We have come so far . . . .

Started by TL, May 03, 2013, 23:20:15 PM

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TL

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"7800 i know little about.

32X? VF pretty much pushed that as far as it could go, 3D wise, but i would have loved to have seen how far things could go 2D wise.

Jaguar:I would have loved to have seen Quake finished and games such as Need For Speed and Daytona USa converted (rumours were they would be coming) only then would we really have seen how far machine could be pushed, but everything would depend on just how was handling the conversions from Saturn/3DO in case of last 2.

Would we have seen Jaguar CD games that (technically) were a big leap over likes of Hoverstrike CD/ Fight for Life (in terms of a 3D polygon engine with 2 texture mapped characters), Battlesphere and Battlemorph i wonder? or just improvements in a few areas?

I have been reliably informed by several Jaguar coders that the machine could have been pushed A LOT further than it was by making less use of the M68000 and more use of the GPU/DSP. Carmack himself said that too with regards to his Doom conversion.

Rogue Trooper

Quote from: "The Laird"
Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"7800 i know little about.

32X? VF pretty much pushed that as far as it could go, 3D wise, but i would have loved to have seen how far things could go 2D wise.

Jaguar:I would have loved to have seen Quake finished and games such as Need For Speed and Daytona USa converted (rumours were they would be coming) only then would we really have seen how far machine could be pushed, but everything would depend on just how was handling the conversions from Saturn/3DO in case of last 2.

Would we have seen Jaguar CD games that (technically) were a big leap over likes of Hoverstrike CD/ Fight for Life (in terms of a 3D polygon engine with 2 texture mapped characters), Battlesphere and Battlemorph i wonder? or just improvements in a few areas?

I have been reliably informed by several Jaguar coders that the machine could have been pushed A LOT further than it was by making less use of the M68000 and more use of the GPU/DSP. Carmack himself said that too with regards to his Doom conversion.

Only proof though is in the 'pudding', never seen any shots of Quake on Jaguar.what games did these Jaguar coders do?

I mean claims are fine and dandy, but taking say the saturn, SEGA were at 1 time happy to tell press it had a 64 Bit graphics chip, was a 128 Bit machine due to twin 32 Bit CPU's and 5 co-processors, then there were claims of undocumented DSP's etc etc.

Only real benchmark of any hardware is the games it produces.

zapiy

Quote from: "The Laird"
Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"7800 i know little about.

32X? VF pretty much pushed that as far as it could go, 3D wise, but i would have loved to have seen how far things could go 2D wise.

Jaguar:I would have loved to have seen Quake finished and games such as Need For Speed and Daytona USa converted (rumours were they would be coming) only then would we really have seen how far machine could be pushed, but everything would depend on just how was handling the conversions from Saturn/3DO in case of last 2.

Would we have seen Jaguar CD games that (technically) were a big leap over likes of Hoverstrike CD/ Fight for Life (in terms of a 3D polygon engine with 2 texture mapped characters), Battlesphere and Battlemorph i wonder? or just improvements in a few areas?

I have been reliably informed by several Jaguar coders that the machine could have been pushed A LOT further than it was by making less use of the M68000 and more use of the GPU/DSP. Carmack himself said that too with regards to his Doom conversion.

I am clearly no programmer interms of gaming and i have to agree with your findings fella..

Even now coders tend to really only get to grips with the coding as a system ages.. Given the time i am certain the Jag would have been pushed a lot harder.

Own: Jaguar, Lynx, Dreamcast, Saturn, MegaDrive, MegaCD, 32X, GameGear, PS3, PS, PSP, Wii, GameCube, N64, DS, GBA, GBC, GBP, GB,  Xbox, 3DO, CDi,  WonderSwan, WonderSwan Colour NGPC

Rogue Trooper

Also:Pushed where exactly? just what areas are we talking?

A.I/Physics/Polygons/Lighting/sound all of the afore mentioned? All make demands of the hardware, think we need to be careful not to get too caught up in vague terms here, sure code could be optimised, GPU made lot more use of, but just what areas had rich, untapped potential?.

Saturn good example-early on nay sayers said, ohhh under powered in 3D, yet by time of VF2 you had 2 texture mapped characters fighting it out, 60 FPS in machines High Res mode, then things like sonic R pulling off transparent effects, lighting etc people said Saturn could'nt do.to me these examples are where coders are pushing beyond what was considered limits of hardware.

you take say the playstation:

MDK said to be impossible to convert, Pentium PC only-MDK converted and is bloody great.

7 developers say quake is impossible on Playstation, all tried and failed.Hammerhead convert Quake II and it's bloody fantastic.Those are developers pushing hardware.Results, not talk :-)

TL

There is a technique on the Jaguar where you can turn off the Motorola 68000 and just code to the GPU and DSP, this was never used in any games because it was considered too buggy. A work around was found several years ago now that stops any bugs from interfering. Even Hover Strike CD, which is widely considered to be the most technically impressive game on the system, uses a fair chunk of 68000 code, less than the cart version though which is where the improvements came from.

The workaround was discovered almost simultaneously by two homebrew coders. Steve Scavone, who programmed Gorf for the Jag and Surround (the first project to use this technique to prove it worked) and Atari Owl who has been working very slowly on the Atari Owl project for a number of years now, a 3D RPG using both polygons and voxels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4K7ABfzMeA

Rogue Trooper

Quote from: "The Laird"There is a technique on the Jaguar where you can turn off the Motorola 68000 and just code to the GPU and DSP, this was never used in any games because it was considered too buggy. A work around was found several years ago now that stops any bugs from interfering. Even Hover Strike CD, which is widely considered to be the most technically impressive game on the system, uses a fair chunk of 68000 code, less than the cart version though which is where the improvements came from.

The workaround was discovered almost simultaneously by two homebrew coders. Steve Scavone, who programmed Gorf for the Jag and Surround (the first project to use this technique to prove it worked) and Atari Owl who has been working very slowly on the Atari Owl project for a number of years now, a 3D RPG using both polygons and voxels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4K7ABfzMeA

this method of coding to the GPU and DSP sounds exactly like the way the Jaguar was intended to be coded for, rather than using the 6800 (for anything more than 'housekeeping' tasks).

Hard to tell too much from a 60 sec.clip on youtube, but any idea just what sort of results this has yielded? ie can Jaguar games run for example with double the Polygon count or use textured polys without a huge speed loss where as previousily developers would have had to use plain polys in order to ensure stable frame rate, or can A.I/Physics be more complex?

Just trying to get a 'feel' for what this enables, as coders like Minter treated the hardware differently to others with superb results (Tempest 2000).

Brief comments i saw from coders were along lines of this enabled them to produce games that would shame the ST/Amiga, which i'd have hoped Jaguar could do from the off given the hardware involved.

TL

Apparently it can increase the speed of a game/3D engine by up to 25% and is far more efficient.

This is the way the Jaguar was intended to be programmed but the hardware bugs and terrible developer tools put a stop to that. Not to mention lazy coding by people who were used to using the 68k.

Rogue Trooper

So just faster F.P.S then?

Getting very wary of Jaguar claims after showing just how misleading the 850 pixels per sec animation, MIP's (Jaguar rated at 55 MIPS, but only 'usefully' runs at around 30) and claims of screens technically possible of 1,000X1,000 (technically possible, but not for games which ran at 320X240 in NTSC mode or 320x287 in Pal mode).

 I really do need to see some shots and or footage of Jaguar Quake to see how far I.D were pushing it.

TL

Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"So just faster F.P.S then?

Not that simple. Better performance would also allow for more polygons and more textures too among other things.

Rogue Trooper

Quote from: "The Laird"
Quote from: "Rogue Trooper"So just faster F.P.S then?

Not that simple. Better performance would also allow for more polygons and more textures too among other things.

Notice the word 'would', now i ask this, as Jaguar performance so often been blamed on the bugs, so now coders have found a solution, i'm keen to hear just what it's allowed that could'nt be done before, just how big a jump in performance have they managed with new coding?

If it's say increase of 5 FPS to a frame rate, that could make a big difference to a previousily sluggish game, if it's higher polygon count and more detailed textures, it could put an end to the claims that the 32X was more powerful than Jaguar in this dept.

Very interested to hear just what is now possible that was'nt before, but so far, things just a little too vague.

TL

Simple maths here:

If you use the 68000 you are stuck with a 13.3MHz 16-bit chip hogging a 64-bit bus.

If you use the GPU and DSP you have chips that are double the speed that can both share the same bus and use it at full speed/width.

When you look at it, using the 68k as the main processor in so many games was just insane.

Rogue Trooper

Quote from: "The Laird"Simple maths here:

If you use the 68000 you are stuck with a 13.3MHz 16-bit chip hogging a 64-bit bus.

If you use the GPU and DSP you have chips that are double the speed that can both share the same bus and use it at full speed/width.

When you look at it, using the 68k as the main processor in so many games was just insane.

Right, so i should be seeing results that show a noticable jump in terms of performance then.


I mean taking say the 32X, i saw inital games like Virtua Racing and Star Wars using plain polygons to texture mapping in games like Metal Head and Darxide as developers tapped into the hardware or Saturn where we went from plain largely untextured polygon fighters in VF, to texture-mapped fighters in VF:remix to Texture-Mapped, running in high res mode, 60 FPS of VF2 as the development tools got better.

So now code is being run off the GPU and not 6800 and DSP, when even something like Hoverstrike CD (which had cleaner textures than 1st gen PSone games), there should be a big increase in performance, yes?.

 

TL

Yes, I am lucky enough to have played a demo version of Atari Owl project and it blew everything else on the Jag out of the water. Shame nobody is every going to use those techniques to make a commercial quality game because the best Jaguar programmers have been chased out of the community by all the trolls. Dr. Typo does show some promise with Tube: SE and Fallen Angels though.

Rogue Trooper

Quote from: "The Laird"Yes, I am lucky enough to have played a demo version of Atari Owl project and it blew everything else on the Jag out of the water. Shame nobody is every going to use those techniques to make a commercial quality game because the best Jaguar programmers have been chased out of the community by all the trolls. Dr. Typo does some promise with Tube: SE and Fallen Angels though.

I'd love to see proper, full on games use the new methods, that way, finally silence the gumf so often written about the Jaguar, until then, demo's alone, no matter how good, will always be open to critiscm to a degree.

Rogue Trooper

Quote from: "The Laird"
Quote from: "onthinice"We have come so far, yet never reach full potential before being abandoned for the next console. :(

I dunno about that, I think systems like the NES, 2600, PS1, Mega Drive and SNES were pushed to their limits.

Systems like the 7800, Saturn, Jaguar, 3DO and 32X weren't though.

Thread bump as found that interview with Lobotomy in SSM, 1 question relates to the above:

SSSM:how much of Saturns power would you say is being used for Duke Nukem?

LOBOTOMY:I would say about 95% or more for this type of game.There are some hardware features of the Saturn we not be touching much at all, as they would'nt apply to this type of game.

They then go onto mention storage space in Ram being a huge challenge for graphics and sound.Speed not so much an issue, as they'd refined their 'Slave driver' game engine since Exhumed, on both Quake+Duke Nukem 3D