The Atari Jaguar technology is still the intellectual property of JTS/Atari
Corporation, subject to a number of patents, and they expressly deny any
source of information on their technology. They do not support, condone or
assist any Jaguar enthusiast in their endeavors to write Jaguar software.
Information on the Jaguar architecture is found from other enthusiasts and
due to the stringent NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) which all developers
need to sign, Atari accredited developers cannot afford to speak about
development or share their resources with non NDA developers. Eventual
publication of any Jaguar "underground" programs is still distinctly unlikely
at this time, and most projects will take over a year to complete.
HUMAN RESOURCES
What do I need, skills wise?
You need to be able to program, and program extremely well. If you can only
program in BASIC, Pascal or COBOL, and nothing else, FORGET IT. You need
to be able to program in ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE, although it is possible to find
a 'C' compiler capable of working with the Jaguar. The 'C' compiler still
requires some assembly language knowledge really.
You should already know or be learning:-
68000 ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE
K&&R or ANSI DIALECT 'C'
HEX, and BINARY numbers.
You will need to learn from JagDox:
GPU RISC ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE
DSP RISC ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE
(The languages are similar.)
You need to be able to read VERY technical low-level information and understand
it. Getting your hands on a real Jaguar devkit, or a Jaguar Server or BJL
kit will NOT help you understand the code. The devkit is much like a floppy
disk drive on a PC. Just because you have a slot to put something in doesn't
make the job of writing software any easier. Read the unofficial documentation,
Jag-Dox. If you don't understand it now, don't expect to understand it any
more when you start coding. Trial and error with actual code clearly helps
over time.
OTHER RESOURCE SKILLS
You will also need to be very versatile, or have friends who can provide
these resource skills- bitmap graphics creation (on Paint-Shop Pro at worst),
3D models creation (if you plan on writing polygon code) using something
like 3D Studio, SoftImage, Autocad or something similar, sound creation or
capture, music composition for MOD format or similar (you can devise your
own format, or write a MOD player) and marketing skills. Marketing skills
are often the first skill to be utilised unfortunately, way before any of
the other skills like programming or project design.
What you need most of all is determination. The Jaguar is not an easy machine
to program for, and nearly everything is hard to do, and the underground
documentation, just like the Atari documentation, is lacking in clarity in
many areas, and devoid of examples. The machine is incredibly powerful, but
debugging Jaguar programs is not an easy task, and you may well find yourself
turning your machine OFF and ON again quite frequently at first.
The other thing you need is to KEEP YOUR PROJECT QUIET. Do not fall into
the trap of telling everyone how 'cool' your game is going to be as soon
as you start coding. You will find that the old programmers' adage that you
should "increase the time-scale to the next level, and double the estimate",
becomes all too true. In other words if you estimate ONE WEEK to finish some
code, think TWO MONTHS... If you continually talk about dates, and then miss
them, you rapidly look ridiculous.
