Discussion NUON Resurrection Update

[The Helper]

I had posted about what was needed to get NUON up to speed with the rest of the consoles and this is an update on it

1. Get a decent working emulator based off of NUANCE

The problem with NUANCE is it is slow with the advent of super fast hardware you can run Tempest 3000 with NUANCE no problem. Hopefully someone will take over the NUANCE emulation project but nobody has come out to do that yet....

2. Get the authentication key for publishing new games - if we have to setup something like Scatologic did with a brute force method on the Jaguar we need to start now

We have this. If anyone was interested in really doing anything they could get this going with information that is already out there from Dragonshadow. When I posted the original post I thought the website was gone because it was down at that time. The Dragonshadow site is up and not going down so all that information that I thought was lost is still there.

3. Get the dev tools all in one place and a guide to use them - we definitely do not want to forget the Jeff Minter Sprite Library in this space. Nobody has really used them or reached out to him on what he thought we would be able to do with it.

Once again I thought the dragonshadow website was down when I posted this so much information is there on this but it just stopped for whatever reason at a point. Jeff Minter definitely needs to be interviewed about the modern view of Tempest 3K once we get it emulated properly but from what I hear the current emulation is pretty good....

4. Get in contact with the VM Labs people and see if they have anything they can give us that they have not yet. Richard Miller, we need an interview with him.

I only have one contact into VM Labs and that is the Dragonshadow guy. We need more.

Someone on Atari Age came out with a scarf that credited I think Richard Miller

 

[atarigalore]

dragonshadow.com is also archived on archive.org along with the downloads

 

[The Helper]

Update on this:

Original Checklist

NUON Resurrection Checklist

1. Get a decent working emulator based off of NUANCE 2. Get the authentication key for publishing new games - if we have to setup something like Scatologic did with a brute force method on the Jaguar we need to start now 3. Get the dev tools all in one place and a guide to use them - we...

www.thehelper.net

NUON Emulator - not much has been done on this. The thing holding us back besides not having a super emulation genius NUON fan is that the NUANCE emulator is written in .Net I think. If we are going to get anywhere this is going to have to target ARM and be linux based - I am down for a group of us to discuss a plan to recruit or contract an emulator genius to look at this issue

Discussion - Resurrecting Nuance

Hi! Let me quickly introduce myself before i start with my actual topic: I fell in love with Tempest back in the Jaguar days, and am still a fan til today (along with all other Llamasoft spinoffs that were released over the years, i even did my own variant in 96k some years ago...

www.thehelper.net

Authentication Key - this has been solved - holy shit never thought that would happen

Discussion - NUON Authentication Tools Thread - Emulating older outdated versions of Linux

Interested in feedback on this https://www.thehelper.net/threads/how-much-do-you-think-it-would-cost-to-outsource-the-nuon-authentication-stuff.168042/

www.thehelper.net

Dev tools all in one place - this is working and definitely we will need a github, this forum and other stuff but this is not so much something for a have to have Now. I have a good idea where all the released SDK stuff is at and some other stuff.

Discussion - You want this (NUON Official SDK, NUON schematics, NUON manuals and more)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q4WfAm9hfiWDh2Sg83zuOpm4JLTHXcnF/view?usp=sharing Contents: NUON Official SDK Serial adapter schematics Composer Kit Devkit Manual Aries 3 schematics Galaxy Quest Enhancements Port Data UPDATE: Link changed from Dragonshadow's direct URL to Google Drive

www.thehelper.net

Contact VM Labs people - Dragonshadow is back in the mix and the other people, I don't know how to proceed with that but I have started a list We are going to need access to stuff in the future that I do not think has been released so we need to be clever about how we approach any former VML people, imho

The NUON Interview Targets

Everyone on this page http://www.vmlabs.de/team.htm

www.thehelper.net

The Controller issue has been SOLVED!
NUON Controllers - our main push is with Carl at Songbird trying to reverse engineer the controllers I sent him.

Big News on NUON Controller Development

Carl of Songbird Productions is teaming up with Lee Olivares (maker of the Yak Twister boards and holder (hoarder? Haha) of the polyface chips) to see if they can make some headway on a NUON controller option. This could be epic! Screenshot below from AtariAge. PS Nick Persijn also posted there...

www.thehelper.net

NUON-Dome - www.nuon-dome.com

I think this is not on the original list but we need a way to get code on to real hardware to test that is not burning a CDR or DVD every time. This is likely going to happen through the controller port and be a Jaguar like BJL solution. A SD card interface would probably be optimal. We are working on getting a NUON Dev kit, we have a source, and hopefully this will help us in this respect.

We need a way test code without having to burn a CDR or DVD every time.

Stephen said I'd love it it we could get an SD based optical drive emulator for these machines, as well as a way of uploading code via the controller port as opposed to burning a CD-R every time. I would actually say, that is more important for now (IMHO) than getting authentication to work. If...

www.thehelper.net

This is about the Dev Kit

Remind me who has the NUON Dev Kit?

I know Dragonshadow had one at one point and he wanted to give it to Stephen but I don't know where this went. Who out there in the Internet has a NUON Dev Kit? Is there any information about it out there? I think if we had one of those it would help us to understand more what is necessary to...

www.thehelper.net

I am going to need your guys help for this to work. Make a plan, execute, and we should get success. Go NUON!

 

[The Helper]

We have 2 controller update solutions in the works - one from Songbird and the other from RobertDaleSmith in the NUON Discord.

Looks like they are both Controller Adaptors. Songbird is shooting for a N64 adaptor while RobertDaleSmith is looking for what people think they want.

Let us know what you think!

Discord - A New Way to Chat with Friends & Communities

Discord is the easiest way to communicate over voice, video, and text. Chat, hang out, and stay close with your friends and communities.

discord.com

#nuon-dome

 

[cubanismo]

Oops, wrong thread. Moved my post about Nuance joystick support here: https://www.thehelper.net/threads/resurrecting-nuance.166935/page-5#post-1397087

 

[cubanismo]

The thing holding us back besides not having a super emulation genius NUON fan is that the NUANCE emulator is written in .Net I think.

Note this is not true. The emulator is written in C/C++. It does have a lot of win32 code and general windows-isms sprinkled throughout the codebase though, which would make porting it a little difficult, but the core of the code looks relatively portable. It wouldn't be impossible for someone ambitious to port it to SDL and make it more or less platform-agnostic.

The code generation, which is currently required for any reasonable speed, is specific to x86 though. It doesn't even build with 64-bit/amd64/x86_64 builds at the moment. That would take some doing to port to ARM. There looks to be a little MMX/SSE usage as well.

 

[The Helper]

Note this is not true. The emulator is written in C/C++. It does have a lot of win32 code and general windows-isms sprinkled throughout the codebase though, which would make porting it a little difficult, but the core of the code looks relatively portable. It wouldn't be impossible for someone ambitious to port it to SDL and make it more or less platform-agnostic.

The code generation, which is currently required for any reasonable speed, is specific to x86 though. It doesn't even build with 64-bit/amd64/x86_64 builds at the moment. That would take some doing to port to ARM. There looks to be a little MMX/SSE usage as well.

You are mod please feel free to update any incorrect information I might have out there.

 

[The Helper]

Controller Solution Done! We have 2 of them actually.

RobertDaleSmith - the first one out NUON Hall of Fame automatic!

NUON-Dome - www.nuon-dome.com

Songbird Productions has an adaptor solution on the way too keep your eyes on the forum for updates on that.

Songbird Productions

New Games. Old systems.

songbird-productions.com

 

[The Helper]

NUON Resurrection Update

Authentication Solved. We can now sign homebrew to work on all NUON players. Thank you EdgeConnector!

Controller Shortage Solved. Thank you RobertDaleSmith and Songbird!

NUON Emulator - NUANCE is actively being worked on. Toxie is back in the mix and we have a few more new names in the mix. Still a work in progress the Emulator is doing better. It looks like we are going to be able to move forward with NUANCE in its current development environment without having to trash what we have. Time will tell. The Emulator people seem confident, I trust in this Go NUON!

Dev Kits - we are actively looking for NUON Dev Kits and we have a number of leads and at least one Dev Kit available, thank you Dragonshadow. This is Work in Progress. If anybody has a NUON Dev Kit or information on a NUON Dev Kit please let us know here or in the NUON Discord.

Interface for Homebrew testing. We have found out from Dragonshadow that the ability to load code to NUON is available through the controller and we are actively exploring this so we can develop a solution to test code without having to burn a DVD every time and possibly a SSD interface. We are also looking at Ethernet Mods to existing NUON units because the Dev Kits have ethernet ports. This is Work in Progress.

We got lines now into the VM Labs people and we are still actively searching out all NUON documents and specs that we can. Please let us know if you see this and have an idea about some NUON spec that we do not have yet. We are currently working on getting a repository of all this information but likely that will be a NUON-Dome thing... hint hint

Games - the NUON Homebrew collection has been signed and is available for all players.

 

[The Helper]

Update on this!

NUON Emulator - we are still working on NUANCE but it is slow going and we still cannot fix the Tempest 3K Audio problems. We appreciate all the people working on NUANCE but we are turning our attention more towards trying to get Atari to pay for getting Tempest 3K on the VCS and other platforms. The best way to do that is that for them to get a NUON emulator like they did for the Atari Jaguar on the Atari 50th. Hopefully the lure of the VLM and Tempest 3K can convince Atari to invest the money to get this game out there. There is no way that Tempest 3K is more obscure than Akka Arrh.

If you want Atari to re-release Tempest 3K on modern hardware which would be best done using emulation let them know at the Atari VCS Disord and the Atari Age VCS Forum where an Atari employee that can actually do something lives.

Atari VCS

Discussion forum for the new Atari VCS console.

forums.atariage.com

davpa is the Atari employee name there.

 

[toxie]

The problem with NUANCE is it is slow with the advent of super fast hardware you can run Tempest 3000 with NUANCE no problem.

Just a small comment on that: As also the Jaguar emu BigPEmu was brought up somewhere else, and how well it performs (and its great, too, btw ), note that the Nuon is a completely different beast, even compared to the already complicated Jaguar. So to put that in perspective:

First of all, clockrates are already much higher, then you have also 4 MPEs, plus each of them can execute up to 7 instructions per cycle, and 3 of these even being vector (4) ones. So this means that in (a very very ideal) theory, Nuon can execute up to (4+3*4)*4*54 = 3456 Million operations per second. And most of these even require multiple instructions to emulate on x86 (or also potentially on arm).
Not to forget the additional bloat for control flow and memory accesses, etc.

And only due to Nuance being very very sloppy (by design!) with timing accuracy it at the moment can be as fast as it is.
Obviously, there is always room for improvement (multicore support being one of them, although not simple to actually make things faster at similar accuracy), but don't expect wonders unless a lot of development time is spent on emulation.

 

[The Helper]

I know it looks like NUON is kind of on a stall right now but we are farther these last 2 years then we have been in a decade. Patience is going to be needed for this. We got something pretty big coming out pretty soon and hopefully follow up with another thing but understand people this is a very small community. Hopefully one of our coming up things will kick us up a notch but unfortunately neither of the things are emulator things. We really need some help with that. SOS on the NUON Emulator!