Jaguar Emulator?

[christo930]

I've often thought that Tempest 2000 would be a good fit for an OLED display too - the black backgrounds contrasting with Gourad shaded polys and colourful vectors should look awesome!

Ah, I'll probably get one in the new year, just to see what the display can do.

Well yes i am sure it will look awesome. I know the regular Tempest in MAME looks great on the display. Basically that is the reason I got the Wiz was that classic games look especially great on the OLED, it is the closest thing to the look of an old RGB arcade monitor that you will get on a handheld.

Does it work under dosbox? T2k was released for dos, but TBO, I don't remember the hardware requirements though I do remember it ran under dos and wasn't a win 95 game.

 

[Firefox]

Does T2K use all of those Jag cores that you mention?

Do you think the Wiz's 3D GPU could be used for something like handling the vectors or doing some of the polygon fills? If that was possible maybe some speed could be gained.

Tempest 2000 uses all of the Jag's cores, yes.

One of the strange/interesting things about the Jaguar is that it doesn't have a frame buffer. Instead it has the Object Processor, which processes a sort of scene graph containing all of the things on screen to produce each scanline of the display in turn, just in time to be streamed out to the TV. The scene graph can change between scanlines, so it's rather difficult to accurately emulate the Jag's graphics cores using a conventional GPU.

 

[DaveC]

Does T2K use all of those Jag cores that you mention?

Do you think the Wiz's 3D GPU could be used for something like handling the vectors or doing some of the polygon fills? If that was possible maybe some speed could be gained.

Tempest 2000 uses all of the Jag's cores, yes.

One of the strange/interesting things about the Jaguar is that it doesn't have a frame buffer. Instead it has the Object Processor, which processes a sort of scene graph containing all of the things on screen to produce each scanline of the display in turn, just in time to be streamed out to the TV. The scene graph can change between scanlines, so it's rather difficult to accurately emulate the Jag's graphics cores using a conventional GPU.

I thought the reason the "emu" ran only t2K was because it was written to only use the cores that this game used. Now that you say it uses all of them I wonder why other games wouldn't run on the emu?

That screen rendering sounds weird. It is like alien technology They sure did things different. The Jag had a few decent games but many were dreadful. I take it was because Atari was so cheap they didn't want to make a ROM cart any larger than they absolutely needed to. I think I remember hearing about how they re-released a game with some levels stripped out in order to save a few cents on ROM chips or something.

 

[Orion4874]

I agree with you Dave that the Jaguar didn't have many good games, but the area it excelled in was the battle/war type games. Battlemorph, Cybermorph, Skyhammer, and Iron Soldier(which in my opinion was one of the Jaguars best games). Any chance any of these games could run on this emu?

 

[Firefox]

I thought the reason the "emu" ran only t2K was because it was written to only use the cores that this game used. Now that you say it uses all of them I wonder why other games wouldn't run on the emu?

T2K (the emulator) has emulated all of the Jag's cores from the very start - though to start with the emulation was only good enough to run Tempest 2000 and the VLM.

As time has passed the accuracy of the emulation has improved, but it still isn't perfect (there's still a fair bit about the Jaguar hardware that is undocumented). More games work on it now, but I don't have a list. I seem to remember Dio saying "between a quarter and a half of all Jag games should work now" when he put out the last release.

I agree with you Dave that the Jaguar didn't have many good games, but the area it excelled in was the battle/war type games. Battlemorph, Cybermorph, Skyhammer, and Iron Soldier(which in my opinion was one of the Jaguars best games). Any chance any of these games could run on this emu?

I don't think so (I've never heard of Skyhammer, though). Battlemorph looks really good from the videos I've seen of it. I'd like to play it some day.

In the last few years Dio has been working on a multi-system emulator (called simply "Emu") that emulates many systems very accurately, including the Jaguar. I don't know if any handheld will be powerful enough to run it, but - with his permission - I'll definitely be finding out.

 

[dogeymon]

How could you have enough buttons on the Wiz to play Atari Jaguar games?? They often utilize the numeric keypad, which you place a piece of film over. In Cybermorph, you use all those buttons to switch weapons.