Rich Whithouse, Jaguar Emu Author Extraordinaire

[neurocrash]

Greetings,

About two days ago, I learned of a new Jaguar emulator called BigPEmu by Rich Whitehouse. It was apparently the Jaguar emulator included in the Atari 50 compilation, but it is also available for free and is even better than what was offered with that software package.

BigPEmu seems to run most Jaguar games very well, even some of those that have been previously unemulated such as Iron Soldier 1 & 2, Hover Strike, and others. This emulator can even run some games at higher frame rates without breaking gameplay, and has customizable visuals, filters, controls, and many other features. I've tested many of the games I own such as Battlesphere Gold, AvP, Iron Soldier, and Tempest 2000. You can look up some Youtube videos and his web site for more information but I'll add a few links I have seen below. I don't know that he has tried to get it to run VLM yet, but have little doubt the he could and more.

I am very saddened to learn that Mr. Whitehouse is dying of cancer, and if I understand correctly, is having a major surgery on 12/06/22 which is two days from now, or tomorrow if you are reading this in the morning. I hope that everyone will send their best intentions for Mr. Whitehouse, in hopes that he will be able to survive the surgery and will be able to have a lot more life. I sincerely thank Rich Whitehouse for sharing his efforts with us, and hope that he will be well.

Here are a few links I've watched, to see what he has contributed to this community.

https://www.richwhitehouse.com/jaguar/index.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg563-sR5ik&t=64s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIcAdJ0mf40
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur3pONKXKO4

Aloha,

John

[Misfit]

The emulator was mentioned in the Atari 50 thread, but I think it deserves its own thread too, so thanks for posting.

What great and awful news. I do hope Rich pulls through.

I'm keen to give this emulator a try, there were a few Jag things I never saw and if this can enhance them a little too it would be great.

I still have some Jag carts, but foolishly sold my Jag to someone on here a few years ago.

[WiteWulf]

Thanks for the heads-up re Rich's health, Neurocrash. Awful news indeed...

[Misfit]

Thanks for the heads-up re Rich's health, Neurocrash. Awful news indeed...

There is an open post on his Patreon here, doesn't sound encouraging:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/time-flie ... =join_link

[Misfit]

The emulator however sounds very encouraging:

Features

Full compatibility.
BigPEmu can run every game in the Jaguar's retail cartridge library.

Fast.
The emulator runs the entire retail library (with default settings) at full speed on almost any x64-capable processor. Every Jaguar processor runs on a single native core (maintaining deterministic emulation) and doesn't rely on any dynamic recompilation (maintaining console compatibility), all the while maintaining extremely low system requirements.

Accurate.
It's the most accurate Jaguar emulator to-date, although there is still lots of room for improvement. I'm continually working toward achieving system-wide cycle-accurate timing.

Better than hardware.
Although the emulator defaults to settings which are catered toward compatibility and accuracy, it's capable of far more. Settings are exposed to overclock/underclock each of the Jaguar cores, as well as to adjust the speed and accuracy of other system components. BigPEmu enables you to play lots of Jaguar games at a full 60 frames per second for the first time ever!

Saved states and movies.
Everything is completely deterministic, just like real life. That's right, I went there. This means that all "randomness" is also controlled by a preserved seed. BigPEmu can record movies from nothing but controller inputs, and play them back with perfect accuracy. You can even interrupt a movie's playback and start playing yourself at any point.

Excessive presentation detail.
I've gone all-out on this one. There's native support for the Jaguar Game Drive's MRQ format in the cartridge browser (as well as box art sourced from PNG files), support for global and per-game backgrounds, and even support for controller overlays! Overlays are composited into the Jaguar controller on-the-fly, displayed on both the input binding screen and the helpful pop-up controller info display.

Extra device support.
Featuring support for analog controllers (both via external bank switching and the ADC), driving controllers, rotary controllers, and Team Tap.

Glorious shaders.
The emulator comes equipped with a powerful, fully customizable postprocessing system. The system supports any type of effect you can imagine, from applying smoothing filters to simulating CRT displays.

Native HDR support.
HDR displays are natively supported, complete with options to tune the output to the characteristics of your display and to force postprocessing effects to employ HDR buffers all the way through the post chain. This means postprocessing effects take full advantage of that increased color precision and push it all the way through to your eyeballs. CRT shaders reap all the benefits. At 4K with HDR color output, they are an amazing sight to behold.

Per-game profiles.
Mapping the Atari Jaguar controller to anything other than a telephone with wings can get a little complicated, so you might want to switch your controller mapping up for different games. You can do that! With per-game profiles, you can automatically load up a new input scheme (or any other emulator setting) each time you load a game.

Manipulate time.
Native fast forwarding capability, which can be assigned to any input.

Plugins.
Stock plugins cover support for video, audio, input, and networking across broadly compatible API's, with the potential to easily expand to any platform/interface. The OpenGL video plugin can scale all the way from its default incarnation (with support for effects, distance field fonts, etc.) down to fixed function OpenGL 1.0, meaning that the emulator can run on just about any GPU that can run GLQuake. (although the font would look pretty bad on some of them)

The usual.
Enjoy all of the emulator niceties you've come to expect in modern times. Automatic preservation of EEPROM, PAL support, custom boot ROM images, native support for multiple displays and different aspect ratios, custom display cropping, extremely customizable input, custom language support, and a whole lot more.

Full of terrible secrets.
No, really, it is. You'll never find them.

[Deckard]

I like his style -

Q: Is this emulator really free? There's no installer which quietly asks to put garbage on my machine, and it's completely self-contained?
A: Yes. I'm a broken old man with no savings, but I'll die refusing to give in to this garbage culture of user/consumer exploitation. However, if you'd like to delay my ultimate demise, you can help me out.

Love his top level membership class too - "One Who Bares Fangs at God"

And of course a mod to turn your Roomba cleaner mapping info into a Doom map !

PS Certainly a clever idea the Patreon idea....never heard of it to today.

[MegaZoid.]

Works great on the deck

[MegaZoid.]

Jag cd also close too being emulated.

[Misfit]

Jag cd also close too being emulated.

Yes, very exciting. VLM on the Jag is one of the few Llamasoft things I've never been able to play with (which I'm sure is true for most of us).

Short post and a video of VLM running here...

https://www.patreon.com/posts/jaguar-cd-its-76714318

[Stephen]

Jag cd also close too being emulated.

Yes, very exciting. VLM on the Jag is one of the few Llamasoft things I've never been able to play with (which I'm sure is true for most of us).

Short post and a video of VLM running here...

https://www.patreon.com/posts/jaguar-cd-its-76714318

Until this is finished, check here to see how you can already emulate and run VLM, even using PC audio as input here: http://www.yakyak.org/viewtopic.php?f=5 ... 5#p1718092

[Stephen]

Just like that, he's got all retail CD games plus VLM running under emulation. If all goes well, a preview version will be going out to Patrons within a few weeks.

[WiteWulf]

Tangentially, I guess Rich's surgery late last year went well, then, as he seems to be working hard on this.

Good news

[neurocrash]

Rich is working very hard on this in spite of not necessarily feeling well. That's why I'm trying to help support his efforts on Patreon and with some hardware donations. Someone even donated a Jaguar CD unit (!) which is how he is able to work on CD emulation. It's a great community.

[Stephen]

https://twitter.com/DickWhitehouse/stat ... SDT85Y2_ew

VLM is working on his CD emulator now, and it will support any music playing on the PC and pipe it. A simple key binding can be done to allow access to the effects editor, and I am assuming emulator save states will be a perfect way to save the edited effects. Can't wait to try this out.

[punkrulesok]

v1.04 has now been released with Jag CD support it says. Do you just set the boot ROM in the system settings to a dump of the Jag CD unit to access it? I have jagcd.rom