Guardians of the PaST : Jaguar XJ220


Title Screen		Game starts with a HUGE reflected Jaguar XJ220. No wonder though, the game comes from a former democoder! (1/37)
Splash Screen	Resolution : Low

Overview

What's in the Box

Related Items (6/6)

Multimedia

Cheats/Tips

Reviews(1)

Comments (0)

Publisher	N/A	Type of Release	Development Demo
Developer	Core Design	Country of Release
Year	2009	Language	English
Origin	Platform Conversion	Packaging	None (loose disk)
Genre	Racing - Cars

Requirements
System	ST / STe Enhanced	Required MB	1mb
Controls	Joystick	Display	Colour Monitor / TV
Players	1 Player Only	Hard Drive Installable	No

Technical Details
Number of Disks	2	Protection	None
Drive Type	Double Sided	Software Version
Drive B Support	Supported	Preservation Status	No

Development Team
Atari ST Conversion	Andrew J. Buchanan	Graphics	Jacy Gee
Game Design	Jacy Gee Jeremy Heath Smith Mark Avory Mark Price	Track Design	Jaguar Cars Limited Mark Price Ron Elkins Limited

Software Notes
Thank You	Guardians of the PaST would like to thank Andrew Buchanan (aka 'Oberje' of Fingerbobs) for the resurrection of this great title and for showing the patience to answer our endless questions and fixing new and improved versions almost daily. So thanks Andrew, your work will be much appreciated amongst the ST community.
The Car	In December 1989, Jaguar announced that a limited production run of its XJ-220 concept car would go ahead. A mere 350 units of the four hundred thousand pound supercar were built by a newly formed subsidiary, Project XJ-220 Ltd. The car borrowed heavily from the XJR-11 racing car, using the twin-turbo V6 engine as well as many chassis and suspension components. Its light weight and tremendous power (over 500 BHP) resulted in performce that humbled the greatest efforts of Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Porsche. Despite its light weight it was not a spartan racing car, full leather interior, air-conditioning and electric windows came as standard. Core Design's agreement with jaguar covered both the XJ220 and the XJR 12 racing car. It allowed for the release of the game at the same time as the launch of the car giving the game extra publicity. There were however restrictions placed on Core for both the Amiga and ST conversions, under no circumstances was the car to be shown in a bad light. This even meant the car would not get a single scratch during a race, in fact no smashes, dents, or smoke were allowed to be associated with the car. Jaguar even insisted that a certain amount off billboards that displayed there logo were added to the computer game track.
ST Conversion	The Amiga version of the game used 1mb of memory and 32 colour graphics mode. The Amiga’s custom chips were utilised to get as much speed as possible, the blitter being used to draw all the roadside objects, tunnels, flyovers, road graphics, and opponent cars. The copper chip was used to draw the road markings and sky graduations. For these reasons the ST version was going to be a big challenge. There were no custom chips to rely on and the screen would have to be reduced to 16 colours. Reducing the colours would actually help the framerate but the biggest impact was the lack of blitter which standard ST’s didn’t have. It was clear the ST was going to have to do everything the hard way. In June 1992 Core Design handed the conversion over to Andrew Buchanan a very talented programmer who was a member of the demo group Fingerbobs. He had previously worked as part of the team that brought Rubicon to the ST. The game was written on a PC running PDS that connected to a 1040STE via a parallel cable. The PC was a 33MHz 386DX with 2MB of memory, 80MB hard drive, and VGA graphics. Core would provide the ST audio & any additional gfx work that Andrew couldn't get via the direct conversion of Amiga assets. The Amiga code provided for the conversion was not very well documented and Andrew was not even provided with an Amiga development kit. He was confident however that he could get close to the framerate achieved in the Amiga version, one thing was for sure, it was going to be a real test of his code reading skills and his Amiga and ST knowledge. The first task was the construction of the sprite engine. Even on a 1mb ST (same as Amiga) memory was too tight to preshift anything much. A routine was therefore written that could blit 1, 2, 3 or 4 plane sprites to a 4 plane screen, all of these needed masking against any arbitrary (rectangular) boundary. Considering how much work this routine had to do it proved to be very fast, there were even fast paths through the code for every specific situation that warranted it. Furthermore the sprite routine internally worked with 32 or 16 pixel strips to minimise any code bloat, with only minimal runtime overhead. Since the ST version used 16 colours many of the game graphics had to be remapped or colour reduced. The tunnels and flyovers in the game were drawn using custom rectangle fills that utilised jump tables and big blocks of code. Line drawing was done using a simple bresenham routine. The road itself proved to be a challenge since it took more than 50% of the screen and was 2 plane. Since it could not be preshifted Andrew wrote the fastest realtime shifting code he could manage and hoped for the best. For the displaying of the rasters the original Amiga copperlist creation code was kept. Another routine would then parse the final list to create directly executable Timer B interrupt routines. Andrew explained that he never got this to work 100% due to various weird things that could be in the copperlists. The rasters themselves were also slightly unstable since the sprite routines were moving so much data around that sometimes interrupts would be a little late. However, these glitches were minimal and not at all noticeable during play. Despite all the above it was still necessary to reduce the number of screen objects and the screen area by 16 pixels from each side of the screen, thankfully the arbitrary clipped sprite routine didn't need recoding for the new sizes. The end result of all this was a very playable game even at this stage of developmeny, although Andrew noted that there was still scope for even more optimisation.
Cancellation	The cancellation of Jaguar XJ220 occurred in August 1992 approximately three months after it was started. Andrew was reassigned to the Amiga game 'Darkmere: The Nightmare's Begun' since it was badly behind scedule, in fact that game would not be published for another two years. To this day the reason for the cancellation remains a mystery and no official announcement was ever made by Core. It can be speculated that a rapidly declining ST market was the main reason, however, the games disappointing moderate success on the Amiga may have also have been contributing factor. It could also be that Core needed all the resources possible to get Darkmere finished and so cancelled Jaguar so they could assign Andrew to the project.
Resurrection	Andrew found the source of the development version of Jaguar on an old almost perished CD-ROM, it contained only the source and the final data files. Purely for his own amusement he resolved to make some working disk images to run on an emulator. Getting the assembly source to compile under Devpac3 proved to be straightforward, requiring only simple textual substitutions for the difference in directives and the addition of a few compiler option flags. Making the disks proved to be more problematic since the conversion had been running using Andrew's own custom disk format (TDOS 4.1). A way was needed to create such disks and so Andrew created a PC program to create the correctly formatted .ST image files directly from files on the PC. After fixing a few annoying bugs the image files were successfully created by the program. The final stage was to fix the bootsector code and bootstrap loader program, and building fresh .ST images. Initially Andrew had to guess which files were needed before he had the first working disks for the ST version of Jaguar XJ220.
Demo Notes	As the game remains just a development demo, comparing the final Amiga-version, there's still lot of things that are not implemented. Championship mode You can access all the tracks and drive races against 20 other cars but after you finish the race, there's no points or money awarded. Car tuning Original Amiga-version allowed to tune the car for better perfomance between the races. Track-editor Only about 20% of it was completed when the game was cancelled. Two player mode Due to a complex game-engine, the two-player mode wasn't working as good as expected so it's missing from the development version. Audio All music and sound FX are missing. It is unknown if it was going to use sampled effects or music in the intro.
Trivia	SUPER CARS RACING CHALLENGE The gameplay of Jaguar XJ220 is based around an SCR Challenge which is spread over 12 international rounds. It is open to all road-legal sports cars. Here's the team you compete against: Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 Team Corvette Factory sponsored team running ´91 spec ZR1's. The cars massive 5.7 litre engine are both powerful and reliable altough thirsty and heavy. The cars traditional front-engine, rear wheel drive set-up limits cornering ability for some bit Porsche 959 Team Stuck Last years winning team, factory sponsored and for the first time running 959's. The cars twinturbo engine provide masses of power and four wheel drive produces spectacular cornering altough rear engine layout makes it twitchy on the limit Bugatti EB110 Team Lorenzo New for the race season, using all new EB110 sports car. Capable of a top speed over 200MPH and the handling to match. This should prove to be a tough contender to all those racing this season Ferrari F40 Team Morello A new private team running the legendary F40. Producing almost 500BHP in a lightweight body gives the car slingshot acceleration and a top speed of over 200MPH. The mid-engine layout provides balance cornering altough being only 2-wheel drive the car is a difficult to drive in the wet Lamborghini Countach Team Kyle The Kyle team return running ex-factory Countachs due to relialibility problems with the Diablos. After a strong showing last season the team must be strong contenders with experienced drivers and well developed cars. The mid-engine cars run modified 5.2 litre V12 engines with fuel injection Jaguar XJ220 Team Core The latest team to enter SCR Challenge. Partly sponsored by Jaguar and running the new XJ220, the team must surely be a strong contender. Altough the car is still in development, its powerplant gives it an obvious speed advantage over most of the field SCR-Challenge tracks The races are held in 36 different tracks which takes place in following countries: England Dry and wet tarmac, fog with limited visibility. Some watersplashs and an occasional driving over small rivers. Egypt Dry gravel/tarmac, desert races with some bushes and rock statues to avoid. An occasional driving over small rivers and you also spend some time driving through a lake. Switzerland Icy and dry tarmac with some more ice and cones to avoid. Driving in very dark tunnels and on narrow road with cliffs on the right side of the road. USA Dry tarmac with some nice colours again. Avoid some bushes on a desert, then drive on highway bypassing some tunnels. Day and nightime driving. Canada Dry tarmac, some watersplashes and rocks to avoid. Driving over a bridge and avoiding fallen trees. Japan Some nice oriental scenery in dry tarmac, day and night time driving Australia Back to the desert again. After that a dry tarmac with long tunnels and some nice waterfalls. Then desert again, avoiding bushes. Greece Some tricky tunnels and avoiding stone statues. Italy Driving on narrow roads with cliffs on the left side. Then to the highway to compete against italian supercars for maximum speed. Germany Foggy tracks on Autobahn. Some cones and trees to avoid. Last stage is a really beautiful night time track. France Again fog and night time driving on French highways. Brazil The SCR Challenge ends here. Some nice waterfalls, long tunnels and beautiful local scenery.
Factoid	Virtually all the game databases on the internet mistakenly state this game was released on the ST, see The Legacy and Moby Games links below as an example of this.
Download	Here at last are the disk images for the legendary game for you to tryout in an emulator. Instructions can be found within the archive, please enjoy! http://www.ntrautanen.fi/marko/sao/Jaguar_XJ220_Development_demo_v5.rar

Title Viewed	4582	Version Viewed	4582
Title Created	Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:50:39 +0000	Version Created	Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:56:52 +0000
Title Updated	Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:26:41 +0000	Version Updated	Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:27:19 +0000
Title Updated By	Goldrunner	Version Updated By	Goldrunner
Whats in the Box	1	Related Items	6
Votes	9 from 1 vote	Multimedia Items	0


Atari Grand Prix	Badlands	Lotus III - The Ultimate Challenge

Coding by Snaptari; Content, Online database, Guardians Player & Guardians Jukebox © 2006-2007 Guardians Of The PaST
All rights reserved. No part of this website may be reproduced without permission.
This website is not affiliated with any video game company. All patents, logos, trademarks and content are owned by their respective holders.
Website is optimised for Firefox 2.0.0.14
This Page was generated on Fri, 04 Nov 2011 05:45:14 +0000 in 2.691 Seconds