18 replies to this topic

[Funkstar De Luxe]

Hello everyone! I'm new here (this is my first post). I've had a good look through the boards and found nothing that explaind this clearly, although I did find some great stuff. I own a PAL Jaguar and was wondering if it was possible to play 'import' games on it? Also, I just payed £21 for AvP - supposedly mint and complete, was this a decent price?

Thanks

[patters98]

Yep there's no regioning on Jag carts. £21 for a mint AvP is roughly right. I paid about £15 for mine for cart only from the US.

[Thunderbird]

Funkstar De Luxe said:

Hello everyone!  I'm new here (this is my first post).  I've had a good look through the boards and found nothing that explaind this clearly, although I did find some great stuff.  I own a PAL Jaguar and was wondering if it was possible to play 'import' games on it?  Also, I just payed £21 for AvP - supposedly mint and complete, was this a decent price?

Thanks  

All games work on all Jaguars. The hardware makes it all work properly no matter what video you use. Welcome aboard!

[Atari_Owl]

Quote

All games work on all Jaguars. The hardware makes it all work properly no matter what video you use. Welcome aboard!

Not quite all.
Dragon's Lair has some kind of timing problem, so whilst it displays the screen properly, it resets to the start of animations regularly and is unplayable (on PAL machines)

[Funkstar De Luxe]

Great, now I can get power drive rally! I've wanted it since the Jag came out!

[Thunderbird]

Atari_Owl said:

Quote

All games work on all Jaguars. The hardware makes it all work properly no matter what video you use. Welcome aboard!

Not quite all.
Dragon's Lair has some kind of timing problem, so whilst it displays the screen properly, it resets to the start of animations regularly and is unplayable (on PAL machines)

The BIOS and Atari timing routines are supposed to handle all that. If this game breaks then the bozos who made it screwed up and whoever tested it at Atari screwed up too.

That sucks.

[Atari_Owl]

Quote

The BIOS and Atari timing routines are supposed to handle all that. If this game breaks then the bozos who made it screwed up and whoever tested it at Atari screwed up too.  

That sucks.

Tell me about it

I think Readysoft and Atari just wanted it out the door and din't really think about it.

Still at least i have an NTSC machine too. They seemed to have sorted out their problems for Space Ace

and Hey at least its not a great game that doesn't work

[Tyrant]

I have both dragons lair and space ace, never managed to get far in either, dragons lair allways crashes as the animation crosses the drawbridge, before any interaction options happen and before the first "scene" really begins. Space ace can get a little further, but often crashes too, and I think quite often skips animations.

Since the only NTSC Jag I have is a stubulator equiped one, is it possible to load normal domestic cd games from it? I know you can play encripted carts by holding B, and I seem to remember being able to get it to boot the cd dev unit by holding c, but does that also work for the domestic cd unit? Not that I really want to play them, but be nice to at least see how bad they are before I consign them to history.

[Thunderbird]

Tyrant said:

I have both dragons lair and space ace, never managed to get far in either, dragons lair allways crashes as the animation crosses the drawbridge, before any interaction options happen and before the first "scene" really begins. Space ace can get a little further, but often crashes too, and I think quite often skips animations.

Since the only NTSC Jag I have is a stubulator equiped one, is it possible to load normal domestic cd games from it? I know you can play encripted carts by holding B, and I seem to remember being able to get it to boot the cd dev unit by holding c, but does that also work for the domestic cd unit? Not that I really want to play them, but be nice to at least see how bad they are before I consign them to history.

I believe you need the Stub from November 94 in order to work 100% with the CD drive installed. I forget exactly but I'm sure the early stubs had problems with the CD.

[Tyrant]

Thanks, I'll give it a go later, tho its kinda hard to get everything connected to the ntsc compatible tv at the moment.

[Thunderbird]

Tyrant said:

Thanks, I'll give it a go later, tho its kinda hard to get everything connected to the ntsc compatible tv at the moment.

Is it a big thing over there to sell TV's that can input in multiple formats? Or is it just that some TV's are good enough to sync to NTSC signals? Is there some kind of switch or something you need to set, or what?

[Tyrant]

The large tv I have upstairs is quite old and a very cheap brand to begin with and cant cope with ntsc. While I havnt looked at new tv's recently I assume most can handle it, but I know sony allways have supported it in all tv's and never make it into a feature, just part of the normal operation for a tv. Other companies did make a big deal of it, not sure if they do now or not tho.

[Thunderbird]

Tyrant said:

The large tv I have upstairs is quite old and a very cheap brand to begin with and cant cope with ntsc. While I havnt looked at new tv's recently I assume most can handle it, but I know sony allways have supported it in all tv's and never make it into a feature, just part of the normal operation for a tv. Other companies did make a big deal of it, not sure if they do now or not tho.

I wonder if anyone makes a TV in the U.S. that can play PAL video. I know there are special VCR's that work with PAL tapes, but that's a different recording format for the video, not just the video signals themselves.

[t.skid]

Even here in Europe Sony TV have PAL and NTSC. But also other brands, like Thompson, Philips offer this feature (maybe only in high-end models).

[Tyrant]

Thunderbird said:

I wonder if anyone makes a TV in the U.S. that can play PAL video. I know there are special VCR's that work with PAL tapes, but that's a different recording format for the video, not just the video signals themselves.

Check out a Sony, chances are it'll support both even if its made in america, while most of Sony's products are just very flashy bits of plastic and metal arround other peoples tech, they make their own tv's and they do make them very well.

[Gaztee]

Hi Guys

There are a couple of other games that I have noticed have problems playing on PAL jags. Protector, P:SE & Soccer Kid all lose some of the top half of the screen. So In Soccer Kid you can't see your score. Haven't played Protector for a while so can't quite remeber what happend, but I think that you lose part of the radar at the top of the screen. Again I am glad to have the NTSC version too, so I use this to play them.

Hope this helps some

Gaztee

[Thunderbird]

Gaztee said:

Hi Guys  

There are a couple of other games that I have noticed have problems playing on PAL jags. Protector, P:SE & Soccer Kid all lose some of the top half of the screen. So In Soccer Kid you can't see your score. Haven't played Protector for a while so can't quite remeber what happend, but I think that you lose part of the radar at the top of the screen. Again I am glad to have the NTSC version too, so I use this to play them.    

Hope this helps some

Gaztee

This is one of the reasons Atari was going bonkers issuing new startup code for developers to use. They would have new code every month or so and insist that everyone stop using the old version and only use the new version. Eventually, they even released the versions that had the "licensed to Atari" splash screen built-in.

Of course we had written the BattleSphere™ startup code somewhat differently and incompatible with their code, since when we designed our boot code they didn't even have a sample to go by yet. We just took NTSC and PAL into consideration and wrote one.

It seems to work fine. I'm not sure why they had so much trouble!

[Walter_J-64]

Thunderbird wrote:

Quote

This is one of the reasons Atari was going bonkers issuing new startup code for developers to use. They would have new code every month or so and insist that everyone stop using the old version and only use the new version. Eventually, they even released the versions that had the "licensed to Atari" splash screen built-in.  

Of course we had written the BattleSphere™ startup code somewhat differently and incompatible with their code, since when we designed our boot code they didn't even have a sample to go by yet. We just took NTSC and PAL into consideration and wrote one.  

It seems to work fine. I'm not sure why they had so much trouble!

Atari didnt have you on there team! Thank God for that we would have never seen BS

[Thunderbird]

I wish we had been funded by Atari, so we could have quit our day-jobs and made the game full-time. that would have made it come out when the Jag was viable and we would probably have gotten some good press from that as well. Oh well, everything happens for a reason.