Talk:Soulstar

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The Reason Soulstar was never released on the Jaguar CD

I worked at Core Design at the time and was in fact working in the same room as Mark Acory (Mac) who programmed the original MegaCD version of the game and undertook to convert the game onto the Jaguar CD. The game was completed and worked perfectly on the official Atari Jaguar CD development system.

The problem was that the game refused to work on the Jaguar CD. Mac spent over a month trying to find the bug and failed. Atari sent an engineer who spent a further 3+ months trying to find the bug but was unable to do so.

In retrospect, Mac concluded that the problem was due to Atari filing to include a processor to deal with CD access. There were no files in the classical sense. Each block of data was defined by it's physical point on the CD measured in minutes and seconds. To load a 'file' one had to read from a slightly earlier time and read slightly more data than was needed and in software detect where the ACTUAL file was.

Mac came up with his own system to do this and it may well have been the case that the times that worked on the development system didn't work on the final hardware.

So sorry to any disappointed Atari CD gamers. We never found what the bug in spite of many of the programmers at Core Design checking the code and then an Atari engineer (who one presumes had intimate knowledge of the hardware) spent months.

For what it's worth, Mac wasted a lot of time because the Atari-designed RISC processor (Tom) didn't actually have some of the instructions or even addressing modes the manuals claimed it to have. For the technically minded, the Tom processor was supposed to support <register value> + R30 or R31 addressing modes. So thousands of lines of code were written on paper before the development kit arrived only for us to discover that the instruction set described by the manual were not implemented in the final design. 2A0A:EF40:E1C:DF01:E1EB:4557:8F7E:38BC (talk) 14:34, 24 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]