people, the Jaguar IS 64 bit. Like I said, the only reason people think it isn't is because old Jag-bashing magazines said it wasn't to discredit it.

This is the Jaguar's chipset:

Processors:
Tom: Graphics Processor (32-bit RISC @ 26 MHz), Object (64-bit RISC @ 26 Mhz), Blitter (64-bit RISC @ 26 Mhz)
Jerry: Digital Signal Processor (32-bit @ 26 MHz)
Motorola 68000 (16-bit @ 13 MHz)

Notice: Tom consists of three cores: 2 of them are 64 bit, 1 is 32-bit.

The other two are 32-bit and 16-bit respectively.

So yes, there ARE 2 32-bit cores, but there are ALSO 2 64-bit cores.

Plus the 1 16-bit core makes is a 5-processor system.

2 64-bit cores make it technically a 64-bit system. (Unless you like to average your bits out, which doesn't work anyway, then it'd be a 42-bit system, or if you think a system is only as strong as it's weakest processor, which isn't true, since the Jag is much more cabable than the Genesis, then it'd be only 16-bit.)

So my Radeon is making my PC a 96bit system technically as this is bit width at which it can process data (4x24fp vector units). Some people my claim they have an 128bit systems too... Who knows if we would count memory bus then even 256bit or more.

I'm just showing that there many ways to count "bitness".

It isn't even the most important thing to perfomance.
(clockrates, pipeling, numbers of execution units and caches are more important)
The best proof is the PSX and is anyone thinking that is less powerfull than "64bit" Jaguar? No doubt that Jaguar got the bad press about its "64bitness" as there was a fame but no results.

jmetal88 posted on Dec 30 2005 at 07:02 PM said:
Unfortunately, the reality of it is that due to poor programming it ended up looking more like the world's only 24-bit system. Some of the games are pretty fun, though.

Jaguar didn't have more ram than psx, more general processing power and certainly not more 3d rendering perfomance. It could not compete in 3d and for 2d snes was already good enough. The rom was only up to 6megabytes - the same like in the snes. Sure - it could do better than previous consoles but why developers should care when snes was basically an industry standard for 2d and the incoming psx (plus Saturn and N64) were significantly more capable in the 3d graphics.

There is very good entry in the wikipedia.com about Jaguar. I didn't know (as I was reading it moment ago) that Jaguar has many serious hardware bugs. Rushed, bad marketing, no developer support, hardware issues, lack of more sophisticated 3d but technically it has 64 bits. That's great! NOT and consumer shared this view.

My point is that it's 64 bits. My other point is it is a beast to program for. I think that with careful programming it could possibly achieve PSX type results, but I also think that no person has ever gotten their head around the hardware enough to see how this would be possible.

By the way, core program code could be run on one of the 64-bit processors (best bet would be the GPU) if you really wanted to. I think the Jaugar's Atari 2600 emulator relied on that, although I haven't gotten it to run yet, myself.

Also, as for the rom being only 6 megabytes, the CD add-on greatly increased that.
 
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