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Zerosquare

Cheap cartridges for developers and gamers

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sh3-rg    6

There is a hell of a lot of off-topic stuff in that & many other threads on AA and most other forums. That's just the way things are, conversations drift & often get chatty and off-topic or worse - suffer in-jokes or deliberate derail attempts. It's really annoying when the thread is regarding your own prods, I know, I've had it happen to my own.

 

Tursi, I appreciate you taking the time to come back here & post your follow-up. I suppose my posts are the ones you found angry, I'm genuinely sorry for that - my enthusiasm for this stuff often comes out a bit excited and gnarly & as I've stated many times, we wouldn't even be on the Jaguar without the skunkboard & are all well aware of the great contribution both yourself & kskunk have made to the Jaguar community. We pretty much all know the difficulties in making things happen for the Jaguar & have a lot of time for you guys & the effort you made in creating the skunk & skunk II and making the things we do that much simpler to achieve. Reading that you had to endure months of negotiations to make it happen only bolsters my respect for you both, I doubt I would have had the patience tbh.

 

Nobody else has commented on my AA avatar, certainly nobody has complained at AA or it would have been mentioned. I've taken quite a lot more serious beatings from Gorf in PM & on sites where I have no account to defend myself compared to a pun in an avatar. I do have serious concerns about the things he says & the people he uses as his source of information but as a gesture of good faith to you personally I'll remove it asap and do my best to give that kind of stuff the elbow.

 

kevin

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First, it's the bickering in general that annoys me, I'm not accusing people of flaming the skunkboard (although the jab about EEPROMs, whichever thread that was in, was annoying. I'm not aware of any title that fails to run for lack of EEPROM so that's not exactly a compatibility issue).

 

No barb, or negativity intented. I love my skunk. You *know* that.

 

BTW - Raiden fails (I believe, after a brief bit of debugging) due to the no EEPROM, so there is at least one. Not an issue, I've got 2 carts of it :)

 

[Edited for spelling]

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Tursi    0

Thanks, SH3.

 

Nobody else has commented on my AA avatar, certainly nobody has complained at AA or it would have been mentioned. I've taken quite a lot more serious beatings from Gorf in PM & on sites where I have no account to defend myself compared to a pun in an avatar. I do have serious concerns about the things he says & the people he uses as his source of information but as a gesture of good faith to you personally I'll remove it asap and do my best to give that kind of stuff the elbow.

 

Yeah, but dude, Gorf is all but removed from the community these days. The icon was mentioned by others in chat, that much I know, since it made me take a closer look and realize that it was actually a NEW icon with the new board in it. Thanks for making the good gesture and changing it, though. I think that's just a good move for the community concept, and gives me hope that one day there will be one. ;)

 

Cyrano - are you sure it's the lack of an eeprom that breaks Raiden? All official carts are supposed to be able to tolerate the failure of the eeprom. I do seem to remember some discussion of Raiden having issues but I never actually had time to investigate it in depth. If you did some research to prove it I might be able to use your research to look at the issue.

 

 

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Cyrano - are you sure it's the lack of an eeprom that breaks Raiden? All official carts are supposed to be able to tolerate the failure of the eeprom. I do seem to remember some discussion of Raiden having issues but I never actually had time to investigate it in depth. If you did some research to prove it I might be able to use your research to look at the issue.

 

I'm pretty sure it is, I was going to fix it myself but it's in a packed file in the ROM and I lost the will to live while looking at it :)

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Tursi    0
I'm pretty sure it is, I was going to fix it myself but it's in a packed file in the ROM and I lost the will to live while looking at it

 

hehe. I took a quick look today, and I don't think I agree. There seems to be some sort of dependency on the Jaguar BIOS.

 

If you run it up in Virtual Jaguar, it will boot if the Jag BIOS runs, but hang on a black screen if you jump directly to it. No Skunkboard involved here. I added debug to the EEPROM system and Raiden doesn't touch the EEPROM before the Atari title screen comes up. Since the EEPROM emulation is available in both cases and the debug suggests the game doesn't access it before the first screen, I don't think that's the cause of the incompatibility with Skunkboard. There's something that the BIOS sets that the game is relying on. I'll see if I can figure it out, it might explain some of the BJL apps that fail on Skunkboard too...

 

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Tursi    0

Raiden fails on Skunkboard because it never sets the VI register, so vertical interrupts are never generated. Skunkboard sets the register to maximum value to ensure unexpected interrupts are not generated. When it's set, Raiden works just fine.

 

This is probably the case with some homebrew that fails too.

 

(editted) I have rolled back the change in the v3 BIOS.. setting the VI register in the Skunkboard startup breaks compatibility with many homebrews that used to work (not completely clear why, probably due to a pending interrupt firing as soon as its enabled). So titles with this problem need to be fixed in the title itself.

 

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Stone    0

Hello all, and may I include in my first post here an apology for upsetting Tursi on AA :) Not my intention.

 

Most of you have 'met' me before. When I was first scene-active in 2001 or so I was still at school. Now I have an electronics degree, a gf of 5+ years, a house and a job :) I still have a soft spot for the Jag even after all this time, and I seem still to retain chunks of the dev manual no matter how hard I try so it looks like you're stuck with me :lol:

 

I've mainly joined here as it seems to be an oasis of technical detail (with a hardware slant too, yay!) and I'm considering a couple of projects along the lines of what I know best. I don't like releasing details of what I'm thinking until I'm in a position to deliver but you'll probably find me asking cryptic questions from time to time and then lurking some more...

 

So, hi to those who know me, hello to those who don't and yah boo sucks to the dicks who have to spoil it for everyone :D

 

Stone

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Tyrant    0
So, hi to those who know me, hello to those who don't and yah boo sucks to the dicks who have to spoil it for everyone :D

Hiya, nice to see you joining up to this little oasis. I completely agree on your evaluation of it btw, it's a brilliant site, largely forgotten by the masses, and full of good stuff. Just a shame so much is in French, but that's mostly the old stuff.

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Stone    0

I still remember enough French from school to get by :)

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Tyrant    0

How's this project coming along? I'd love to get my hands on a couple of these carts right now, and then a big batch of them sometime down the line.

 

When will you be able to give us a better estimation of the cost of them? Also I believe something was mentioned about cart shells, would be nice to get more details on that too.

 

Thanks.

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Zerosquare    10

I (finally !) got a quote from the manufacturer a few days ago. There's a 358.80€ fixed cost (regardless of the number of carts manufactured) to set up the production, plus 28.11€ per board for the parts, PCB manufacturing and soldering ; it goes down to 25.12€ per board if we get more than 200 boards manufactured. The price still isn't 100% sure, because the company has to consult the PCB supplier to know if the silver/gold plating and beveled edges are going to add an extra cost ; that's why I hadn't announced it publicly yet.

 

One of our Reboot friends has bought a large number of carts shells ; depending on how many people order one, the price should be about 2 or 3 euros.

 

So, assuming the prices are final, one cart + shell would cost 35€ if we get 100 of them manufactured, 30€ if we get 200 of them manufactured, and probably less for more.

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Zerosquare    10

The project is "on hold" at the moment, due to myself getting a new job that takes a lot of time, and problems with the manufacturer I had previously chosen.

I'll restart it as soon as I can :)

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Zerosquare    10

Soon... oh wait, that's what I said last time already ;)

 

The technical details have been sorted out, so as soon as the money is collected, we're good to go with mass production of the first Jagtopus-based games. When this will happen is up to game developers to tell me :P

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sh3-rg    6

You may have heard about SCPCD's 4-way cart programmer - it's a device intended for devs/publishers to allow them to rapidly produce Jaguar games on flash cartridges (for the moment, this means Jagtopus).

 

I made a video of the programmer in action, check it out here.

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TXG/MNX    0
You may have heard about SCPCD's 4-way cart programmer - it's a device intended for devs/publishers to allow them to rapidly produce Jaguar games on flash cartridges (for the moment, this means Jagtopus).

 

I made a video of the programmer in action, check it out here.

 

Hi looking good, any date when final price of the flashcards and programmer wil be released ?

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