T2k Atari Jaguar Emulator

[halo9]

It might be a while before it runs AvP, so think carefully if you're mainly splashing out on a GP2X because of this...

I'm still debugging the new ARM assembler Jaguar RISC processor core emulation code (try saying that quickly!) It's a bit painful, because now it runs for a bit and then blows up because of something that happened many (emulated) instructions before... But I do some more to it every weekend and I'm gradually squashing the bugs.

I'm wondering if it might be an idea to release a version with a hybrid RISC emulation core - one that is the bulk of my assembler core grafted onto part of Dio's original C core. I think that's a bit faster than what was in the last release, but not nearly as fast as it should go with the 100% assembler core.

Dunno, I'll see how things go this weekend.

Cheers for keeping us posted on this interesting project, good luck with the RISC stuff!

 

[rob27]

I wish i could do all this stuff

I just want a portable version of my xbox thats got mame and all sorts on it. The original Jag ran AvP a little slow ? but the Project Tempest seemed fine. Maybe the PC's speed?

 

[predatorramboxxx]

I wish i could do all this stuff

I just want a portable version of my xbox thats got mame and all sorts on it. The original Jag ran AvP a little slow ? but the Project Tempest seemed fine. Maybe the PC's speed?

could someone make a youtube video of this thanks iam gp2xless right now!!

 

[Firefox]

Here we go, three minutes of attract mode:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YYnPTlHRNE

Please excuse the dreadful quality; that's the best my ageing camera can do (being compressed by YouTube hasn't helped).

 

[predatorramboxxx]

Here we go, three minutes of attract mode:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YYnPTlHRNE

Please excuse the dreadful quality; that's the best my ageing camera can do (being compressed by YouTube hasn't helped).


can you make on of avp and try to play it and will there be sound in future release? Iam actually impressed!

 

[argor]

QUOTE

QUOTE

will there be sound in future release?



So far I've completely ignored the sound in order to concentrate on getting the rest of the emulator to go as fast as possible. It was just the easiest thing to leave off in order to tackle the rest.

Once I've squeezed as much performance as I can out of the emulation of the Jag's processors and graphic chips I'll see if I can't do something about the sound. B)

 

[Samba Pa Ti]

i noticed these for sale the other week

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/115280

reading the info about it its pretty interesting im wondering how ebuyer has bnib ones :S

 

[Gruntfuggly]

Because Atari spectacularly failed to sell many of them. Just after they came out, they got hammered by the Dreamcast and then the Playstation...

I'm surprised how much eBuyer are asking for them though - I picked mine up from HMV (I think) for about £20 or something a few years aho...

 

[rob27]

Thats way too expensive, I bought my new one about 2 years ago with AvP for £35!

 

[Exophase]

Because Atari spectacularly failed to sell many of them. Just after they came out, they got hammered by the Dreamcast and then the Playstation...

I think you might have meant Saturn there (Dreamcast came out 6 years after Jaguar). It and PS1 came out nearly 1.5 to 2 years later (in America). Jaguar sold well at first but the launch titles just weren't any good, and the machine quickly gained a reputation of being difficult to develop well for because it was so much different and more complicated than the competition. Because of this almost all of the games heavily underutilized the available hardware.

Although it's obvious the Jaguar couldn't stand against all of the hype of the upcoming big three consoles from Sony, Sega, and Nintendo they were also dwarfed by the SNES's ongoing popularity at the same time (Star Fox, Donkey Kong Country series, Yoshi's Island, Chrono Trigger, etc). And to make matters worse it wasn't just Jaguar competing for a new position in the market at the time but also 3DO and 32x, all of which had serious issues working against them.

Maybe if anything this has taught game companies that bit marketing doesn't work, even on Americans. Actually, I'm not sure if it ever worked at all. Jaguar was definitely pushing this angle more heavily than anything else I've ever seen though (even PC-Engine, aka Turbografx-16). "Do the math" indeed...

I'm surprised how much eBuyer are asking for them though - I picked mine up from HMV (I think) for about £20 or something a few years aho...

There are a lot of new ones on eBay as well going for a lot less (buy it now), but at this point the new stock has got to be drying up.

 

[rokdcasbah]

And to make matters worse it wasn't just Jaguar competing for a new position in the market at the time but also 3DO and 32x, all of which had serious issues working against them.

yeah i was in grade school in the early 90s and i remember thinking the game market had gotten really weird. i think after the first big wave of home consoles and the crash (during which time i didn't have any console), nes was all anyone (that i knew anyway) had, played, or talked about. then after the big 16-bit consoles, a bunch of "weird stuff" (again, in my mind) started coming out. cd-i, 3do, cd32, jaguar, neo geo. sega had more genesis add-ons than games

funny thing is, there's more stuff out now than there was back then, but a lot of it's handhelds, which to me is better than a glorified video cd players which ended up being less "interactive" than dvd.

 

[rob27]

Mmm i got a GP2x 1st edition running firmware 2.1.2

But when i try and load the jag emulator it goes to the initial T2K emulator screen then bombs back to main menu....

any ideas...

Cheers.
Rob.

 

[Firefox]

Mmm i got a GP2x 1st edition running firmware 2.1.2

But when i try and load the jag emulator it goes to the initial T2K emulator screen then bombs back to main menu....

any ideas...

That's identical to mine.

Have you got the Tempest 2000 cartridge ROM image in the same directory and is it called 'Tempest 2000.jag' (with a capital 'T')?

 

[rob27]

Mmm i got a GP2x 1st edition running firmware 2.1.2

But when i try and load the jag emulator it goes to the initial T2K emulator screen then bombs back to main menu....

any ideas...

That's identical to mine.

Have you got the Tempest 2000 cartridge ROM image in the same directory and is it called 'Tempest 2000.jag' (with a capital 'T')?

Is there a screen where you pick what rom you get as im not even getting there... i click to run the software the title screen appears then boot back to gp2x menu

 

[Firefox]

No, it's hardwired to load Tempest 2000.jag as it's the only ROM that'll really work on the early version of the T2K codebase that the GP2X version is based on.

If you launch it from an STerm by cd'ing into the T2K directory on your memory card and entering './t2k' (or watch the output from the serial port when you launch it from the menu if you have a BOB or cradle) you might see an error message that indicates what's going wrong.

The only other thing I can think of is that perhaps your ROM image file is corrupt. Try getting a fresh copy from here and unzip it before you copy it into the T2K directory on your card.


In other news, I had a brainstorm early this morning and exterminated a pair of related bugs from the new asm Jaguar RISC emulation core. Hopefully that means there aren't too many left now...

 

[rob27]

Great news about your brainstorm

Ah cool, i will try the rename 1st....

 

[rob27]

Cool it works, it was the file name!

Great work !

 

[Firefox]

Glad that's sorted.

It will eventually have a fileselector of some kind for selecting which ROM to load, but for the moment I'm concentrating on getting the emulation going as fast as possible while I've got a firm grip on how it all works. I'll add all the nice frills like menus and fileselectors later on.

 

[Jaguarandine]

Wow, this is great news! I never expected someone to take such a serious crack at the Jaguar. As a long time Jaguar fan, thank you, I really appreciate your efforts. Tell me, I'm broke now, but where would I donate money to this awesome project? I suppose you and Dio are the main contributors?

Also, I really enjoy the technical discussion of it. What kind of effort would it take to integrate Jaguar CD support? AFAIK, the attachment had no extra hardware other than what was used to spin the CD. I'm sure it's not as simple as turning a switch on or off, but it would be interesting to hear about the logistics of this. Thanks again!

 

[Firefox]

Wow, this is great news! I never expected someone to take such a serious crack at the Jaguar. As a long time Jaguar fan, thank you, I really appreciate your efforts. Tell me, I'm broke now, but where would I donate money to this awesome project? I suppose you and Dio are the main contributors?

That's alright, no money is expected.

Dio created the emulator whilst on a boring flight back from America. It's his project really. I ported it to Linux (well, SDL, but there was already a Mac port in the works by two other chaps as well as the Dio's original Windows version). The GP2X version is something I'm doing off my own bat, just for the fun and the challenge of it. Dio obviously knows about it and gets copies of the source, but it's not going to be merged back into the main emulator because the changes are too drastic.

Also, I really enjoy the technical discussion of it. What kind of effort would it take to integrate Jaguar CD support? AFAIK, the attachment had no extra hardware other than what was used to spin the CD. I'm sure it's not as simple as turning a switch on or off, but it would be interesting to hear about the logistics of this. Thanks again!

If you mean the VLM sound-to-light firmware that's built into the Jag CD unit, that's already supported in the Windows version. In theory it should work in the Linux and GP2X versions, but I'm not sure how I'd go about streaming in sound data to feed into the emulator. Especially on the GP2X version, which is running the processor flat out (and doesn't support sound yet anyway! )