Flying the British Flag! JustClaws
What's New Page
Feedback!
Click Here
This is DevCats | Also visit JagSite | Also visit JaguDome | JI-II Forum

Atari "Alpine" Devkit


(Atari) The Official Jaguar 64 Kit (UK)
There are two versions reported of the OFFICIAL ATARI JAGUAR 64 DEVELOPMENT KIT. One uses an IBM PC compatible, (typically a fast 486 or Pentium) and the other uses a Atari ST family machine, although they really expect you're using a Falcon or at least a TT. I'm told that the official kit has a good debugger, but is slow to upload your code for testing.
The Jaguar development kit hardware consists of a large board which plugs into a special "Development Jaguar" which is not the same as a normal Jaguar. Software development is generally done in RISC assembler, and Atari supply software subroutines in assembler for common functions. The GPU code is difficult to debug despite the development kit tools.
(A full Jaguar development kit, with Flash ROM!)
A picture of a full developers kit, complete with Stubulated Jaguar, 2Mb Alpine development board, Flash ROM, developer controller (notably in grey with blue buttons instead of black) and Atari Jaguar developer manuals. (All normal Jaguar manuals have a developer serial-number or name as a watermark across them.) The Jaguar is shown booted up (apparently) to the Jaguar boot-up screen on a standard RGB monitor.
(A full Jaguar development kit, with Flash ROM!)

(A close-up of an Alpine development kit!)

The enlargement above of a Jaguar Alpine board fitted to an Stubulated Jaguar shows how complex the circuitry of an Alpine development board is. The buttons on the top are (apparently) RESET, STOP and memory protect. Alpine boards may be either 2Mb or 4Mb. Developers with big projects such as Alien Vs. Predator and Battleshere had 4Mb Alpines. The large unit can 'pretend' to be any normal Jaguar ROM, but no ROM can be plugged in at the same time as the Alpine so it cannot be used for examining existing software titles. 

Kit consists of Jaguar Testing Station (Jaguar with Stubulator ROM and inter-
connect to Jaguar Alpine board), Jaguar Alpine ROM emulator with debugging
interface, 8-bit PC bi-directional parallel port I/O card, and 2 controllers.

Software includes text editor, MADMAC and ALN assembler and linker, DB
GPU/DSP/68k symbolic debugger, Jaguar GPU/DSP/68k macro assembler, Jaguar
utilities (file format converters), Jaguar Image Compression utility (JIC),
Jaguar synthesiser (JASD) and Jaguar 3D tools together with some Jaguar
source-code samples. You also get a Jaguar Software Reference Manual!
There is also a Jaguar CD-ROM Station available though detail is sketchy. It should comprise the hardware described below. However, as so few developers have this equipment and Atari refuse to elaborate unless you're under NDA I cannot say. 
The hardware which comprises the CD-ROM station includes CD-ROM emulation 
hardware, Jaguar development CD-ROM unit and interface, inteconnect cable 
(CD-ROM unit to CD-ROM emulator), SCSI-II to C50 cable and CD-ROM profiler
and emulator software.
Telephone Atari UK on:- 01753-533344. (Kit costs around $5,500- even in UK!)
(eMail!) eMail Atari UK about it. (atari@cix.compulink.co.uk)