Atari Jaguar

[gentle bobcat]

I think there were a few things that used the second SD slot.

What doesn't kill you...

( only makes you stronger )

[slender valley]

Oh, I know there's like... 2 or 3 cores left that still use it (Though I don't think any require it anymore and have other options) I meant if the Pi boards somehow messed with it

[uncut atlas]

AHHH yeah I fixed that glitchiness

[mental briar]

Was it fun at least?

Something delightfully Atari

[slender valley]

I thought their motto was "Have you played Atari today?"

[uncut atlas]

• Please test cropping, make sure it's sane
• Please test direct video to make sure it still works
• Please test saving with memory track (use the menu to mount the blank memory track card). Open OSD to write.
• Make sure CD's are stable, don't crash, and load consistently
• Make sure the VLM does all the things it's supposed to and none of the things it isn't
  As a bonus
• Feel free to try the hidden menus in the custom cd bios by holding start when the vlm logo is right side up. You can save effects.

[uncut atlas]

it was the stupid xwaitl signal. cursed signal. very atari.

[gentle bobcat]

On the VLM hold-the-button she means PAUSE... which will pause music if it was playing... but once the magic menu is up you can hit pause again to unpause the music.

Just wanted to mention, as you said earlier, music is working again in Primal Rage... not that I play that game, but just wanted to check it.

[uncut atlas]

everything I checked works, robinsons, ants, highlander, primal, all the usual suspects

ants may be a little inconsistent.. I think that's just how the game was programmed

[mental briar]

zero 5 (cart game)?

[uncut atlas]

also for Jaguar Mind Bomb Squad, having the text cropped at the bottom is correct, I believe it was made for PAL size

[slender valley]

So ants is full of bugs?

[uncut atlas]

you could say that

[mental briar]

zero 5 boots

[uncut atlas]

if this holds up ill make a single ram version for more testing

hopefully that will make even the most atari-pilled person happy

[mental briar]

(his name is dowdle)

[dreamy hinge]

I will download to play tempest once a month

[slender valley]

That should be all consumer Atari hardware that the mister now supports right?

Not like Atari lasted long...

[dreamy hinge]

no falcon

[slender valley]

Huh, didn't know there was a computer before the ST.

[uncut atlas]

I got brett hull prototype to work with my cd bios

[slender valley]

Surprised the newer ones have cores but the older one doe snot

[warm oasis]

There were loads of computers before, should be all covered by the Atari 800 core

Falcon was a super up ST

[uncut atlas]

@dreamy hinge can you make some better way to deal with the two memory card like files?

I don't know how to and I'm too apathetic to learn

[warm oasis]

Atari XEGS console could possibly benefit from a bespoke core though, support for that within the 800 core seems broken and a mess. Try load games and figure out what option to select and see how you get on

[uncut atlas]

oh cheats are disabled in that build btw for just build time

because they make builds longer, ill turn them back on for release

[slender valley]

Loads between each startup logo Ouch, also, the intro of that song keeps making me think of Guile's theme

[uncut atlas]

I also am really proud of the numstick input option for the number pad and i'd love feedback on that

[uncut atlas]

to be fair it's an unreleased dev prototype

[slender valley]

Ok, fair

[uncut atlas]

does anyone want to see what I had to do to make the video cropped right on this cursed console?

[mental briar]

Everything looks good here. Should I put this in the Dual Ram repo? Or would you prefer it stays here for now?

[mental briar]

only if it's incredibly annoying and atari

[uncut atlas]

@mental briar did you test all the crops?

I know you love doing that

[dreamy hinge]

farmer TheJesusFish

[mental briar]

lol, the only thing that looked off was double dragon, but it was fine on a CRT

[gentle bobcat]

There is also the Atari Portfolio... that was marketed by Atari but they bought it from someone else. It was an 8088 DOS handheld PC with a tiny 40 columns by 8 lines (or something like that) screen that was about the size of a VHS tape. I had one back in the day. That was long before the Palm Pilot.

[dreamy hinge]

probably, are the empty memory card formats complicated or is it like a header+empty space? and are they only relevant for jagcd or carts too?

[uncut atlas]

it's blank 128kb

[warm oasis]

Maybe wait for a build run off with cheats enabled?

[uncut atlas]

all 0's

[uncut atlas]

omg you and your cheats

[dreamy hinge]

MiSTerCheatBox

[warm oasis]

Hah! Sorry, I assumed you had them done but just turned off on this build

[dreamy hinge]

also do we want these saves to be psx style (automounts a per-game memory card, user can override in menu) or just one big save for everything?

[gentle bobcat]

@uncut atlas - yes to the show the crop pain

[slender valley]

https://tenor.com/view/cheetah-gif-27497752

It's called a Jaguar, not a cheetah!

[uncut atlas]

// Blanks are important to alter here, because they eventually feed into the BLANK signal which is
// used in pix.v to determine what pixels are drawn, so merely changing the blanks given to the
// framework isn't enough, the pixel output will still be cropped without changing the system's
// internal behavior.
// In NTSC, 1588 x 476 seems to be the canonical drawn screen size, PAL is 1588 x 568.
// What we want is about a 640x224 output which is 1280x448 output in atari terms.
// 704x238
// 5, 10, -1, 7

// It seems the active display drawing makes the vblank shifted up by 2 jaguar lines and the hblank shifted right by 4 jaguar clocks


wire [10:0] hdb_real = (hdb1_ < hdb2_) ? hdb1_ : hdb2_;

wire [10:0] hb_real = ((hdb_real > (hbe_ + 3'd4)) ? hdb_real : (hbe_ + 11'd84));
wire [10:0] he_real = ((hde_ < (hbb_ + 3'd4)) ? hde_ : (hbb_ - 11'd44));
wire [10:0] vb_real = ((vdb > (vbe + 2'd2)) ? vdb : (vbe + 11'd26));
wire [10:0] ve_real = ((vde < (vbb + 2'd2)) ? vde : (vbb - 2'd2));

// So, HC (horizontal counter) is a lie. It does not increment from 0 to the length of the line.
// In fact, it increments to HP then resets and increments it's 10th bit, then increments to HP again,
// so using real numbers for horizontal counts doesn't work. They have to be adjusted to use the real
// hperiod.

wire [10:0] h_correction = (10'b11_1111_1111 - hp) + 11'b1; // Correction to add to HC to get real horizontal position
wire [10:0] cropped_hlen = (ntsc ? 11'd1280 : 11'd1398) + h_correction;
wire [10:0] cropped_vlen = ntsc ? 11'd448 : 11'd574;
wire [10:0] full_hlen = (ntsc ? 11'd1588 : 11'd1553) + h_correction;
wire [10:0] full_vlen = ntsc ? 11'd482 : 11'd576;

// The active drawn area between the blanks.
wire [10:0] hblank_len = hbb_[10:0] - hbe_[10:0];
wire [10:0] vblank_len = vbb[10:0] - vbe[10:0];

wire [10:0] hactive_len = he_real - hb_real;
wire [10:0] vactive_len = ve_real - vb_real;

wire [10:0] hgap_lead = hb_real - hbe_;
wire [10:0] hgap_tail = hbb_ - he_real;
wire [10:0] vgap_lead = vb_real - vbe;
wire [10:0] vgap_tail = vbb - ve_real;

// Only crop if we need to crop.
wire [10:0] ha_diff = (hactive_len > cropped_hlen) ? (hactive_len - cropped_hlen) : 11'd0;
wire [10:0] va_diff = (vactive_len > cropped_vlen) ? (vactive_len - cropped_vlen) : 11'd0;

// The space between hblank end and drawing begin, plus whatever crop we need to do to the drawing area.
wire [10:0] h_offset = 11'd0;
wire [10:0] v_offset = 11'd0; // Maybe 4 for some things?
wire [10:0] h_mask_offset = 11'd16; // I have no earthly idea why this number is needed.

wire [10:0] h_lead_diff = (hgap_lead + ha_diff[10:1]);
wire [10:0] h_tail_diff = (hgap_tail + ha_diff[10:1]);
wire [10:0] v_lead_diff = (vgap_lead + va_diff[10:1]);
wire [10:0] v_tail_diff = (vgap_tail + va_diff[10:1]);

wire crop_h = ((hbe_ + h_lead_diff) > hc[10:0]) || (((hbb_ + h_mask_offset) - h_tail_diff) < hc[10:0]);

I dont really need to use most of it though

[mental briar]

light work

[uncut atlas]

the overall vibe you should get is cd's are really stable

and wont randomly crash

[mental briar]

I have not been able to crash one yet

and opening the menu doesn't mess stuff up

[uncut atlas]

none of them really feel like finished games to me

[mental briar]

This whole system is a series of “oh this was a game that someone paid real money for” experiences

It’s why I love it

[uncut atlas]

my goal is for nobody to ever waste their money on this system

[mental briar]

This may be the worst version of mortal kombat

[sterile moss]

duck and kick is near unbeatable

[tropic rock]

Tested with an older core and the new build. Volume is unchanged.

[gentle bobcat]

@GreyRogue - Thanks for checking.

[slender valley]

I have a feeling more people being able to play Jaguar would inspire more collectors to buy the real thing XD

[uncut atlas]

I agree with this, but im wondering if you know what influences it

the cd drive technically has a volume register. I dont know that it was ever really used to any particular effect

[warm oasis]

Porkchop did a lot of work years back to boost/normalise the audio on all the cores, maybe if it is too low it can be boosted?

[tropic rock]

The muxxing is not done like some other cores. The raw CD audio data is fed into the i2s on jerry which mixes it internally with other sounds and music. If the volume register does affect it it would be directly modifying the raw audio data. I think the best way to test is against real hardware. Compare cart audio vs cd audio. I suspect it will match real hardware well. I suspect no software modifies the cd drive volume register and it is always at 100. I didnt want to waste a dsp multiplication on it and was worried about timing. It might be safe to add though.

[uncut atlas]

I agree with you, there's no easy way to boost i2s either, but I thought it was worth thinking about if it might have been redbook related or just something I was unaware of

[tropic rock]

The vlm volume is handled by jerry.

[uncut atlas]

the volume register returns a valid code but does nothing

same with the lid commands

[tropic rock]

Yeah. I think best test is play a game cd audio and compare to a cart audio.

[uncut atlas]

I managed to gather up all the expected dsa commands from the cd dev emulator, decompiled games and cdbios source, and the dsa spec sheets, and then I went through and made them comply to expectations as cdbios > cdemulator > spec sheet

[tropic rock]

Primal Rage has a track player internal if wanting to avoid using vlm

[uncut atlas]

oh neat I should try it to see if uses a->b or search

[tropic rock]

It is not complicated. Only uses up and down to select track

No volume control or seeking.

[uncut atlas]

@tropic rock are you okay with all the changes to butch?

99% of it is just adding checks for stale data and making commands more robust

and atti stuff

for future reference, audio gotos in vlm have to come out to 30 ms or they will be wrong

[tropic rock]

My eyes are glazing over a bit. Nothing seems egregious. You can update the TODO in the readme.

[high token]

I have owned I’d say four in my lifetime. More because I always wanted it as a kid and to me anyways, I loved it. But they’re such pieces of shit. Like Atari just threw together bits and pieces whether they worked or not which is why a lot of these are non functioning. Some also are sold as such because you need a game to complete the circuit and power it on, so most people see a blank screen and think “junk”. Scored a few Jags this way which I got for friends that wanted one. Even bought a NEW one once, however, since it had issues with the GameDrive’s CD functionality (it was an earlier unit), I sold it. Just gotta see if I can get a BlissBox and Jag controller unless someone else can make a SNAC adapter.

[urban mango]

@high token The reflex adapt works well if you insist on using an original controller for Jag, new rev due soon.
I think I’ve had 3 jags over the years, still have 2(!) that I got back when they were being cleared out. The CD unit I picked up years ago was flaky but fixable

[uncut atlas]

our base system is really accurate, about as accurate you can be

atari themselves made it the real system from the same files basically

I feel pretty good that our cd system is pretty accurate now too

i've verified it again and again against the bios and software's expectations, the datasheets etc

@dreamy hinge eeprom is 128bytes and initializes to 0xFF for all 128 bytes. It doesnt really need to be visible to user, if it doesnt exist it just needs to be made to exist and mounted. realistically users will never have to change or think about it, it just has to be there to save stuff

memory track is 128kb and initializes to all 0's. the game will silently create the filesystem the first time it is used. I'd like the option to create a blank one, and an option to create one per each disc. At least just make a new one.

ok today my agenda is aspect ratio and cheats

verify save pending triggers

I guess add a lid wire just in case

single ram build testing

[supple finch]

Note to self: Never let @gentle bobcat near a CD player if he visits.

[ashen spoke]

I have completely lost the plot on what is going on in this channel

[uncut atlas]

im generally getting jaguar ready for release and ignoring moondandy worms

[ashen spoke]

I’m not making a joke but I thought moondandy worms was driving this chat for the past couple of weeks

it was all audio player improvements right?

[uncut atlas]

sort of

here's the problem robby: the atari jaguar is terrible. It has no good games. The audio player is actually ones of it's most outstanding features.

I say that with complete seriousness

so having that broken means both the cd drive emulation is wrong, and one of it's better features isnt represented

so it had to be fixed to know we had accuracy

the VLM (aka the audio player) was made by a pretty famous guy with a cult following

I spiffed it up a little in the process so the hidden editor could save and load the neat effects

[ashen spoke]

That was genuinely what confused me and your answer makes complete sense

Like why were you spending so much time on it, and yeah that makes sense

I wasn’t going to question it but I know how logical you are so I was trying to figure it out lol

[uncut atlas]

right, on a ps1 or something there's this rich library of games and the cd player is just trivial

but I'd say 0 of the jag cd games are really playable

the cd player being by jeff minter becomes one of its more appealing features

[ashen spoke]

I never used it but it sounds interesting. And since you’ve spent so much time and care I should try it out

[uncut atlas]

it has sort of neat visualizations is the thing

and there's no real way to get them elsewhere, especially not on a crt

anyway the point is it's a non trivial piece of the jagcd

cd+g is, but the vlm in general really has to work

gosh im hungry, I think I want a bacon egg and cheese

[ashen spoke]

No lie, I’m a bit jealous of your ability to just walk a few blocks and get amazing breakfast lol

[uncut atlas]

walk? what

no I order it

[mental briar]

walking? in this economy?

[uncut atlas]

@tropic rock the one thing that still bothers me is our system handling of save eeproms

I had to write a proper accurate one for the cd drive's eeprom because our existing code didnt work with normal eeprom behavior

but basically a bunch of weird mysterious things are happening with the cart eeproms

one is they can't be on the external bus, and logically, there's no way they can be which is ???

two, they have that weird hold write over cs behavior, which is not typical at all

without that they fail

the part number atari used wasn't any kind of special eeprom

it shouldn't be like this

I mean it works.. but why?

[gentle bobcat]

There had been an autosave toggle but now it just seems to work... or did I imagine that?

[mental briar]

The hero arc that kit has taken with VLM from "I dunno people are weirdly obsessed with this" to "No, this is actually the JagCD's only redeeming value"

[uncut atlas]

it's in advanced options

the UX reality is most people want autosaving on and never to turn it off

im a really strong believer in less options, because most of them are useless distractions that you wouldn't care about if they weren't there to force you to think about them

allowed to run amok you end up with nothing but a maze of options and half your time is spent tweaking every game before you play

it's a trap

[mental briar]

Autosave should be on by default in all cores. Thanks for coming to my ted talk

[uncut atlas]

you should just be able to load a cart and play and not have to think about it

[gentle bobcat]

I'm totally down for that. On the CD audio boost thing... sorry I brought it up... it is totally a me thing. The audio setup I have is completely inadeqate and there is nothing the core could do to do remedy that. 🙁 But until I solve that, earbuds work fine. )

[uncut atlas]

we have very little control over cd audio muxxing on this core so you're probably SoL there anyway

it's not like other cores where it's just a pcm stream

it's i2s from the chip itself, so jerry already has full control over the volume levels

we never have a chance to do anything

on the bright side you can rest reassured that it it is digitally perfectly accurate in every way

#taber

although...

I do have to debug the i2s a little

we latch the data on the wrong clock edge, and I believe the reason centers around this flipflop here

you can clearly see there they are latching the ws signal, presumably to delay or align it

that seems not to be taking place the way they intended at the moment

[gentle bobcat]

On the origin of the netlist, I believe you are correct about the dumpster dive retrieval of the first netlist, but after it got out, John Mathieson did provide updated copies of the Tom and Jerry netlists to ensure what was out there was as accurate as possible.

[uncut atlas]

oh, that was nice of him

[high token]

It’s not an “immediate” thing like I have to. But I’d like to have the option. Right now, using a RetroBit wireless Genesis six button and have 1, 2, 3 mapped to X, Y, Z and pound and star to L and R.

[mental briar]

Oh wait, @uncut atlas is the 2nd stick stuff in here?

I keep forgetting to check

[high token]

Genesis D-Pad is SO much more comfortable than the Jaguar one.

Using that also for 3DO as well

[gentle bobcat]

Dumpster diving was a major tool of "hackers" back in the day. Just ask the two Kevins (Mitnick and Poulsen although Mitnick has been dead for a while).

[uncut atlas]

the what?

[high token]

I can actually play Tempest 2000 without hurting my thumb. Got my best score for that game the other day using the core and the Genesis controller than I ever did on a stock Jag.

[mental briar]

for the num pad. the stuff you added so you don't need an 18 button controller

[uncut atlas]

yes

it's called numstick

turn it on in input options

[gentle bobcat]

LittleMissKittn: I'm guessing you keep your thumb engaged with the d-pad at all times and slide it around? I just pick my thumb up constantly going from position to position and placing it back down again. I've not really ever had any overuse/stress on my thumb even with longish gameplay sessions. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. 🙂

[high token]

I basically use the D-Pad as a spinner but with my thumb. I just leave it down and slide it

[gentle bobcat]

I guess I treat the d-pad as if it were 4 buttons.

"The Watchman: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Serial Hacker Kevin Poulsen" by Jon Littman is my favorite non-fiction book followed closely by "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage" by Clifford Stoll. Jon Littman also wrote the best book on Kevin Mitnick.

The "This Week In Retro" podcast from today covers that giant controller adapter for the MiSTer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE8c463aibw

[uncut atlas]

yikes

just get a ps5 controller ffs

oh I didn't mention it

[tropic rock]

;  DI (data in)     - is written on bit0 of GPIO_0
;  CS (chip select)    - is pulsed low by any access to GPIO_1

[uncut atlas]

there's also an input option to use the keyboard to mux with p1 controller

so you can use like a numeric keypad

[uncut atlas]

yes?

but the ebus gates are closed to the driving serial pins when the address to access them is used

[tropic rock]

It is not on the external bus

[uncut atlas]

the eeprom is not?

[tropic rock]

It is on gpio0

[uncut atlas]

the cart save eeprom?

[tropic rock]

Unless I am misreading something

;                        *
;    EEPROM Write & Read Primitives        *
;                        *
;************************************************
;
;    Hi-Score on-board-cartridge EEPROM primitives 
;    for use by Jaguar game cartridge developers.
;
;    128 bytes (accessable as 64 words) of non-volatile
;    memory are available on Jaguar game cartridges to
;    preserve Hi-scores or other game status.
;    Data is retained for up to 10 years, and a minimum
;       of 10,000 read/write cycles is assured, according to
;    product literature. 

[uncut atlas]

is it e2data here?

[tropic rock]

That is DO

; DO (data out) - is read on bit0 of JOY1

[uncut atlas]

so it's just on thhe raw gpio

not through edbus

[tropic rock]

That is my understanding. It is also why the cs behaves as it does.

[uncut atlas]

it makes more sense. gpio0 is pulled up

they all are

[uncut atlas]

you're right, there's no intermediate for gpio to the expansion

butch pulls cs low while jag pulls cs high when undriven

still I can't seem to reconcile the behavior

there must be some other timing nuance

[gentle bobcat]

The multi-controller adapter board for MiSTer supposedly borrows the DaemonBite design but it doesn't provide any Jaguar controller ports. 🙁 Pretty much everything else though... including 3DO and NeoGeo.

[tropic rock]

Latest timestamp of the eeprom source

[uncut atlas]

so this

assign cart_ee_di = dbus[0];

should be gpio0?

then what is the sck?

42b

ok so yes..

there's only one din/dout pin

so d = e2data (ebus)
sck = gpio0
cs = gpio1

@tropic rock so basically the answer is yes, it's still a mystery why we can't use e2data for DI

[tropic rock]

    move.w    d2,GPIO_0of(a0)        ;write next bit

Pretty sure this means it pulses gpio0 while driving the bus

[deep granite]

this is subjective, i think the jaguar has some good games and decent specs for the pre-PSX early-mid 90s but it was effectively hobbled by both internal mismanagement and external circumstances

but i understand your insistence on preserving it regardless and especially the VLM which I appreciate

[uncut atlas]

right this clocks it, but it doesn't fix the DI anomaly

[timid snow]

Rayman on Jaguar is actually the best version believe it or not. The PSX and Saturn versions have a lot more bells and whistles with FMV custcenes and CD audio, but PSX and Saturn versions are ludicrously hard because they changed the jump angle. The Atari Jaguar has the correct jump angle and it makes the ridiculously difficult platforming levels much more manageable

[uncut atlas]

there must be a behavior of the external databus that isn't fully understood here

[tropic rock]

DI and D0 are not the same pin

[uncut atlas]

like it must latch the value before disconnecting it

... what?

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

[tropic rock]

Maybe I am misunderstanding

[uncut atlas]

okay

lets fill in the blanks

[tropic rock]

ee2data is only for reading from eeprom

[uncut atlas]

SCLK =
DI =
DO =
CS =

DO = e2data, yes?

[tropic rock]

yes

[uncut atlas]

so what is SCLK

[tropic rock]

gpio0

[uncut atlas]

okay

and what is CS?

[tropic rock]

gpio1

[uncut atlas]

so far we're in accord

now what is DI?

[tropic rock]

It has to be databus0

[uncut atlas]

it cannot be databus0

it has to be e_dbus0

[tropic rock]

How exactly it is connected is unclear

[uncut atlas]

the real databus does not ever touch the expansion

[slender valley]

if it dosen't break and refuse to work anymore after a few months, can it really be called accurate to a real Jaguar CD? 🤣

[uncut atlas]

the unclear part is that when jerry is written to mess with GPIO, it disables the external databus, which is the only possible thing connected to DI

that's EXPL signal there

jerry toggles expl high so it disables the gates

so the question is HOW does this eeprom see e_dbus0 if e_dbus0 is undriven and pulled high because it is disabled by the very thing writing to the eeprom?

and, the act of writing to GPIO because it is not in e_dbus range, actually ALWAYS disables the e_dbus

this is why it's an a paradox, so there must be some kind of residual value behavior

[gentle bobcat]

Cyber Akuma - and the Jaguar core doesn't break cartridge saves nor the CD EEPROM / memtrack cart after 100,000 saves.

[tropic rock]

 this is for ROMs, joysticks and other non DSP IO */

Dspcs :=    IV (dspcs,dspcsl);
Exiol :=    ND3 (exiol,dspcs,a[14],al[15]);
Expl :=        AN3 (expl,exiol,romcsl[0..1]);

Expl should be active for gpio

[uncut atlas]

but it's not

if it was, we could just use e_dbus[0] and it would work

wire [31:0] e_dbus = (e_dbus_we) ? dbus[31:0] : {e_dbus_31_16, e_dbus_15_8, e_dbus_7_0}; // Internal data bus writing.

wire e_dbus_we = ~xexpl & ~rw;

is the problem rw? is it not writing?

it has to be

[pure oracle]

Lemme ask Claude real quick brb

[uncut atlas]

it's not going to know that

[pure oracle]

Yup! It just said that Tom & Jerry don’t get along well

[uncut atlas]

I think basically DI should be latched on the GPIO write to jerry

[uncut atlas]

as it turns out, the TDA1545A isn't an i2s dac

it doesn't use I2s

that explains why i2s doesn't work

it's phillips violating their own protocol

latching the data in eeprom was the missing ingredient too

that seems to be the correct behavior

[uncut atlas]

yes, I just said that, thank you

[high token]

So, testing out the new MiSTer main that’s coming that finally fixed the menu on the RT4K, however it broke the Jaguar video

Using the Rework core from today

Used also the core from 02.24 and same issue, so something in that main broke the Jaguar core

[slender valley]

Ah yes, the Rtagya from PTA, great system

[high token]

Ignore that message of mine. Come to find I still had the PSX preset on, that’s what messed it up….🤦🏽‍♀️

So take this as a sign that even someone with twenty five years experience in tech can screw up from time to time

[uncut atlas]

does this sound cleaner now?

[uncut atlas]

okay im interested in this, is that direct video?

I did change video signals a lot

they were kinda jank before, but it's still ultimately using vvs

there's also a setting in audio and video called Visual Area: Active

try changing that to original and see what happens

well that audio chip change finally puts one of the last long standing mysteries to rest

and now I can use the same eeprom path for both eeproms

everything is coming up jaguar

[gentle bobcat]

Yes, that GnR song sounds noticably cleaner in your video.... but I'm getting to that spot and there isn't anyway to fast forward to that solo... pretty long song.

[uncut atlas]

probably all jaguar audio is cleaner

would be my guess

[gentle bobcat]

VLM audio has been pretty clean for me.

Because those are audio CD tracks playing directly I assume.

[gentle bobcat]

I happen to have that album as a VLM .cdi file.

[uncut atlas]

yeah I think the sound is better

this is why little bandaid fixes are never okay

they hide grevious weepin infections that threaten to kill you from sepsis

[mental briar]

Don't look too hard at this. In order to get the menu to crop properly in Direct Video, you have to twist the video in weird ways, and I think what's happening here is that LittleMiss's adjustments to the menu are spilling over into Jaguar

I can test whatever DV stuff you need

[uncut atlas]

I do need to know if it's a core issue or just old settings being applied

[mental briar]

I'll look right now

[gentle bobcat]

Thanks Dr. House, (going from your analogy)

[uncut atlas]

the video signals look pretty kosher and well generated now

[mental briar]

Looks good

[uncut atlas]

okay

getting real close now

[uncut atlas]

why do all these retail games feel like unfinished homebrews

[mental briar]

50 dollars a game

In 1994 money

And you came home with AirCars

[gentle bobcat]

There are only a small handful of games that were written by developers who actually figured out the hardware... mainly because the default development toolchain was literally developed over a weekend from gcc... because the company that was contracted to make it, failed and it got yanked at the last minute. The only games that really exercise the Tom and Jerry are Doom (and Carmack didn't figure out background music), T2K/D2K, AvP to some degree but I'm sure it could have been a lot better frame rate and music... but the main one is Battlesphere as those developers spent about 7 years (part-time while working full-time jobs) figuring out the hardware and tuning their custom development tools... that was released with the game and used by homebrew these days. The vast majority of everything else was just stuff ported from 68000-based systems to the 68000.

...with the bare minimum effort to get it working and not much polish and a shoestring budget. The more ambitious titles really didn't get enough effort put into them and were released in terrible shape (Checkered Flag and Fight For Life). Kasume Ninja came out reasonably well but so many folks expect SF2-style controls and it doesn't have that.

T2K definitely isn't perfect and has some audio clipping in the more busy action sequences. I bet Minter could have done much better if he had spent more time on it and the development tools had been better. The Tramiels were broke and hanging on for dear life... with patent suit winnings being their primary source of income. Most games didn't sell that well... and I think T2K sold about 30,000 copies.

Now having said all of that, I can tell you, having lived through the drip-drip-drip of releases... we were just happy to get what we got... and for the most part, we enjoyed it.

[uncut atlas]

dowdle you make me so sad for you. I want to give you a hug and a bowl of soup

[gentle bobcat]

I'm guessing some folks in this channel have some notion of the 2600 and how that hardware really wasn't designed to do much of anything... yet developers figured out how to do all kinds of unthinkable things... usually with only one or two developers... mostly one. Atari was still in that mindset that developers could figure it all out and make magic happen and almost now one did (with the Jaguar). In contrast though, the Jaguar hardware (let's pretend where weren't any hardware bugs) was not suffering from a lack of resources (for the time).

Oh, I hope I didn't give the impression that I was sad about that... but I was just answering your question with a ton of hind-site that no one had at the time.

[uncut atlas]

not the 2600

oh god oh god

[tropic rock]

What does this affect in the core?

[uncut atlas]

the way it processes audio

[gentle bobcat]

The 2600 was my first gaming system and the only one I had for a couple of years... and I never made it to the NES (the Jaguar was my next system years later)... but I don't have much fondness for the 2600. There are only a couple of 2600 games I'd consider playing... and Atari definitely drug its lifecycle for at least a decade beyond what it should have been. Blah, blah, blah.

[uncut atlas]

so we were getting an I2S signal and capturing it as though it were i2s, but we always had to bodge it to capture the data on the wrong edge and we didn't know why

[gentle bobcat]

Sorry it bring up previous nightmares for you. 🙂

[uncut atlas]

the TDA1545A uses an inverted WS.. which means left and right were backwards before, and also a different frame timing, which means we weren't really capturing the right data always

[tropic rock]

The i2s_receiver in jaguar.v?

[uncut atlas]

right, I rewrote it as tda

that's why atari put that flipflop on ws

so it was always kind of a head scratcher why the i2s module had to be janky

im slightly confused my atari didn't just use the TDA1545 non-A but.. i've stopped questioning atari's decisions. It was probably 2 cents cheaper

[mental briar]

Imagine how much money they saved on the 200000 jaguars they sold

[uncut atlas]

I cleaned up some of the gating around saves triggering too so those should be a little more stable, there was some circumstances where switching between cds and carts could jank stuff up

Jaguar.sv is starting to remind me of one of those piles of random old broken stuff you see collected in a rain puddle in a vacant lot in the city, behind a rusted and half-fallen fence

[mental briar]

So many wires

[gentle bobcat]

The Jaguar 2 totally fixed everything (ducking)

[high token]

Yes, but I had it at the PSX setting that’s why it was doing that. The new MiSTer main didn’t break the video or fix the menu. I just had it at PSX settings and forgot to turn off the RT4K.

[high token]

Because Atari had their developers rush stuff out or in some cases never paid them so they were sent the unfinished game and they released it. Fight For Life is the most notorious of these.

[uncut atlas]

seems like dragon's lair does not like running in PAL

does anyone know if real PAL hardware runs it well?

[uncut atlas]

so it's ok?

primal rage might look a little off in PAL

I genuinely don't care

if you care about primal rage in pal mode, I encourage you to learn to code

[gentle bobcat]

Is there a .jcd to .cdi converter somewhere?

( me learns to code )

[gentle bobcat]

It tried that AI generated python program to convert from bincue to .cdi and it only makes hissing noise.

@humble bluff - Was it you who had a large collection of Jaguar Homebrew stuff?

[urban mango]

I can check on GameDrive as I don't have that disc

[tropic rock]

Small bug in that

[gentle bobcat]

I imagine that the AI processed that section of code you told that one guy to remove.

[tropic rock]

Currently working

[uncut atlas]

it's possible that butch using xvclk instead of the cpuclk impacts PAL vs NTSC

[tropic rock]

It was actually a bug in the original. Off by one in the filename

[uncut atlas]

seems unlikely though

mostly the clock is just used for calculating rates

[tropic rock]

If you converted with the original c code the dummy filename was truncated to .cd instead of .cdi . Nothing uses it so it doesnt really matter. But the python was adding the i to the end but not increasing the filename length.

The --swap option works (I needed it for the ones I ripped)

[urban mango]

If that’s the attract mode, GD freezes at that point and restarts the attract vid. “Gameplay” gets past that point. PAL GD.

[uncut atlas]

yeah the attract was all messed up

like it reset abruptly then eventually crashed if I let it run

seems like that is probably accurate behavior

[gentle bobcat]

@tropic rock - That updated .py still gave me static. Had to rename it to cue2cdi.py to get it to run.

[uncut atlas]

see if yall notice a difference in sound here or if it's just me being crazy. also cheats are on in that build.

[gentle bobcat]

At least I can try Hells Bells to see if the channels are different.

[uncut atlas]

what is that?

[gentle bobcat]

The AC/DC song... it has the guitar on one side and the bells chiming on the other.

[uncut atlas]

well Tube sounds like it's coming from the right side now

[tropic rock]

Try swap (or not swap if you did it already)

It is looking for --swap

[gentle bobcat]

They guy that makes the 240p test suite has an audio suite (that I'm a patron subscriber to but haven't) that could analyse the wave forms. Artemio(sp?)

The start up to Vid Grid is much more vibrant.

Yeah, there is a noticable improvement in sound. Way less scratchy background fuzz.

From some to none.

[tropic rock]

You are on linux right? You can test with audacity. Import raw audio on the bin file. Try little-endian and big-endian. If little-endian works (plays with no static) then you do not need swap. If big-endian works you need swap

[gentle bobcat]

ok

yep the L word

[glossy iron]

No, It'a a known issue that dragons lair doesnt Run Run ob pal systems.
I have a PAL System, a cd and the original Game and can verify that

[tropic rock]

Someone else also wrote a converter. Just released yesterday https://forums.atariage.com/topic/389139-cdi-maker-a-command-line-discjuggler-image-file-assembler/

[pure oracle]

Core is already perfect!

[tropic rock]

Swap is trying to compensate for ambiguity in byte order. To you end with the littlest byte or the biggest byte. If you find a place near the beginning of the audio with low volume as it fades in you can see that the even addresses change more often than the odd addresses. This means the even values are describing smaller changes. This is what you want in the final cdi.

[brittle zinc]

Jeff Minter is a complete fucking legend

[uncut atlas]

i'm glad it's broken as intended, than you

[uncut atlas]

oh duh

channels are correct

[tropic rock]

It would be nice to be able to test left/right on a cd

[uncut atlas]

they were reversed before, checked old core

[tropic rock]

Do we know if they were right on the cd. They might be endian swapped from the cdi conversion

[uncut atlas]

this is the old core sound code:

[tropic rock]

Is that a cart or cd?

[uncut atlas]

cart

but cd's don't sound horribly broken

if anything they sound clearer

[tropic rock]

Just worried left and right are backwards

[uncut atlas]

does someone have an audio cd with like a "RIGHT CHANNEL" "LEFT CHANNEL" kind of indicator?

or something definitive?

maybe @gentle bobcat with his hells bells

[gentle bobcat]

Here's Artemio's tool I was remembering something about:
https://youtu.be/hTXxxVxU-7Q?si=BCXCBG-DBHYx0ylH&t=119

"mvforia"?

[uncut atlas]

artemio is awesome, I got to meet him at the retro con in hartford once

that's what im using there dowdle, that's 240p test suite

[gentle bobcat]

I thought it was a different tool. One for audio and one for video but maybe that got integrated into the 240p test suite as that video is from 6 years ago.

I found a stereo test suite album from the dawn of vinyl that had be ripped to audio CD... that I used way back when when we were testing the Jaguar core about a year ago, but I have since deleted it.

[high token]

Is this the build that fixed the left and right audio accidentally being swapped or something like that? Could be related to the issue with the latest test core y’all are talking about. Haven’t tried it yet myself. Been napping since mid afternoon, knee pain finally got to me. As for the video, when I was booting Jag after I turned off the filters and just stuck with the default, it was working. Want to test with the Jaguar preset.

Unfortunately when you get to 40, even from a nap, getting up is a process.

[gentle bobcat]

Hmm, for whatever reason... a lot of the CD games are no longer working for me. Maybe my microSD card is goofed up. Space Ace, Dragon's Lair, Myst... whereas some work fine...

[tropic rock]

See the above. It is about byte ordering. It will produce noise if the 16-bit byte ordering does not match. If that matches but the 32-bit byte ordering is swapped it will swap left and right channels.

[humble bluff]

I do have a large collection

[gentle bobcat]

kconger: Kitrinx was looking for a bunch of homebrew to test.

[high token]

Maybe she made it TOO accurate? 🤣

[sterile moss]

With today's core and using Atari Jaguar CD Bios (Kitrinx v0.01).rom, dragon's lair gives a black screen for me after the licenced to atari logo
Under the 26/03/08 core and Atari Jaguar CD Bios (Kitrinx v0.01).rom it gives a disk read error

[gentle bobcat]

Adding --swap to the the py converter worked great for me.

[sterile moss]

changing to stock CD BIOS seems to get it going under both cores

[uncut atlas]

I noticed that, it's actually specific with space ace, bread dead 13, and dragon's lair, and my bios

[gentle bobcat]

CountDuckula: I'll give that a try.

[uncut atlas]

I think it's actually a timing thing because it boots so fast

[sterile moss]

🙂

[uncut atlas]

ill fix it when i get a chance

[sterile moss]

i noticed the MK beta homebrew loaded to black screen under yesterday's core, OK under todays and the 2026/03/08 one. possibly related to the cheats being disabled?

[gentle bobcat]

Bingo

[sterile moss]

wait, my bad. MK still black screen under today's core for me

[gentle bobcat]

me 3

[uncut atlas]

the beta that worked before?

[sterile moss]

yeah, working OK under the 20260308 build you shared

[uncut atlas]

oh

[sterile moss]

i tried resetting settings, and homebrew support is on

[uncut atlas]

I think I disabled gamedrive emulation for build speed

thanks for reminding me

[sterile moss]

thanks for all the core work, was playing around last night and haven't seen any issues with retail carts and new BIOS

[uncut atlas]

yeah it was disabled, I removed that

I wanted to be able to iterate faster so I disabled all the non-essential stuff

@humble bluff do you have that one cd game with the memory track thing?

Impulse X

the cd version

[mental briar]

Kitrinx is a big Impulse X fan. She has been searching for it

[uncut atlas]

I want to rip the memtrack manager

hmmmm maybe it's in the cart

[humble bluff]

I have not been able to find that one yet either.

[uncut atlas]

oooh I think it IS in the cart

I guess this impulsex cart worked as a memtrak

[gentle bobcat]

The product page for it and the box art don't mention it doubles as a memtrack. Perhaps there were multiple releases?
https://songbird-productions.com/product/impulse-x/

Looks like one or both of the games can have external content added so maybe they used additional cart storage like the memtrack to store that?

[uncut atlas]

it's definitely in there

no idea why

maybe not all versions?

it's gotta be a cd only feature

[gentle bobcat]

https://www.ebay.com/itm/167853997748?_trksid=p2332490.c101875.m1851

The back of the box does mention a bit about memtrack:
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/u64AAeSw2h5o6qUQ/s-l1600.jpg

[uncut atlas]

it's an undumped disc it seems

ill just make my own better one I guess

[tacit eagle]

World Tour Racing started working with yesterday's core. It always black screened after the Atari screen in previous versions. It's probably the best car racing game on the Jaguar in terms of physics and gameplay, although that's admittedly not a high bar.

[gentle bobcat]

World Tour Racing had been working for me for some time.

[tacit eagle]

It always froze for me, maybe it's just my setup.

If I go back to the previous core, it hangs. 🤷‍♀️

Yesterday's core reproducibly works for me, and for that I'm grateful!

[deep granite]

https://youtu.be/EB-NMfWKFhk

so good

[high token]

Okay so there’s a problem I spotted with the Jag core today (yes I tested a few times to make sure this time). So using the stock bios for both console and CD, the games work. However, when I try to go back to a cartridge game after playing a CD one, it’ll freeze at the bios screen. Like it’s in an infinite loading loop. Not even the red screen of death, just plain. Rebooting fixes it so I can play carts again, I can even change to a CD or boot another CD after. But when I try to boot to another cart, it won’t let me. Played some Blue Lightning for a while to beat training, saved, then tried to play Defender 2000. Frozen. Rebooted the MiSTer. Defender 2000 loaded fine. Went to check if my Blue Lightning save was there, it still was. Went to play Fight For Life to check my six button configuration. Frozen. Another reboot. Fight For Life works. Tried out Blue Lightning again. Worked. Tried Doom. Frozen.

[mental briar]

I'm not able to reproduce. I just did AVP > Primal Rage > Bubsy > Vid Grid > Fight for Life with no problem. I'm using this core: #1055574003810578503 message

[high token]

I didn’t use that one, but the one previous

[sterile moss]

With today's core and kit's bootrom/cd bios, if I keep loading blue lightning (CD) then defender 2000 (Cart), occasionally the cart BIOS seems to crash
red 'jaguar' text gets a red grid over it, sound goes garbled for second then a black screen with lines of blue dots

got it to occur maybe 3 times out of 20+ cycles, cd game always loaded but a few times cart/bootrom bios had that issue

just loading a cart or cd again gets it going here

[high token]

Just tried the core you pointed me to @mental briar and now it is working as intended.

[sterile moss]

Not a core issue:
With my NTT pad and triple controller adapter, somehow dpad left and right act as left analog stick left and right also, so brings up left 'numstick' feature
Checked in input tester after deleting its .map files and re-mapping in main menu, still does it (only left and right, not up and down)

that controller has a numpad and no analog sticks so just disabled the feature. It works nicely on my xbox controller 🙂

[high token]

My Genesis controller was doing that too lol

[deep granite]

https://youtu.be/EbPVeQ4acuc

[sterile moss]

triple controller adapter too?

[high token]

Nope, Retro-Bit. BTW, noticed that when I use the new WIP core that @mental briar linked me to, not only is my save gone from Blue Lightning, but also I can’t save or load my backup RAM nor load the eeprom or Memory Track files uploaded yesterday.

And the problem I mentioned before still exists, just takes longer to appear. Went to load Vid Grid again after seeing my Blue Lightning save was gone to see if that was gone too, it locked up at the bios. Loaded a cart after that, bios locks here too.

You can see where it froze just as the cube was coming in.

I have to do some more testing tomorrow sometime unless someone can beat me to it. Loaded the core from the menu and it seems like the save is still there and it’s a different core than the one Zaparoo loaded.

Zaparoo now detects the Jaguar CD CDI files but there’s a core in the DualRAM folder and one that I use in the regular main folder. So I have to figure out what the hell happened here.

It loads up the Jaguar core, problem is that it’s loading up JaguarCD where there’s no such core. It’s just another extension supported by the Jaguar core. So I don’t know if that direction is what’s messing it up.

It can’t even detect the “Now Playing” even though right now I have Blue Lightning loaded onto the “nightly” from earlier tonight.

Posted also in the Zaparoo discord to see if that was an issue too. Gotta get some sleep, it’s almost 4am.

[glossy iron]

I have the original Game on CD

[ashen spoke]

I’m a big Static-X fan

[mental briar]

That’s a lie, no one is a static x fan

[uncut atlas]

can you make a rip of it ? >.>

[uncut atlas]

the cd game? backup any saves you care about btw

[uncut atlas]

ill try to reproduce this

[ashen spoke]

please don’t ask for roms

[uncut atlas]

I wasn't, I was asking for a disc image

preferably CDI but ill take anything thx

[ashen spoke]

damnit you’re right!

[glossy iron]

Yes, have to source a cd Drive for my PC though

[uncut atlas]

that would be amazing

[glossy iron]

Got one. Any free tool to rip the physical disc to discjuggler these days? I'm on Windows and old Discjuggler 6 doesn't work anymore

[mental briar]

bin cue would be fine. I have no idea what even dumps that though

[uncut atlas]

I do not know much about modern cd tools, what platform? windows? let me look what's available

[uncut atlas]

http://wiki.redump.org/index.php?title=Disc_Dumping_Guide_(MPF)

that seems to be the "good" way to do it

[glossy iron]

Nevermind, got it to work 🙂

[uncut atlas]

I found the issue, part of the editing I accidentally moved the position of some of the low ram

[ashen spoke]

At some point I’ll clean up the pins but I’d rather wait until Kitrogue finishes cooking

[uncut atlas]

okay I added some of the features I was missing

still working on a color theme I like

I was trying to make it jaguar-y colors but it didn't work great

does anyone know how art works?

what do I do

[gentle bobcat]

I don't know how art works and that looks good to me... but I defer to those with more taste. So far as color pallets go and colors that go good together, I've seen a few pallet makers for websites. They could produce random combinations of 3, 4, and more colors that go well together, or you could pick a single color and then it'd provide a few different colors to go along with it. But hey, that does look Jaguar-y.

At least it has good contrast and is easy to read compared to a lot of websites out there where the contrast is terrible.

[uncut atlas]

I just thought it was frustrating to not be able to make copies of data

[gentle bobcat]

So is that going to be an alternative boot2rom?

[uncut atlas]

yeah

since we're kinda going with the memory card paradigm, it seems reasonable to be able to manager the memory card better

[gentle bobcat]

Amen

[uncut atlas]

umm okay what was I working on with the actual core now

I forget what I had left to do

something was broken right? did someone say something was broken?

[slender valley]

Impulse X is kind of a mess if it needs that many save files

[uncut atlas]

yes, well homebrew often is

but it had a memory manager I wanted to see

there im okay with that

[gentle bobcat]

For future reference, here's a complementary color generator site... that I don't know if it is any better than any other one but it seems to handle the basics well enough:
https://paletton.com/#uid=55A0u0kHixPnrHwudGCIQpYLRk9

What you have there is great.

[uncut atlas]

yes it makes it more appealing and thematic with the other bisoses and things

[gentle bobcat]

Speaking of alternative color pallets:

I think those "Atari Power Pad" controllers were made for the Atari Falcon but same connector as Jag.

[uncut atlas]

@mental briar what bugs did people say I have to fix?

cheats are a real problem on this core

enabling them makes the builds super unstable

on the bright side my auto-aspect ratio calculator seems to be working swimmingly

so in rayman, none of these things which sort of suggest they should be circles really are circles, yes?

the gold coin or the binocular like area

also the blue orb things

[gentle bobcat]

I have to wonder how many of the .gg style cheats are any different than various cheats one can do with the numpad in most games already if you look it up?

[high token]

Still gotta check the issue from last night but I’m fairly certain that it’s because it was reading the Jaguar core from the DualRAM folder instead of yours from yesterday that I had in the main folder.

I still kept the DualRAM stables in case there were issues (like the 3DO core right now with the direct video). But I’ll remove the Jaguar stable and see if it’ll force the Zaparoo to read from the test core

Wizzo said it should’ve read from main first but for some reason, it didn’t.

[mental briar]

I didn’t see any. I think @copper owl’s issues were related to an older build. I think just gamedrive stuff?

[high token]

I’m going to check first as I deleted the DualRAM stables off the SD, but first nature unfortunately calls.

[pure oracle]

Major one is doesn’t work with single ram? 🫣

[uncut atlas]

ok

[high token]

I suspect it’s because Zaparoo was loading the games from the stable DualRAM rather than the unstable I have in main.

But I’d have to check as soon as I get out of this bathroom

[gentle bobcat]

Yeah, make sure you turn ON all of the build-time options you previously had OFF... when you don't mind the build time taking longer. I think most of the "bugs" were just things you had disabled.

[high token]

I don’t remember touching anything in the core options other than the control scheme.

[uncut atlas]

cheats makes the build come out non-functional or with fake bugs due to failed timing about 66% of the time

im not sure when it got added but it really was not compatible with the jaguar bus speed

[urban mango]

Yeah, it was a Falcon controller. Saw one for sale recently and just no.

[uncut atlas]

when I wrote that module it was inteded for like a 4mhz nes

[limpid isle]

behold

[uncut atlas]

[dreamy hinge]

perfect

[limpid isle]

wouldn't be the same without the actual phone buttons

[gentle bobcat]

That looks so industrial, I think it needs a transparent flip cover over the numberpad... so you can rest your hand on it... as it seems to be fight-stick oriented.

[uncut atlas]

and a key to arm the..

[gentle bobcat]

But way better than I could do since I couldn't do anything. (the missile)

Yeah, that controller requires two players so you can turn both keys at the same time... or it doesn't work. ( I was in the Minute Man 2&3 missile field back in my USAF days but never in a launch facility. I just saw it in "WarGames" )

[limpid isle]

I want one only if the numbers make real dial tones

that you can't turn off, of course

[uncut atlas]

• Snazzy new theme
• Changed the controlls:
• A = Copy File
• B = Rename File
• C = Delete File
• Start = View file contents
• Option = Still sort-by
  hold option as the cd bios starts up to get to the memory track editor. All other functions in games should be identical

someone with a crt tell me if the font is too thin to work on a shitty tv

[gentle bobcat]

ohhh pretty and widescreen. i guess that is the screen size formula you mentioned in action.

[mental briar]

I can look if Dowdle doesn’t have a crt

[gentle bobcat]

i do not...not handy

[mental briar]

we are go for shitty tv font

[uncut atlas]

good

[granite oasis]

Is latest build dual ram only? If it is it's fine and I will wait patiently. This channel is zooming with updates so I can't tell if they are all dual ram at the moment until things are more settled.

[mental briar]

yes. single ram will come out once kit is done cooking

[granite oasis]

Cheers I figured as much. When things are going this fast it wastes time to build for the analogue video board guys like myself. I shall observe and bide my time 🙂

[mental briar]

there iiiiis one that is single ram from when kit started working, so it's more up to date than the december one. are you already using that one?

[uncut atlas]

im working on tidying up single ram stuff now

[dreamy hinge]

I can't wait to play this compelling library

[uncut atlas]

good, you have to zakk, because this was your idea

so I want to see you consuming all of the jaguar content

gluttenously

[dreamy hinge]

wait, which part was my idea again?

[uncut atlas]

you know what you did

[gentle bobcat]

Is the CD+G support in there yet? (j/k)

[mental briar]

Your choice is to add CHD support or to play all the CD games to completion

mostly because I want to know if they can be completed

[uncut atlas]

no. I thought of moondandy and involuntarily deleted all trace of cd+g from my computer

[mental briar]

If she gave moondandy cd+g now, what would he have to bug her about for the next 6-9 months?

Game Gear?

[uncut atlas]

so, most of the translation between the system and the image is in cd_stream and it's fairly clean

[dreamy hinge]

he'd bother her about CD+EG or whatever

[uncut atlas]

it gives a few helper signals to the drive to tell it if data isnt ready so it can act like the disc is being slow rather than crashing the game

but for the most part it's clean

moondandy is basically my Wheatley

[mental briar]

https://tenor.com/uTy5g4mYNZr.gif

sometimes, the perfect gif does exist

[high token]

Okay, so I tried it for an hour or so, it’s working. It was using the older core in the DualRAM folder instead of the main folder. But I ran across Highlander freezing when starting the game that I think someone else spotted here.

[uncut atlas]

that's pretty hit or miss

im not really sure what it's sensitive to

sometimes it changes from build to build

[high token]

I believe that game also had issues on the GameDrive IIRC. Trying out the Snatcher CD again and it’s working. Gonna try to rip more music CD’s in a couple days.

[uncut atlas]

there is snatcher for jagcd?

[mental briar]

👀

[uncut atlas]

yall need to share all these rare discs

[gentle bobcat]

While I have most of my music collection as Audio CDs, I made sure to rip them to flac and that's what I've been making most of my audio .cdi files out of. Only takes about 2 minutes per title. I have about 60ish done so far... not counting the flawed "The VLM Collection" that was done before we noticed the first/original bincueaudio2cdi was dropping the last 8 minutes. I don't have any of the original files for that to redo those. To get all of the music from all of the Jaguar games, I subscribed to a site that provides all of the game music... and that was basically for streaming in your browser... so I had to browser magic download all of the tunes. That was a lot of work. At least about 0.1% of what Kitrinx has been through.

( and Grey too )

[mental briar]

we must catch them all

[gentle bobcat]

It would be nice if the HTGDB collection could be refreshed with all of the missing stuff and all of the .jcd files converted to .cdi.

[high token]

How’d you do that as I have a TON of FLAC music.

[gentle bobcat]

I use Brasero on Linux which is one of a few different data/music CD authoring tools available. I say I want to create a new audio CD project, select the files, write it out to files (a single bin and cue file). Then I use the bincueaudio2cdi cli to convert.

Brasero will take pretty much any audio media format and auto-convert it to what is needed to make an audio CD.

[warm oasis]

That reminds me Zakk, any chance you could have a look at this next time you are updating Main? Thanks in advance!

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/issues/1133

[high token]

Do they make that for Windows 11?

[gentle bobcat]

I will help out with collecting Jaguar documentation for the "Help" system. I have mostly PDF manuals for everything... in a variety of sizes... so it needs work. Text files are really the way to go for other things... but is there any way to increase the font used? As it is, the font is really too small for my old eyes. On the Reflex Adapt, if I want to see its tiny display well, I break out a magnifying glass. Until I was 45 I had 20/20 vision.

LittleMissKittn: I'm not that knowledgeable about Windows multimedia apps but I'd be surprised if there weren't also a few to pick from.

[high token]

I can barely see shit as is and I’m 40 lol.

I completely understand that. With glasses it’s better, but it feels weird to see through them at times.

[gentle bobcat]

Oh, and I need to scan that Jaguar Gamer's Guide book in someday.

[high token]

I more have trouble seeing things at a distance

And I’m diabetic on top of that so while my numbers are good, gotta watch the eyes as well.

[gentle bobcat]

ditto

Hmm, the Retro Collective has a new 1hr long video out today. Not sure what it is about but hoping some MiSTer stuff included. Retro Remake is supposed to have some big video out RSN as well.

[uncut atlas]

what is retro collective?

is that the group of arcade people that does nothing but rant all day about other people?

[gentle bobcat]

A museum and restore/preservation group that is mostly housed above Heber in their building... and Heber is sort of a non-profit working with them making hardware. Yes, lots of MiSTer related stuff:

[uncut atlas]

sounds like a bunch of fringe stuff

[gentle bobcat]

Pretty much... except their Multisystem 2 has sold quite well... approaching 20,000 units. Maybe they'll surpass the Jaguar. 🙂 But seriously, they said they'll have fulfilled all pre-orders and should have in-stock orders starting April 2nd.

The system shortage may be over soon.

[mental briar]

they are also going to release forked cores so they can do cart loading....

[uncut atlas]

you can give this a quick smoke test (cheats are disabled)

[mental briar]

I will never understand why people want to load via carts

[warm oasis]

@timid snow and I have been cooking on the manuals side, so we should have that all covered. Although maybe there are a few MIA you may have that KK will know

[warm oasis]

If you have one you don't mind donating to Gaming Alexandria, they/Hubz said he is open to doing professional scans and adding to archive

[gentle bobcat]

TheJesusFish - My older son has a sizable GBA collection of carts but currently no working GBA. I've tried to get him into MiSTer but so far nadda. Anyhoo, it might be nice to have an addon to test his carts if he wants to start selling them... but other than that, I too am at a loss for why people would want to do that... "because it's there" I guess.

[mental briar]

No idea why people would want physical media

opens a box from dowdle

[gentle bobcat]

I'm open to donating the book. I'd get more use out of it as a PDF anyway. If you could, DM me the info or share in-channel if desired.

[warm oasis]

@obsidian python is here so you guys can work out logistics 🙂

[mental briar]

forget manuals. I want to pillage everyone's rare CD collection

[gentle bobcat]

Oh crap, the single-RAM core to test. I have to get ready to go to a long movie with a buddy of mine... but I'll check it out later this evening... and by that time I'm sure it'll have been well tested. Long movie... Project Hail Mary.

[mental briar]

GIVE ME YOUR JAGUAR CDs

[pure oracle]

@ashen spoke we need a pin

[mental briar]

Needs a sys update

[high token]

WHAT?! That’s crazy! Congrats to them on 20K. I was going to get one myself, but since it didn’t support DualRAM, I cancelled mine. Eventually I might want one for the accessories.

[uncut atlas]

ill do that seperate

[high token]

Let me know how it goes. Got A-List back again so I want to go check it out.

[pure oracle]

Rayman works. Core is perfect

[gentle bobcat]

Busting out the MS2 as I have a little bit of time.

[mental briar]

@uncut atlas

[uncut atlas]

you should probably turn that off

you have it mapped to axies

[mental briar]

opened the menu to do that and the music in primal rage died

[gentle bobcat]

If you don't have numsticks turn it off.

[sacred blade]

Any reason to play this version instead of the 60 fps Saturn version?

[mental briar]

yeah, music is gone even in a new match

[uncut atlas]

ill check, it might be a ram miss type situation

[timid snow]

Yeah I sourced all the Jaguar/CD manuals except Robinson’s Requiem so it’s an almost complete set

[gentle bobcat]

You have a manual for iImpulse X?

[timid snow]

Nah I only sourced official games and cancelled games that were later released like the Telegames and Songbird Productions games

I think it’s 74 total game manuals

[timid snow]

20K units for just the MultiSystem 2 is really good. That means that the MiSTer and all of its clone boards have likely sold ~200K. Not too shabby

[mental briar]

Primal rage stalled out in the attract mode

yeah, stalled out again. took about 10 minutes

not touching the controller or opening the menu or anything

[slender valley]

Sure that wasn't just meant to go with the dentist x-ray machine?

[high token]

That’s the color scheme I wanted to do actually. Figured it’d be not only cool looking but a conversation piece

[slender valley]

Fun I guess, and/or to use their old saves, not everyone has a Sanni cart reader. I guess also for special carts like the Gameboy camera. That's not really something you can play on the MiSTer in digital format. (Wouldn't this mean that any carts with mappers/special chips not supported on mister should work too?)

[mental briar]

Game drive is also disabled (no boot on MK)

[mental briar]

that's fair - being able to play the special carts is a catch 22 because you're goal is to preserve the hardware so that other hardware (that will also eventually rot) is compatible.

FPGA Gameboy camera wen

[uncut atlas]

so the cd drive struggles without that extra fastcache then

[ashen spoke]

Thank you

[mental briar]

Dual Ram wins again

[mental briar]

so far it's only primal rage that dies in the attract mode. been running dragon's lair for 20 minutes and had no issue. Did Blue lightning before that

[uncut atlas]

it's probably just using sdram in a way that the system struggles to keep up

dual ram will always be better

[mental briar]

anything else you want me to poke at? cart games seem fine

oh let me try flip out

try the problematic ones

[uncut atlas]

the biggest change will have been cd games, because one of the sdram's cache chunks is used so it can save memory track

it only impacts cd's

[mental briar]

got it

I think CDs have been mostly fine. Attack of the mutant penguins still crashes if you pick the 2nd character

[dreamy hinge]

try FastRAM1 = 2

[mental briar]

oh nice - I didn't realize that option was still there

but yes that works

Vid Grid works. I think it's in pretty good shape

[pure oracle]

What does that fix?

[mental briar]

You can select the 2nd character in attack of the mutant penguins

[uncut atlas]

@mental briar does it make primal rage work better?

probably not since fastcache1 is disabled for that

but yeah I left that option there just for mutant pengins pretty much

[deep granite]

can per-game numpad control configs be added for games like iron soldier?

[uncut atlas]

no

did you try the numstick?

[deep granite]

what’s that

previously, I bound the numberpad to the analog stick directions

[uncut atlas]

it's an option in input

it makes a nice display for using analog to select numbers

[deep granite]

I’ll have to update the core on my mister

ngl it’s been confusing keeping track of it because of all the little updates lol

i appreciate it all though, especially getting save games working

[uncut atlas]

well, soon it'll be released and then it'll calm down

there's not really much missing

right now the bugs im tracking are highlander instability and whatever @mental briar puts on his spreadsheet

and if anyone has homebrews of any sort that don't work for them please tell me, im missing most of them

[mental briar]

Please, it’s moondandy’s spreadsheet. I’m just renting

[uncut atlas]

I lost track of where that spreadsheet is again

[dreamy hinge]

one sheet is just an infinite column of 'CD+G not supported'

[warm oasis]

Sheet should be in the pins?

[uncut atlas]

oh yeah, pins

wow look at you guys

my mods are so awesome

[plush salmon]

or as robby likes to call them "peens". I don't know why

[mental briar]

I had to stop testing to care for my offspring. But I think it’s in good shape. I say unleash it

The masses will have better bug reports than me anyway

[dreamy hinge]

what is keyboard as P1 for?

[mental briar]

So you can use a controller and keyboard I think?

[uncut atlas]

so I can send keystrokes over ssh to control the thing

but if you want you could use a numeric keypad muxxed with the p1 controller

[sterile moss]

my ntt pad via triple adapter seems to always report dpad left and right as left analog left and right also, even after deleting mapping files and mapping again (skipping all stick prompts). LittleMissKittn had the same thing with a retro-bit adapter also
Can see it in input tester and other controllers like my SNES mini pad dont do it.

Its odd its only dpad left and right and not up/down, is it the same for you?

[mental briar]

no, I was just using the NTT pad with the adapt earlier today. lemme check input tester

so in input tester it was fine? reversed only in the core?

[uncut atlas]

some jankier joysticks do that

especially nintendo ones

[mental briar]

This is a professional controller for my spreadsheets

and so I can switch guns in avp

[uncut atlas]

it means ill have to make numstick default to off though 😭

[sterile moss]

in input tester, dpad left and right also inputs left analog left and right (but not up and down)
was wondering if the m30 in vid shows same thing in input tester

[gentle bobcat]

Movie was good. Got caught up. Added the Attack of the Penguins fix to the spreadsheet notes.

[sterile moss]

seems your m30 and whatever retrobit device LittleMissKittn was using do it also
my snes mini controller via raphnet and few others dont
So odd its only left and right

[gentle bobcat]

Worth mentioning that I guess Jotego had some method for speeding up single-RAM that he designed for his upcoming CPS3 core (I think) that got passed on to srg320 who put it in the Sega Saturn single-RAM core... and that supposedly sped a bunch of stuff up... stuff that was previously considerably laggy. I have no idea if that could pertain / be used by the Jaguar single-RAM core but just throwing that out there.

[high token]

You mean the NumStick thing? Yeah the Genesis six button RetroBit was doing that so I turned off NumStick in the options menu.

[uncut atlas]

does saturn work perfectly with single ram now?

[gentle bobcat]

The only info I have seen regarding that is PCN did a video where he played a few of the games that had previously had slowdowns in them and the appear to be full speed. No real scientific measurement going on there. Perhaps the devs have written more info on that but if so, I haven't seen it.

[mental briar]

no

[uncut atlas]

alrighty then

[gentle bobcat]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThFAS4-S_Ro

[mental briar]

it also barely compiles now

[gentle bobcat]

I don't think he showed the old next to the new which would have been helpful.

[uncut atlas]

I appreciate it but I don't get my technical advice from youtubers

sdram is stupidly complex in jaguar core

[gentle bobcat]

That single RAM gain core is a nightly so it hasn't made it to update_all. I haven't tried it myself.

[uncut atlas]

I'm wading through layers and layers of old code churn right now trying to break it down into clean interfaces in fact

and it breaks with like the tiniest error

[gentle bobcat]

PCN isn't the inventor of the claim, he is just passing it on. Just let that settle and you can take a peek at it whenever if you ever have any desire to do so.

[uncut atlas]

// You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
// along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.


// This module is highly specialized to match Jaguar.
// Ch1 is geared for DRAM and requires using ras/cas addresses and refresh commands. Uses BA 0x0X only.
// Ch2 is geared for ROM and uses BA 0x1X only. Assumes refresh provided by Ch1 or self_refresh on.

//SDRAM
//-BA 0 and 1 used for DRAM
//-Original DRAM uses columns A0-A7 and rows A0-A9 x16 = 256 addresses per active and there are 4 chips
//-SDRAM uses columns SA3-SA10 which map to A0-A7. SA0 is used to switch between 2 chips. BA0 is used to swap the other chips in single RAM. Dual RAM uses the other SDRAM chip.

//-BA 2 and 3 used for ROM and BIOSes
//-Jag M BIOS (K not supported) is located at Bank 3, max row = 7F-7F, unless 32MB RAM and no cd and cart is >15.875MB
//-NVROM BIOS is located at Bank 3, max row = 7E-7E
//-CDROM BIOS is located at Bank 3, max row = 7C-7D
//-Cart ROM (up to 16MB) is located at Banks 2 and 3, rows = 00-7F,possibly overlapping 78-7F
//-For 64MB SDRAM, no overlapping as BIOSes are moved higher rows 80 (FC-FF)

[mental briar]

it wouldn't apply here.

Jotego is working on CPS 3 which uses the SH2 chip that SRG created for the saturn core. Jotego found some things that were not quite correct about the SH2 implementation based on the documentation. He PRed those updates back into saturn, which broke a bunch of stuff, and then SRG went through and cleaned it up - and that is how some of the fighting games run better.

But the Jaguar doesn't use the SH2, so it wouldn't work here

[gentle bobcat]

Good to know. Thanks for clearing that up.

[mental briar]

I take it the video didn't go into that?

[mild karma]

interesting…did it improve anything for the dual ram saturn core? I was under the impression that some of those 3d fighters still ran slightly slow there too

[gentle bobcat]

PCN almost never tries to explain technical stuff... and says it is all over his head. Most of the time it is over mine also. I watched the video when it first came out and I wasn't paying that close attention... so I don't remember.

I'd check it out again now if I weren't trying to do the Heber video from earlier today.

[mental briar]

Now we are getting a little out of my depth a little bit. But whatever, I'm a white dude on the internet so let me explain.

It didn't have an effect on dual ram; and I think that is because that build's SH2 isn't bottlenecked by the stuff that the update fixed (thanks to it being able to use the bandwidth of two ram sticks)

is that why? i have no idea

I should start a youtube channel

[mild karma]

iiinteresting

[sudden palm]

https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?p=105896#p105896

[gentle bobcat]

What is the name of the schmup they are referring to in that post?

[high token]

Okay sooooo…..

If y’all have Apple Music, you can now have Vid Grid right on your phone without needing to play the game to see the videos:

https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/vid-grid/pl.u-DdANv1au0epDvbg

It functions as a reference if you need to figure out where the pieces go, but also as a playlist to watch the videos or hear the songs whenever you wish!

And Smells Like Teen Spirit is a hidden song on there, but I included that too

[gentle bobcat]

Nirvana is in the Jaguar version of the game?

[high token]

I didn’t get that far yet.

Now I have to lol

My guess is that they were going to publicize that, but then Cobain died and they didn’t

For obvious reasons

According to wiki: “Each song is present in both Windows and Jaguar CD versions:”

[gentle bobcat]

Hmm, I wonder how you get to it?

[high token]

I’m assuming you’d need to complete the rest of the tracks?

[sterile moss]

level 3 apparently
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/jaguarcd/916024-vid-grid/faqs/55836

"After completing level 3, you will unlock a bonus music video, Nirvana's Smells
Like Teen Spirit!"

[gentle bobcat]

I can do level 1. For beyond that I have to cheat.

[sterile moss]

to confirm, all cd saves go into the .jmc you choose from OSD?

[gentle bobcat]

Works for me.

Man, when Vid Grid is in the mode where if you drop one piece in the wrong place, it shuffles the whole puzzle... ouch.

[sterile moss]

oh damn

perhaps teen spirit was not meant to be smelled

Nice, TY Kitrinx

[uncut atlas]

you like?

[sterile moss]

i do

[uncut atlas]

I put at least 15 minutes of thought into the colors

mostly I wanted an easy way to make backups of saves

[sterile moss]

jaguar logo is red, eyes arent bleeding
most good

ie red from the jaguar logo....

reset to exit?

[uncut atlas]

yup

[sterile moss]

cool, now i have saves I can play long enough to find out vid grid becomes annoyingly tough like dowdle has :p

[sudden palm]

i think it's this https://janesondergrond.art/formersubdomains/jogstudio.janesondergrond.art/JoGgy24/

They're working on a game, but I don't even know what it is

[sterile moss]

Definitely didn't hold 4+7+8+B while in a puzzle 🙂

[urban mango]

I've compared a CD with a known Left Channel Only sound on Jaguar CD hardware vs your last posted DualRam core and they match.

And just for sanity's sake, I confirmed Cart is correct too.

[wise ether]

"ddram: additional cache for RAM-H channel (single sdram build)" This is why RAM-H is less bottlenecked on single than before, helping some 3D titles, nothing to do with the SH2 updates.

[mental briar]

Ahh see, I thought it was this because this was the build things were better on. https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Saturn_MiSTer/commit/98c4c9ec0ddd139854f49134edeaa7a2a97c1326

[uncut atlas]

regardless, it's irrelevant to us

[high token]

And the Jaguar’s broke again on the new unstable MiSTer main🤦🏽‍♀️

The pain of being a tester, I can only imagine the pain of being a developer.

Swapped between CD and cart a few times and boom.

Okay so I was able to “unstick” it by loading another CD game, then carts started working again. Weird. So it seems to more happen at random now.

[uncut atlas]

probably not a core problem

you seem to use a pretty nonstandard base setup and i'd blame that first

with all the rfid stuff and unstable main binaries

Important question: Is anyone having any issues with the cropping or behavior of the "Active" setting of audio and video (it's the default)

like has anyone noticed the screen is too cropped or wrong compared to previously?

this includes aspect ratios being weird or anything

I did sort of a complicated heuristic that uses the active area a game reports for games that report it right, and detects if they are using the register wrong and attempts to fix it when they do, and then crops to that area, which leaves a variable number of horizontal and vertical lines, so then it recalculates the aspect ratio automatically based on crt constants and applies it

so in theory the video should always be pretty sanely cropped and the real aspect ratio

[mental briar]

i haven't seen any issues across either core with active. Neither in DV or standard HDMI

[gentle bobcat]

Me neither (HDMI). I did spent about two hours doing random cart, game, and ST port loads on the single-RAM core last night and everything was just sweet.

[high token]

I’m not using the single RAM. The DualRAM from Saturday along with the MiSTer unstable main from today.

And I didn’t load with Zaparoo this morning, just the standard OSD

[mental briar]

if you trigger it again, confirm the core date by pressing menu, right, and then selecting about

[high token]

Will do

[mental briar]

I am also using the standard bioses

because I like my precious cube

[gentle bobcat]

I'm using all three alternative BIOSes.

[mental briar]

cube hater

[high token]

Same. I’m using the stock bioses. Especially since I never had a legit Jaguar CD. I get to see it when loading a disc.

But I try to have the latest nightly of different cores and main. Try to keep everything up to date since that’s the best way to test and see if anything breaks so it can be fixed.

Can’t improve anything if we don’t make sure everything works without breaking other stuff ya know

[gentle bobcat]

The alternative CD BIOS doesn't lose anything, it just adds easy-to-get-to VLM effect editing/saving.

The alternative MemTrack BIOS adds copy and rename. I also noticed the ability to look at the contents of the save file but that might be in the original. I'm not sure.

[high token]

I don’t think I have the alternate Memory Track BIOS.

[gentle bobcat]

Its at the top of the pin if you want to try it out.

[mental briar]

I just want to figure out how we are getting the core into a broken states so that we can reproduce it for kit

[uncut atlas]

no that's new

I actually added the ability to edit the contents too

I didn't really test it throughly yet but you are welcome to

[gentle bobcat]

In Johnny Carson voice, "I did not know that". I know, you don't know Johnny Carson's voice.

Maybe after class tonight.

Dana Carvey is familiar with that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXLjs91sjJ4

[high token]

Same here. That’s why I try to keep the MiSTer up to the minute basically.

Though while I can test, keep in mind for the next couple days, I’m going to basically be on bed rest, so I won’t be able to update my MiSTer with any new unstables until Wednesday afternoon at the earliest.

[high token]

BTW, you are aware that A, B, and C are backwards on a legit Jaguar controller right? Just making sure when I seen the controls here.

It’s C, B, A. And the top buttons on a Pro are Z, Y, X. Don’t know why Atari did that but 🤷🏽‍♀️

If y’all got a Genesis controller or another six button config, you’ll want to set L & R to Jaguar Keypad 4 & 6, and X, Y, Z to 9, 8, & 7 on the Jaguar Keypad.

[uncut atlas]

I don't know

I set them to kind of a specific pattern on my ps5 controller

before, all three buttons were "delete file"

[high token]

Ahh. This is the pro controller layout. L, R, Z, Y, and X are just Keypad buttons remapped to be extra buttons

[uncut atlas]

is it important to the memory track manager?

[high token]

I never had a JagCD personally so I’m not sure.

[gentle bobcat]

It doesn't matter what the layout is as long as they are labeled properly and work. Ding.

[high token]

Figured if you’re going for accuracy it might matter, but most are probably going to use a diamond layout like a modern controller.

[uncut atlas]

accurate means just all buttons delete files

the new functions are ones I made up

and gave them new buttons

[high token]

Ahh I see.

Thought they were existing functions

[uneven cobalt]

Never knew this!

[gentle bobcat]

Yes, I got to it. I got half-way through level 2 and saved there... and then I cheated to get to level 4... and the bottom right video gets replaced with the bonus song.

[mental briar]

they replace spoonman? philistines

[glossy iron]

Thanks for the new Version @uncut atlas . That onscreen numpad is amazing! Really useful.
Saving works great so far even in single core with CD but when opening Mister osd with autosave activated the Hardware is nearly to freeze. Battlemorph Frozen for about 20 Seconds until saving was completed ^^

[gentle bobcat]

CD-i: The Memory Track cart has a storage capacity of 128KB and game saves are typically 10K or less.. most seem to be 512 bytes. I've not been able to duplicate the extended pause but will give it more testing this evening. Does it recover once it is done?

Now that we have a better-than-the-real-thing VLM, the next step in the evolution would be the VLM where L stands for Laser:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccl57ndJRCI

[glossy iron]

Yes it recovers, Just have to be patient

You tried with the single core?

[gentle bobcat]

Yes. But I didn't try that specific thing... just saves in Vid Grid mostly... and that you do manually. Seemed to take a second.

I'm not sure I know exactly what autosave does with regards to CD games?

[glossy iron]

It writes the saves to File when you open the osd after saving in game

And when opening the osd it slows to a crawl for about 20 seconds

[gentle bobcat]

Thanks for the explanation. Will see if I can duplicate later this evening.

[uncut atlas]

do you have like a super slow sd card?

[glossy iron]

No, the other cores it works fine

Will do a video tomorrow

[mental briar]

Not connected to a nas or anything, are you?

[glossy iron]

No. But the Images are on an external HDD. But as i Said Saturn, psx and other cores with CD Images are on the Same HDD and saving works fine. And yes i know saves are on the SD Card

[mental briar]

Ahh ok. I’ll see if I can reproduce

[mental briar]

Can someone test something (I'm on the forbidden direct video and am not sure it's happening in HDMI). I get a weird resync whenever I skip a button in the button mapping. I suspect it has to do with decimation and is limited to direct video, but I just want to make sure its not happening over hdmi

[dreamy hinge]

seems ok here

oh wait, one sec. I'm still using Kit's cursed ini

[mental briar]

its very weird

I could get up, walk 20 feet, and test it on HDMI but I'm lazy and still "working"

[dreamy hinge]

yeah, it's fine with vsync 2 for me

[mental briar]

ok good. it's probably just decimation stuff. it doesn't do it over pure analog into a tv - just direct video into a scaler.

[dreamy hinge]

I don't understand why it does it even over dv, it's not like you're leaving the menu

[mental briar]

let me confirm that it happens on the tink too

no, it's just the morph. I need to rule out that it's not something with my setup

it's just this morph. I am sure I have blown something up here. False alarm

[mental briar]

oh no, grey...someone wave him off

https://tenor.com/bs416.gif

[dreamy hinge]

wat

[mental briar]

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Jaguar_MiSTer/tree/cdg

[dreamy hinge]

oh, lol

moondandy got another one

[tropic rock]

Got it starting to work

[warm oasis]

CD+EG... Soon... I can practically ignore reading the Time Extension article already...

[tropic rock]

Not on this core. The cdbios only has support for cd+g

[warm oasis]

Ah, I wondered about that. It is a bit of a mystery still what actually supported CD+EG and what was just CD+G

Is it a situation where if CD+G is implemented in something and it supported CD+EG then that would just work as well or would it be additional support?

[tropic rock]

CDBIOS source code for translating CD+G to Jaguar graphics is here https://github.com/mwenge/vlm/blob/63a2d3748a98077027dbca57bd79a3b3bb4d07d1/src/cdfront/pack.s

[warm oasis]

Hmm, so if someone were to make a custom bios could it add support for CD+EG or could the hardware not support it?

[tropic rock]

I have not read enough about cd+eg to know how it works. Maybe? Some info here (Saturn apparently supports it)

https://www.segasaturnshiro.com/2024/06/04/saturn-extended-disc-formats/

[warm oasis]

https://forums.sonicretro.org/threads/cd-eg-extended-graphics-dump-sega-saturn-pc-fx.42860/

[tropic rock]

I guess that CD Graphics World disc discussed in the 3do thread is an cd+eg? A version is linked in that page

[warm oasis]

That is the most I found written on it, that chap is kicking about Discord though I think on PC-FX discord

[tropic rock]

If it is just combining multiple cdg frames into one cdeg frame (ie more color at slower update speed) then most things that support cdg could support cdeg with new software (The display graphics need color depth to support to see the difference though).

[warm oasis]

Is it more frames or more detailed images/colour? From the examples it looks like a higher quality image than more frames unless I am not understanding frames in this situation

[tropic rock]

Maybe I am wrong about jag https://github.com/mwenge/vlm/blob/63a2d3748a98077027dbca57bd79a3b3bb4d07d1/src/cdfront/pack.s#L1099

[lyric pelican]

;*		  extended TV-graphics mode, of from primary memory	*

[tropic rock]

CD+G is a very slow bitrate. It takes a while to update the whole screen. Increasing the number of colors will take even longer.

[warm oasis]

Got you

[sterile moss]

I was able to reproduce something similar, but only quite intermittently
#1055574003810578503 message

[uncut atlas]

stahhhhhp

modifying the VLM is extremely nontrivial anyway

what is even wrong with you

have you heard of mpeg video?

it's this new hotness from the 90s

it has LOTS of colors

[warm oasis]

What GR found in the code seems to suggest CD+EG might be supported by the hardware already (if I am reading that correctly)

[uncut atlas]

if I could shoot lasers out of my eyes across the internet at you, I would be right now

[sterile moss]

Spoonman's still speaking the rythm all alone, it adds a 4th track to middle row 🙂

[warm oasis]

It is annoyingly cold here for spring, I would appreciate some of your American warmth, not picky on how, lasers will do 🙂

[uncut atlas]

space lasers?

[mental briar]

https://tenor.com/bjLKV.gif

[plush salmon]

someone got moondandy-ed

[sage rune]

@warm oasis Just a little word of advice around programmers like us. Please consider, next time you are ready to ask whether something is POSSIBLE, perhaps rephrase it to ask whether it is REALISTIC or even worthwhile. Most of the things you ask are THEORETICALLY POSSIBLE, but not worthwhile.

Like spending $1,000,000 to get two more drops of soda out of a bottle.

Not trying to give you a hard time, just trying to let you know that it sounds similar to a request for something that is considered semi-trivial by the requestor (but is in fact like moving a mountain)

As in literally, several man-years of effort

Lots of people would tell you, "no it isn't possible", but several of us actually know that it's really just a ton of effort that we aren't ready to spend

And anyway, if it was only a small amount of effort - we would proabla already be thinking about it

It might sounds like I'm yelling at you, but seriously this is coming from a place of love.

[warm oasis]

That is why I explicitly asked if it would just work, if it did on original hardware

[sage rune]

Well, that's a test you can run at sme point I guess.

[warm oasis]

It is a real unknown though, it does seem to literally be just this one chap who has ever dug into the format

[sage rune]

Agreed... and seemingly the only person who has even heard of the format

[warm oasis]

Yeah, we don't even have any real documentation of what systems that support CD+G also support CD+EG. It is like digging into uncharted history with this one

[sage rune]

Well, unearthing the spec is a key part of it - and that sounds unavailable.

[uncut atlas]

because there's like.. NO FUCKING CDS WITH CD+G

[warm oasis]

My curiosity is ultimately, is support at the hardware level or software? Again, not documented

[uncut atlas]

you can now play Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Karaoke Remix with lyrics, congrats

[sage rune]

Well, there are a few with CD+G. Like zero obtainable CD+EG. And honestly, other than a 5-minute demo, it's just not worth it.

[dreamy hinge]

PURE ENERGY

[sage rune]

I WANNA KNOW

[uncut atlas]

I'm going to implement CD+EG actually. Instead of virtual boy.

[sage rune]

Probably take longer than VB

[uncut atlas]

probably

virtual boy is also stupid, and I also dont like it

but at least it's a game playing thing

[sage rune]

Well, if you don't like it, you don't have to implement it

[dreamy hinge]

she doesn't like the Jaguar either

[sage rune]

OH

[dreamy hinge]

or the 2600

you should know these cores are like some self-punishment for her

[uncut atlas]

by the way who is Ron Swanson?

[sage rune]

I'm suddenly confused about Kitrinx' motivation

[plush salmon]

it's called hate coding

[timid snow]

Kitrinx is like a Sith Lord. She's fueled by hatred for Atari game consoles

[warm oasis]

Well Gumby has done good work on the shared CPU between PC-FX and VB, but it still needs work before someone could use it to try make a VB core

[sage rune]

CPU is only a small part of any core

[plush salmon]

now I want to hear the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun remix

[uncut atlas]

I think that's the most flattering thing you've ever said to me

[gentle bobcat]

Wow. For a second or two, I wasn't the most hated person in this channel. 🙂

[uncut atlas]

we don't hate you dowdle, you're kinda like a lovable old dog that bumps into the table and spills a little of your coffee

[gentle bobcat]

If we can convince everyone that dual-RAM is required to get CD+G working... why that'll just change the MiSTer userbase almost overnight. (as if there was a place to get them in quantity). But hey, looks like GreyRogue "got it working"?

[dreamy hinge]

moondandy will convince at least 4 people to try it

[gentle bobcat]

I'm puzzled not only by the fact that he got it working.... but that he found media in a consumable format. You guys are constantly defying reality. You two aren't Angine de Poitrine are you? Next thing you are going to tell me is that the Jaguar core now supports .chd and .jcd.

[mental briar]

No no

[gentle bobcat]

Everyone knows who Ron Swanson is.

[mental briar]

Let’s not get greedy

[gentle bobcat]

( me starts to hyperventilate when Kitrinx provides a modified version of the Jaguar 2 BIOS )

[uncut atlas]

jaguar 2?

[gentle bobcat]

Exactly.

Ok, enough silliness. Sorry.

[high token]

More like a Jaguar Duo

[gentle bobcat]

Me? Never. I've already gotten more than I ever realistically expected.

[warm oasis]

Even I don't know what a Jaguar 2 is...

[uncut atlas]

ask the superstation guy to make it

jaguar is certainly near the top of people's lists for nostalgia

[gentle bobcat]

The Jaguar was the last gasp of a dying company. The Jaguar 2 was the gasp after the last gasp.

[warm oasis]

What is it? Unreleased add on?

[mental briar]

concept art

actually, it's kitrinx's nightmare

[gentle bobcat]

It was a combination of the Jaguar and the JagCD... like the "JagDuo" mentioned... but supposedly fixing the hardware bugs of the original Jaguar.

[mental briar]

Imaginary Hardware
Atari
Schematics exist

move over virtual boy, there's a new top dog in town

Two of the chips are proprietary designs, nicknamed "Oberon" and "Puck".
The third chip is a standard Motorola 68EC020 used as a coprocessor.
Oberon and Puck are built using an 0.3 micron silicon process. With
proper programming, all seven processors can run in parallel.
 
- "Oberon"
- 1,250,000 transistors, 292 pins
- Graphics Processing Unit (processor #1)
- 64-bit RISC architecture (64/128 register processor)
- 64 registers of 128 bits wide (shadow-buffering)
- Has access to all 2 x 64 bits of the system bus
- Can read 128 bits of data in one instruction
- Rated at 127.902 MIPS (million instructions per second)
- Runs at 63.951 MHz
- 2 x 32K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM (matrix)
- Performs a wide range of high-speed graphic effects
- Programmable
- Object processor (processor #2)
- 64-bit RISC architecture
- Programmable processor that can act as a variety of different
video architectures, such as a sprite engine, a pixel-mapped
display, a character-mapped system, and others.
- Blitter (processor #3)
- 64 bits read and write at the same time! (multibuffering!)
- 8K read buffer (fifo)
- 8K write buffer (lifo)
- Performs high-speed logical operations
- Hardware support for Z-buffering and Gouraud shading
- Texture Mapping Engine (processor #4)
- 64-bit RISC
- 64 bits
- Programmable risc processor
- 256K "texture-work-ram" of zero wait-state internal CACHE
- capable of doing about 900000 texture-mapped polyons,
without textures there can do 2500000 polyons.
- realtime Gouraud and Phong shading
- J/MPEG "COMBI" Chip (processor #5)
- 64 bits
- not programmable!
- 8K own data rom (with sinus) table
- 128K CACHE (fifo)
- realtime J/MPEG decompression via CACHE (fifo)
- DRAM memory controller
- 4 x 64 bits
- Accesses the DRAM directly
 
- "Puck"
- 900,000 transistors, 196 pins
- Digital Signal Processor (processor #6)
- 32 bits (32-bit registers)
- Rated at 53,3 MIPS (million instructions per second)
- Runs at 53.3 MHz
- Same RISC core as the Graphics Processing Unit
- Not limited to sound generation
- 96K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM
- CD-quality sound (16-bit stereo 50KHz)
- Number of sound channels limited by software (minimum 16!!)
- Two DACs (stereo) convert digital data to analog sound
signals
- Full stereo capabilities
- Wavetable synthesis, FM synthesis, FM Sample synthesis, and AM
synthesis
- A clock control block, incorporating timers, and a UART
 
- Motorola 68EC020 (processor #7)
- Runs at 26.590MHz
- perfect 68000 emulation
- General purpose control processor
 
Communication is performed with a high speed 64-bit data bus, rated
at 2400 megabits/second. The 68020 is only able to access 32 bits
of this bus at a time.
 
The Jaguar 2 contains eight megabytes (64 megabits) of fast
page-mode DRAM, in eight chips with 1024 K each.```

[gentle bobcat]

Some claim it was a 128-bit system. I highly doubt that. I don't know if they actually had a hardware prototype... or if, as TJF alluded to... just a case mock-up.

[mental briar]

Apparently hardware exists?

[gentle bobcat]

TheJesusFish - Where did you get that hardware description. Ask A.I. to make it up?

[uncut atlas]

I mean, just make a fantasy system

that guy who haunts dev-chat is

[gentle bobcat]

Oh: https://atarimuseum.ctrl-alt-rees.com/videogames/consoles/jaguar/jag2specs.html

I do vaguely remember seeing this years ago:
https://atarimuseum.ctrl-alt-rees.com/videogames/consoles/jaguar/jag2.html