Author Archives: LinkoVitch

Manual work

Another night spent working my way through the SoundEngine manual, version 0.21 nears launch, so there is a new feature to document, some old features I had forgotten to document (Thanks CJ for pointing those out 🙂 ) and a general tidy up here and there.

Still hoping to have the next version out this month (February), so keep checking back, or the usual places on AtariAge and Jagware (which I will update as and when it’s released).

Freeing up RAM and bus

Resources can be quite tight within the Jaguar system.  All though CPUs fighting for time on the bus, only 2MB of RAM, 4MB (mostly) of cart space.  Compromising assets to make a game fit or work isn’t something you want to do, especially the people that have created those assets 🙂

With that in mind I am always looking for ways to free up ROM/RAM, and keep the SoundEngine off the main bus as much as possible.  I have spent the last few days pondering a few tweaks that could benefit both storage capacity and bus use, and from the initial very basic experiments tonight these are looking quite promising.  I shouldn’t really count my bytes before they have hatched, but I am pretty sure that there could be some significant savings coming soon in regards to music playback on the Jaguar..

Watch this space…

Inclusion in Rebooteroids furthering feature development

It’s quite an exciting time in the U-235 bunker at the moment, work has been progressing nicely these last few weeks adding some extra features to the SoundEngine.  U-235 are very proud to have had our SoundEngine selected for use by Reboot in their RAPTOR Engine and the subsequent games based on this technology.  So it’s obviously a great honour to have our work also be ported into the upcoming release Rebooteroids!

Working closely with the guys in Reboot to meet the needs of Rebooteroids highlighted a new feature for the SoundEngine, Pad & spinner code!  Now the SoundEngine takes care of polling pad 1 & 2, presenting the state of the pads as two individual bitmaps.  Spinner code has also been added to allow the reading of rotary controllers.

At this time the code is only present in the custom build of the SoundEngine, but these features will of course be ported into full general releases of the SoundEngine.  Pad read code is planned to be included in the next release, with spinner reading code coming in a release after that most likely.  The next release of the SoundEngine will hopefully be in February this year assuming no big hitches with the development or available time.

Big thanks to Cyrano Jones of Reboot for the suggestion and various code fragments and feedback.

Jaguar Demo

Not something produced by U-235, but I have always loved demos on whatever platform.  Always wanted to make one myself 🙂

It’s good to see them starting to appear on the Jag too! Given the toys under the hood it should be interesting to see what the demo boffins can produce on the cat!

Checkout J_ by Checkpoint over at pouet

Or watch the YouTube video uploaded by Reboot:

e-Jagfest

Amazing how quickly time flies when you are having fun (moving house etc).. e-Jagfest 2013 is nearly upon us!  Celebrating 20 years of the Jag!  Has to be the best Atari Jaguar event in the whole world!  A full 64 bits of awesomeness, interactive, multimedia…. ahem…

We (U-235) are going to be there, along with fellow Jaguar fans to wish the Jaguar happy 20th birthday.  Why not come along, join in the fun, talk to devs, fans, collectors.. eat tasty German sausage, drink their beer & coffee and generally have a bloody good time!

Join the event page on Facebook here

New project…

We decided to try and get something together for an up-coming show, time has been quite short and there have been a few sticking points but progress has been made and things are moving along nicely.  If you follow my twitter feed (@link2076) in amongst all the other random nonsense you will find the odd tid-bit of info as I work on the project.

It is going to be a game, and yup poor ole GazTee is the hero 🙂  for this game, lets hope he packed some warm clothing…..

 

Jaguar Archives

They’re back!

I just noticed that the Archive of files we host on our site wasn’t as readily accessible as I thought! OOPS! my bad! sorry!  I have now (hopefully) rectified this, point your pointing thing over the ‘Jaguar Archives‘ page and fill yer boots.  🙂

Sound Engine 0.20 RELEASED!

It’s been far far too long, and not all of the features I hoped to get in this release are there, still plenty to do and add.  A significant bug was identified by Matmook of Jagware which would result in small looped samples sounding terribly off key.  This release fixes that bug.

In addition to this fix there is now a Pseudo random number generator built into the Sound Engine! whilst it is loaded into the DSP and the DSP is running it will merrily generate 16bits of pseudo rubbish.  Hopefully this will be of use and free up some ticks elsewhere in your projects.

Also now added support of the Vibrato & Volume slide effect.

The majority of changes have mostly been around some internal code tidying and documentation to aid in future development.

Head here to download the latest version, enjoy!

Jaguar Graphics converter beta released

It’s been a long time in coming!  I initially wrote this tool many many years ago, then lost the source, but back then it worked only for a very very limited selection of BMP source files.  This has bugged me lots, so when I started re-looking at Jaguar development I rewrote it from scratch.  However, this time I have used the ImageMagick image processing libraries to enable support for pretty much every image format on the planet.  Spent a good few hours last night polishing off some of the rougher edges, and whipped it into an early beta release for people to use.  Still a lot to do, if there are any features you would like to see, drop me an email and we might be able to get them added.

The release can be obtained from the Developer > Jaguar Graphics Convertor section of this website.

Enjoy!

New look website

Finally got sick of hand editing HTML.. so have done a quick WordPress install, a few plugin’s and here we are!  Hopefully a more useful site, and one that we can more quickly update people with our progress and activities via.

Still a work in progress (as I write this, it’s still hidden off in a seekret URL 😀 ) but arn’t most things