[NEWS] Virtual JaguarX (11-10-2012)

I have been working in the last months in a port of Virtual Jaguar for Xbox. Although the compatibility and performance of the emulator are not very high, I think that it is worth to release it. I hope that people can begin to enjoy another new system emulated in our Xbox

Hopefully, the emulator will be available in the emuxtras site and other usual places very soon. If you search for it, you will find it

From the README:


WHAT IS THIS
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Virtual JaguarX is an Atari Jaguar emulator for Xbox. It is a port of an old version of the Virtual Jaguar emulator (v1.0.5) with some improvements taken from later versions.


COMPATIBILITY
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The sound emulation is disabled by default to make the emulation faster (although you can turn on the sound if you want).

With the sound disabled, you can play at full speed (or at least at playable speeed) to some games: Rayman, Flashback, Zool 2, Command and Conquer, Sensible Soccer International, and maybe a few more. I am not sure about Tempest 2000, it seems playable too.

There are other games that run at full speed too, but they occasionally hang: Double Dragon 5, or Raiden.

Other games can be played but they are slow, so you have to use Frameskip (usually Frameskip 1 or 2) to be able to play them: Alien vs Predator, Pitfall, Atari Karts, Dragon, Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tails...

And finally, many other games don't load at all


SOUND EMULATION
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If you want to play with sound, you have two different choices:

* On the one hand, you can enable "real sound", but the emulator will run too slow if you don't have a modified Xbox. So, if you choose to have "real sound", you must use Frameskip too.

* On the other hand, you can choose "overclocked sound" (you can choose to overclock the sound processor x2, x3 or even x4). Overclocked sound has very low quality, but its speed is higher.

Example: if you want to play Command and Conquer, you can do it in three ways:

1) You can play it at full speed without sound (no frameskip is needed)

2) You can choose "real sound", but you must use Frameskip 2

3) You can choose "overclocked sound x2" or "overclocked sound x3" and play the game at full speed without Frameskip.

Each game has its own optimal choice. In this example (Command and Conquer) the last option is good: overclocked sound is very bad as far as music is concerned, but it's very good as far as SFX sounds is related. So, if you choose "overclocked sound" in Command and Conquer, you will listen at the begining a very ugly roar, then a very ugly title song... and after that, the gameplay is almost perfect, because all the SFX sounds (ARGH!, OUCH!, BANG! and so on) are played very well during the game.


RARE CASES:
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There are some rare games that need a special configuration to run. For example, the game NBA JAM needs sound emulation to be played. In NBA JAM, I recommend using "overclocked sound" AND Frameskip 2 TOO, and you can play it at a decent speed. It is a very weird game...


IMPORTANT!!!!!
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Roms MUST be placed in the /roms directory, as Virtual JaguarX v0.9 has a very limited GUI, but future releases of this emulator may use a different and wonderfull interface (thanks to the Surreal64 CE team!) so you will be able to put roms wherever you want. But this version must read the roms from the "/roms" folder. Lots of formats are valid, even zipped roms (if you have troubles with a zip, read the final part of this description). Furthermore: be sure that the "/roms" directory contains at least one rom, or the emulator will crash.


KEY MAPPING
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As far as the key mapping is related, you know that the Jaguar has 3 standard buttons (A, B and C) and a numeric keypad. The standard buttons are the most used, and they are mapped in the Xbox buttons A, B and X. After that, we must decide which is the better way to map the numeric pad. At the moment I have mapped the buttons in this way: START = 0, Y = 1, Black = 2, White = 3, Left Trigger = 4, Right Trigger = 5, dPad UP = 6, dPad Right = 7, dPad Down = 8, dPad Left = 9. Anyways, feedback will be very well received, to discuss the best way to map all these buttons.

You can exit of the game pressing START+BACK simmultaneously. You can launch a very limited in-game menu pressing the right stick to change the frameskip. At the moment there are only two options that can be configured by the user:

* Frameskip: The default value is ZERO, because many games run at full speed (or at least at playable speed) without using frameskip. But if you play a game that runs slow, maybe increasing the frameskip can help a bit to make the game playable. Please, be warned that increasing the frameskip in the middle of the game is possible, but decreasing frameskip in the middle of the game can make it crash (you probably will have to re-launch the rom).

* Sound emulation: It is disabled by default because it makes all the games run slow, sometimes they crash, and the sound is choppy. But I have included the option to enable real sound (you will need frameskip, as it is slow!) or overclocked sound. Read above for sound emulation details.


THANKS
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I want to say thanks to all the people that helped me in the port process: Neobomb, Hyper_Eye, Madmab, Freakdave, weinerschnitzel, XtecuterX73, the Surreal64 CE team, the creators of the original Virtual Jaguar emulator (nwagenaar, Caz, Adam Green, Aaron Giles, David Raingeard, Bernd Schmidt, Sam Lantinga, Ryan C. Gordon, Curt Vendel, Reboot, byuu, and mainly thanks to Shamus for his help!), thanks to the people who encouraged me to do this with their posts, and thanks to the creators of all the libraries for Xbox (like the SDL ones).... Yes, I know that you are thinking "hey HCF, if so many people has worked in this emulator... so, what did you do?"

Besides, big thanks to all the people that make possible the Xbox scene and the emuxtras project, Neobomb (again!), Wimpy, Waal, Perr, Mega Man... Thank you very much for your work!

The sources of the emulator are in the same package, so if anyone wants to see them and try to improve them, it will be very wellcome. You can contact me if you want to do it.


FAQ
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Q: What about CD support?
A: At the moment it is not supported, sorry.

Q: My rom (in ZIP format) did not work!
A: There are lots of formats valid for this emulator (JAG, J64, BIN...) and it has been added the possibility to compress them in ZIP format, but this ZIP support is very basic: each ZIP file can only have ONE file inside. If you have a ZIP file which contains more than one file, it will probably not work. Besides, I have found roms in internet whose zip file was corrupt. So, my advice if you are having troubles with a compressed rom, is to uncompress it.

Thank you for reading this!

HCF