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New Atari Jaguar Game Running $1,225 on eBay
Bill Kendrick writes, "The long-awaited Atari Jaguar game Battle Sphere has finally been released. A special signed copy of the game is running on eBay for $1,225. After the auction is over, the game will start being sold for about $80 a cartridge. All proceeds from the auction will go to diabetes research."
Actually, it wasn't two 32-bit chipps added together. There *were* 64 bit chips and busses in there doing real grunt work. It's just that the CPU was a 32-bit 680x0 (like the ST) and that's why people cried foul.
If the CPU is demoted to tasks like controlling I/O and keeping the other chips in line - and those chips are 64-bit -- I don't think it's unreasonable to call it 64-bit.
Of course, another way to draw the line is how the code is compiled... in this case 32-bit. But it's kind of interesting to think about this when we get to the point that CPU's don't matter.
CPU's only matter in today's architecture because ** INTEL SUCKS ** and they want everything tied in such a way that the system can't scale without upgrading the CPU. Well designed (in this respect) systems are Solaris, Alpha boxes, and even PowerMacintosh. For better or for worse though the market says that bad designs will win because of economies of scale.
On a different note, I had *really* hoped Atari would regain their glory with this system. A cartridge system could have scored big if Atari got this out on time. As it was, 18 months too late, CD rom was the only way to go. Atari later made a CD Rom expansion, but those type of expansions *always* fail because you fragment your market (just like Microsoft... LOL)
I think most people are missing the point. Battle Sphere has been in development since almost before the PSX came out. It takes some serious devotion (and capital, I'd imagine) to put out a game (a console game, no less!) that's been off and on for over 5(?) years.
I bet there's a hell of a story behind the development of this game.
Finally, the Jaguar version is out. That means they can finish up the Amiga port.
The web page stated that it can support up to 32 players, yet I don't remember Atari ever having modem or serial link capabilities to the system.
You can use a JagLink cable hooked up to the DSP port on the back to link two jaguars together, or use CatBox units to link up to 32 systems together.
Hasbro Interactive acquired rights to many Atari properties, including the legendary Centipede, Missile Command, and Pong games, in a March 1998 acquisition from JTS Corporation.
This announcement will allow software developers to create and publish software for the Jaguar system without having to obtain a licensing agreement with Hasbro Interactive for such platform development. Hasbro Interactive cautioned, however, that the developers should not use the Atari trademark or logo in connection with their games or present the games as authorized or approved by Hasbro Interactive.
"Hasbro Interactive is strictly focused on developing and publishing entertainment software for the PC and the next generation game consoles," said Richard Cleveland, Head of Marketing for Hasbro Interactive's Atari Business Unit. "We realize there is a passionate audience of diehard Atari fans who want to keep the Jaguar system alive, and we don't want to prevent them from doing that. We will not interfere with the efforts of software developers to create software for the Jaguar system."
The BattleSphere Shrine
The BattleSphere FAQ
Next Generation's Preview/Review
Enjoy...
Wrong. It was 64 bit. From Atari Jaguar Frequently Asked Questions:
The Jaguar has five processors which are contained in three chips. Two of
the chips are proprietary designs, nicknamed "Tom" and "Jerry". The third
chip is a standard Motorola 68000, and used as a coprocessor. Tom and
Jerry are built using an 0.5 micron silicon process. With proper
programming, all five processors can run in parallel.
- "Tom"
- 750,000 transistors, 208 pins
- Graphics Processing Unit (processor #1)
- 32-bit RISC architecture (32/64 processor)
- 64 registers of 32 bits wide
- Has access to all 64 bits of the system bus
- Can read 64 bits of data in one instruction
- Rated at 26.591 MIPS (million instructions per second)
- Runs at 26.591 MHz
- 4K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM
- Performs a wide range of high-speed graphic effects
- Programmable
- Object processor (processor #2)
- 64-bit RISC architecture
- 64-bit wide registers
- 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-bit RISC architecture
- 64-bit wide registers
- Performs high-speed logical operations
- Hardware support for Z-buffering and Gouraud shading
- DRAM memory controller
- 64 bits
- Accesses the DRAM directly
- "Jerry"
- 600,000 transistors, 144 pins
- Digital Signal Processor (processor #4)
- 32 bits (32-bit registers)
- Rated at 26.6 MIPS (million instructions per second)
- Runs at 26.6 MHz
- Same RISC core as the Graphics Processing Unit
- Not limited to sound generation
- 8K bytes of zero wait-state internal SRAM
- CD-quality sound (16-bit stereo)
- Number of sound channels limited by software
- 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
- Joystick control
- Motorola 68000 (processor #5)
- Runs at 13.295MHz
- General purpose control processor
Communication is performed with a high speed 64-bit data bus, rated at
106.364 megabytes/second. The 68000 is only able to access 16 bits of this
bus at a time.
The Jaguar contains two megabytes (16 megabits) of fast page-mode DRAM,
in four chips with 512 K each. Game cartridges can support up to six
megabytes (48 megabits) of information, and can contain an EEPROM
(electrically erasable/programmable read-only memory) chip to save game
information and settings. Up to 100,000 writes can be performed with the
EEPROM; after that, future writes may not be saved (performance varies
widely, but 100,000 is a guaranteed minimum). Depending on use, this limit
should take from 10 to 50 years to reach.
The Jaguar uses 24-bit addressing, and is reportedly capable of accessing
data as follows:
Six megabytes cartridge ROM
Eight megabytes DRAM
Two megabytes miscellaneous/expansion
All of the processors can access the main DRAM memory area directly. The
Digital Signal Processor and the Graphics Processor can execute code out of
either their internal caches, or out of main memory. The only limitations
are that
Some people here just don't get it when it comes to Battlesphere. This program was started when the Jaguar was a current machine. Rather than just giving up, these people stuck with it and finished their product. BTW, the programmers all had full time jobs and wrote Battlesphere in there spare time. They have overcome so many obstacles its amazing. My hat is off to these people.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I actually dug up all my old jaguar development hardware to give to these guys a year or two ago.
Unfortunately, it turned out that I had lost the C compiler that I had retargeted to the jaguar RISC engines, so DOOM was no longer buildable.
There is something noble about developing on a dead platform -- it is so completely for the joy of the development, without any commercial motivation.
The quick recap on the jaguar:
The memory, bus, blitter and video processor were 64 bits wide, but the processors (68k and two custom risc processors) were 32 bit.
The blitter could do basic texture mapping of horizontal and vertical spans, but because there wasn't any caching involved, every pixel caused two ram page misses and only used 1/4 of the 64 bit bus. Two 64 bit buffers would have easily trippled texture mapping performance. Unfortunate.
It could make better use of the 64 bit bus with Z buffered, shaded triangles, but that didn't make for compelling games.
It offered a usefull color space option that allowed you to do lighting effects based on a single channel, isntead of RGB.
The video compositing engine was the most innovative part of the console. All of the characters in Wolf3D were done with just the back end scalar instead of blitting. Still, the experience with the limitations and hard failure cases of that gave me good amunition to rail against microsoft's (thankfully aborted) talisman project.
The little risc engined were decent processors. I was surprised that they didn't use off the shelf designs, but they basically worked ok. They had some design hazards (write after write) that didn't get fixed, but the only thing truly wrong with them was that they had scratchpad memory instead of caches, and couldn't execute code from main memory. I had to chunk the DOOM renderer into nine sequentially loaded overlays to get it working (with hindsight, I would have done it differently in about three...).
The 68k was slow. This was the primary problem of the system. You options were either taking it easy, running everything on the 68k, and going slow, or sweating over lots of overlayed parallel asm chunks to make something go fast on the risc processors.
That is why playstation kicked so much ass for development -- it was programmed like a single serial processor with a single fast accelerator.
If the jaguar had dumped the 68k and offered a dynamic cache on the risc processors and had a tiny bit of buffering on the blitter, it could have put up a reasonable fight against sony.
Now the LYNX, on the other hand, was very much The Right Thing from a programming standpoint. A fast little processor (for its niche), a good color bitmapped display, and a general purpose blitter.
Price and form factor weighed too heavily against it.
John Carmack
I was only into the Apple II/IIGS during the Amiga's strong times, so I never really got to give it a fair evaluation. My impression of the Amiga is mostly colored by later years of fanatics hounding me about supporting the "inherently superior amiga" when it was obviously well past its competative prime. John Carmack
I mean that I never actually worked with low level register programming specs for the amiga, so I can't comment authoritatively. The reason is that when I was young and the Amiga looked interesting, I couldn't afford one. When I had the means, I no longer had the desire.
I certainly don't mean to imply that all Amiga users are fanatics, just that the advocates that made it to my mailbox were less well mannered than those for many other platforms. You are right, it did color my response.
So, to give you a somewhat better answer:
The Amiga's success was in demonstrating the large benefits of specialized graphics coprocessors for personal computers, and providing close to a workstation like environment while the PC was still struggling with segment registers in dos.
It wouldn't have been obvious at the time, but the Amiga was basically fated to go the way of a console generation, rather than evolve as the PC or mac did.
The reliance on low level hardware knowledge and programming provided the obvious visual superiority, but also locked it in to a very ungracefull evolution.
John Carmack
Umn, please, as a diabetic, I beg you...
Don't further the myth that eating sugar causes diabetes. It's no more true than saying that thinking gives you Alzheimer's disease.
Diabetes is actually one of two diseases:
Type I (formerly "juvenile diabetes") is caused by an autoimmune response that destroys most or all of the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas (actual cause unknown, viral infection suspected), and requires that the person take insulin shots regularly for the rest of their life, barring medical breakthroughs. This is the type of diabetes I have.
Type II (formerly "adult-onset diabetes") is caused by a desensitizing of the body's cells' insulin receptors, and is often associated with aging and obesity. It can often be treated with changes in diet and exercise habits and oral medication, but occasionally requires supplemental insulin if these therapies fail. My father recently developed this form of diabetes. It's more common than Type I at about a 9:1 ratio.
(There's also 'gestational diabetes,' which is a cousin of Type II....)
Eating sugar has nothing to do with the onset of either of these diseases. I only go out on a limb and talk about this because public misinformation about what diabetes is, and how it works, could potentially kill me (see the movie "Con Air" for a REALLY REALLY bad example of horrible diametrically-opposite incorrect possibly-fatal misconceptions about diabetes).
And, to be moderately on-topic, it's ASTOUNDINGLY cool that the authors are giving this money to diabetes research; diabetes is the nations's fourth-largest killer disease, and largely goes undiagnosed for over 50% of the people who have it. Get your blood sugar checked if ANYTHING seems weird in your health. It can't hurt, and might save your life.
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