9 replies to this topic

[SoilentGreen]

Hi,

I was a pretty big Jaguar fan a few years ago, I lost interest in it and sold everything I had off.

I came across an Atari ST 520m not too long ago and had my interest re-sparked.
I have a few questions about how that would translate to coding on the Jaguar.


I know that both are based on the 68000, even though the 68000 is only thought of as a manager on the Jaguar rather than being
the main CPU. Am I better off coding on the ST and then transferring to the Jaguar? Would BJL work with my Atari ST?
Thanks!

[CyranoJ]

If you head over the the Jagware Forum a few people over there use Atari equipment to code for Jaguar. I'd say most people these days use a PC and a skunkboard or alpine though.

[rush6432]

SoilentGreen, on Wed Oct 26, 2011 6:40 PM, said:

Hi,

I was a pretty big Jaguar fan a few years ago, I lost interest in it and sold everything I had off.

I came across an Atari ST 520m not too long ago and had my interest re-sparked.
I have a few questions about how that would translate to coding on the Jaguar.


I know that both are based on the 68000, even though the 68000 is only thought of as a manager on the Jaguar rather than being
the main CPU. Am I better off coding on the ST and then transferring to the Jaguar? Would BJL work with my Atari ST?
Thanks!

Depends on what your comfortable with as far as a dev environment. ST would be cool to use for development but a PC with XP works just fine as well or linux setup. pc setup just makes the process quicker and removes any hassle of transfering files from pc to st and allows for alot more multi-tasking going on while developing. Again all personal preference.

Im personally not familiar with a bjl uploader for the ST, but thats not to say one doesnt exist.

If you're looking for a bjl, I've got one thats already modified that im selling. Of course you can always go the way of an Alpine or skunk like CJ stated above.

Great to hear there is another person looking into development on the jag

[SoilentGreen]

rush6432, on Thu Oct 27, 2011 12:02 PM, said:

Depends on what your comfortable with as far as a dev environment. ST would be cool to use for development but a PC with XP works just fine as well or linux setup. pc setup just makes the process quicker and removes any hassle of transfering files from pc to st and allows for alot more multi-tasking going on while developing. Again all personal preference. Im personally not familiar with a bjl uploader for the ST, but thats not to say one doesnt exist. If you're looking for a bjl, I've got one thats already modified that im selling. Of course you can always go the way of an Alpine or skunk like CJ stated above. Great to hear there is another person looking into development on the jag

Well.. I'm not comfortable with anything just yet. I need to learn to crawl before walking, right?

I've never coded on the Jag or in ASM. It sounds like fun though and there have many great strides since I've first looked into messing around with the Jaguar!

As far as buying a BJL modified Jaguar (what I'm assuming you're getting at), I'm waiting first to see if I get a Jag for Christmas from my better half. If I do, I'm going to wait until then to hunt down the BJL setup. If I don't get one, I'll definitely keep that in mind. I've been forced to promise not to buy anything for myself for the next 2 months. "Right now I'm kind of in the information gathering I.E: what would it take for me to do this?" phase.

What's the advantages/disadvantages of doing BJL vs using an Alpine board or a Skunkboard?

[JagChris]

SoilentGreen, on Fri Oct 28, 2011 5:57 PM, said:

rush6432, on Thu Oct 27, 2011 12:02 PM, said:

Depends on what your comfortable with as far as a dev environment. ST would be cool to use for development but a PC with XP works just fine as well or linux setup. pc setup just makes the process quicker and removes any hassle of transfering files from pc to st and allows for alot more multi-tasking going on while developing. Again all personal preference. Im personally not familiar with a bjl uploader for the ST, but thats not to say one doesnt exist. If you're looking for a bjl, I've got one thats already modified that im selling. Of course you can always go the way of an Alpine or skunk like CJ stated above. Great to hear there is another person looking into development on the jag

Well.. I'm not comfortable with anything just yet. I need to learn to crawl before walking, right?

I've never coded on the Jag or in ASM. It sounds like fun though and there have many great strides since I've first looked into messing around with the Jaguar!

As far as buying a BJL modified Jaguar (what I'm assuming you're getting at), I'm waiting first to see if I get a Jag for Christmas from my better half. If I do, I'm going to wait until then to hunt down the BJL setup. If I don't get one, I'll definitely keep that in mind. I've been forced to promise not to buy anything for myself for the next 2 months. "Right now I'm kind of in the information gathering I.E: what would it take for me to do this?" phase.

What's the advantages/disadvantages of doing BJL vs using an Alpine board or a Skunkboard?

In the meantime you can tinker with the Jagulator for coding along with Belboz's Jaguar development setup website. He has tons of different setups ready to go to take care of almost any need:

http://www.hillsoftw...com/?page_id=11

Here is the Jaguar simulator you can tinker around with for uploading homebrews and messing around with coding, such as Belboz's 'Hello World' program.

http://www.jagulator.com/

[CyranoJ]

Virtual Jaguar is much better for testing things on... gotta love --alpine

[JagChris]

CyranoJ, on Fri Oct 28, 2011 6:34 PM, said:

Virtual Jaguar is much better for testing things on... gotta love --alpine

Perhaps but isnt the Jagulator easier for most to get up and running right now as is? I have not had a chance to mess with VJ but you should post a link to it so he can look into that as well.

[CyranoJ]

No, not really. For development, the --alpine and vj.log files offer far more debugging potential. Not to say that both couldn't be improved upon, but, as always, compatibility before features (as it should be!) - VirtualJaguar is also not limited to a Windows environment.

For a link, see the Virtual Jaguar release thread in the main forum

The OP mentioned using an Atari ST to develop on - GGN recently patched the Atari BJL uploader to handle bigger files, if this is the way you want to go, grab that here.

[rush6432]

SoilentGreen, on Fri Oct 28, 2011 5:57 PM, said:

rush6432, on Thu Oct 27, 2011 12:02 PM, said:

Depends on what your comfortable with as far as a dev environment. ST would be cool to use for development but a PC with XP works just fine as well or linux setup. pc setup just makes the process quicker and removes any hassle of transfering files from pc to st and allows for alot more multi-tasking going on while developing. Again all personal preference. Im personally not familiar with a bjl uploader for the ST, but thats not to say one doesnt exist. If you're looking for a bjl, I've got one thats already modified that im selling. Of course you can always go the way of an Alpine or skunk like CJ stated above. Great to hear there is another person looking into development on the jag

Well.. I'm not comfortable with anything just yet. I need to learn to crawl before walking, right?

I've never coded on the Jag or in ASM. It sounds like fun though and there have many great strides since I've first looked into messing around with the Jaguar!

As far as buying a BJL modified Jaguar (what I'm assuming you're getting at), I'm waiting first to see if I get a Jag for Christmas from my better half. If I do, I'm going to wait until then to hunt down the BJL setup. If I don't get one, I'll definitely keep that in mind. I've been forced to promise not to buy anything for myself for the next 2 months. "Right now I'm kind of in the information gathering I.E: what would it take for me to do this?" phase.

What's the advantages/disadvantages of doing BJL vs using an Alpine board or a Skunkboard?

Alpine is the official devkit and offers a debugger for everything. Skunk is a flash cartridge that works much like the alpine if not exactly the same but without a debugger program. Thats not to say one cant be written easily but that has yet to have been done from what i understand. The bjl has VERY basic debugging capabilities where you more or less have to put an illegal instruction where you want it to dump out so that it will bring you back to the main BJL screen and show you whats in the registers. It works but its not very convenient. With the alpine you can stop the program dead in its tracks and step through instructions which is pretty cool.. That feature does however come with a price-tag of about $600 dollars for an entire 2mb alpine setup (dev jagu + alpine board and all hookups + controller) Not exactly cheap.... The skunk 3 is something that is quite cheaper price wise and does the same thing except minus an existing full debugger and has even more features. If we could only get someone to port WDB debugger setup to the skunk3

Using an emulator can help for certain things but if wouldn't trust it 100% and develop and entire game using it and not the real hardware. Nothing better than testing on the real hardware. Ive used project tempest a few times here and there as well as a few other emulators to test functions ive written and so far ive had no issues just yet with it working on a real jaguar the exact way i wrote it. You might check out some source code to see if you can pick up on how the system is setup video and OP wise and go from there. Maybe write your own routine for refreshing the object list and setting up the hardware. The developers manual would also be a good thing to check out so you can read up a little on the systems hardware and quirks along with how everything ties together. This should give you a basic overview and let you decide from there where you would like to go.

Edited by rush6432, Tue Nov 1, 2011 5:55 AM.

[Tursi]

rush6432, on Tue Nov 1, 2011 5:48 AM, said:

If we could only get someone to port WDB debugger setup to the skunk3

Well, we still ship the GDB stub, so if you know how to use GDB you can single-step 68k code over the Skunk, at least. I don't use it myself, though, so that's why it's shipped as-is.