Jaguar Developer Hardware
Become a Jaguar Developer
Jaguar Developer Hardware
The low-down on Developer Hardware.
HARDWARE RESOURCES
What do I need, Jaguar wise?
You need some form of development kit for your Jaguar. There are now FOUR
choices available, but only TWO choices are strictly legal and available.
The two solutions are both very good, but do remember that the Jaguar Server
is the more commercial solution, and more existing developers own the Jaguar
Server than any other system at present. These development kits basically
give you a means to send your own code to the Jaguar, and then invoke it.
That's all. The rest is up to you, Atari can't help, and development is
secret.
Read All About The Various Hardware
What do I need, computer hardware wise?
ATARI ST FAMILY
Most software development tools for Jaguar are available for the Atari ST
family. You can use an ST, STe, TT or Falcon. Probably the Falcon would be
the preferred machine with lots of RAM and lots of hard disk. Atari recommended
a Falcon for Jaguar development, and if you were to get hold of a CD development
kit, that REQUIRES an Atari Falcon even if you had a PC based development
kit. The CD emulator runs on the Falcon, and you need a PC formattted (FAT)
SCSI hard disk attached. Remember a Jaguar CD can be 790Mb, so get a big
hard disk.
You can use an IBM PC compatible with an ST emulator (see the Jaguar Server
Home-Page for more information) but you still need a REAL Atari ST in order
to do the actual uploading to the Jaguar, but that will be changing, check
the Home-Pages for more information.
IBM PC COMPATIBLE
If you decide to do development on an IBM PC compatible, and can find some
tools, you need a FAST machine. Something like a Pentium 100 or better would
be ideal, but I've been using a 486 DX/2 80 and it gets me by although I'd
prefer really to be using my 686/150+, but some software expects DOS, and
you may also want to use an ST emulator.
If you can get the official Atari devkit or the Cross Products devkit, both
these products were once available in both Atari ST and IBM PC compatible
versions. Both versions will work with an IBM PC compatible, connecting to
the parallel port on the PC. What you MUST HAVE on your IBM PC compatible
is a bi-directional parallel port, (EPP or ECP), you cannot use either of
those official devkits without that facility on your machine.
What do I need peripheral wise?
Peripherals for Jaguar development are really just a matter of common sense.
There is NOTHING (other than that bi-directional EPP or ECP parallel port)
which is essential, but I would recommend the following items to create your
graphics and sound from personal experience, bearing in mind I had a tight
budget, and you might too.
HAND SCANNER
Yes, a small scanner, black and white or colour, is VERY useful as it lets
you import into the machine your hand drawn graphics. There is nothing like
an artist preparing images with pen/ink or pencil. The results for a real
artist are nearly always superior.
GRAPHICS TABLET
A graphics tablet, with a touch pad pen, is ideal for creating hand-drawn
graphics. Real art is not so popular these days for logo screens etc., being
pushed out by pre-rendered images, but many people still believe real
hand-created artwork is more impressive, and as an artist myself I tend to
favour it for title screens.
FRAME GRABBER/VIDEO DIGITISER
This item, commonly known by either or both of these names, is essential
if you want to show other people your work. Although you can sit down and
create a masterpiece, in all likelyhood the majority of non-developers will
not see what you've done until, if, you can get it published. A frame-grabber
is ideal as it can capture the image direct from the TV to your PC. It is
also useful to capture images or real objects or people using a video camera
attached to the composite-video port of the card.
MICROPHONE, SOUND CARD
This may sound stupid- but not really. My development machine does NOT have
a sound card, but I do have a machine with a sound card. The development
machine is not really going to need sound, it is a coding engine, most probably
your main machine, however. The Jaguar will be playing sound files in a
completely different way to the PC, and so you may well find that apart from
sound sampling, you don't use it. The microphone will be required if you
wish to sample speech for the game. You may of course just use an audio samples
CD, widely available.