Issue 36: Oct 2003
Features
- | Foreword
- | Tip of the day
- | Digiscoping Or How I Saved $68,000
- | JagFest UK 2003 Aftershock
- | Mod Shop Horrors
- | Broadband ST
- | Atari Goes Metal: 2
- | ABBUC Highscore Chat
- | Activision's "Forgotten" Years
- | Keep That Atari!
- | MiNT And I
- | Atari Logo Evolution Continued
- | Atari In Argentina
Reviews
- | Painter
- | Laser Squad
M@ilbox
| JagFest UK 2003 Aftershock Text by TXG Photos by Fox-1 I liked the review about JagFestUK but I'd like to tell my version as well. On Friday we travelled from the Netherlands to the UK. In the morning at 09:30 the Demming brothers arrived and we drank some coffee before we left. Then we drove to Calais. After 25 km of driving we had some bad luck, something happened and we were standing still on the highway. I decided to drive to the centre of the city to get to the other side of Breda and get on another highway but it seemed lots of people also did that. Finally we were on this other highway and already lost one hour. We had to be at Calais by about 14:30, but everything else was fine so we arrived there about 13:30. Robert Demming had ordered the tickets so he had to get them, this was the reason we had to be in Calais together, otherwise we wouldn't have a ticket. When we were there we ate something and then the journey to the UK could really start and we drove in the train that would bring us to the other side. The trip was about 35 minutes and really quick and relaxed. I think this is a nice way to travel. In the UK we drove directly on the highway and my first test of driving left was going well. I thought it would more be difficult. About one hour later we arrived at the hotel and met some people there. We put our stuff in the room with the pool table and before we unpacked I put the two flags and the Jaguar banner on the wall just to feel more at home. Then we drank a Dutch beer with Nick and the others before we connected all the Atari computers we brought. Robert Demming brought his Jaguar development system with his Alpine board and his brother the Samsung Nuon 504 DVD player with games like Merlin Racing and Tempest 3000. Later that evening after connecting everthing I played some games on the Jaguar like Tempest 2000, one of my favorite games.
Alhough I don't have a rotary controller I managed to get a pretty good high score.
In this same room there was this original Jaguar display it was really nice but sadly not for sale.
More and more people arrived and I was impressed how many people were there. It just started with one simple question on AtariAge. I visited Nick of 16/32 Systems to see what items he had for sale. To make my Jaguar game collection complete I bought Worms and Iron Soldier 2 CD and I played these games, of course. Nick had a nice place and lots of cool Atari items for sale like Jaguar CD-ROM players, Jaguar consoles, Jaguar games but also ST and Lynx stuff.
Nick even had some Japanese Jaguars and Alpine developer boards for sale.
While we saw more and more people there I saw one person who developed this cool hardware to attach a PC joystick to the Jaguar. He gave a little demonstration and it works cool.
I hope the schematic and more information will be available in the near future.
On Saturday morning the rooms filled very well and more people came in, like some people of the MyAtari team. They had their own section where they wrote the latest articles. In this part of the room you could also find some ST users. Meanwhile, LinkoVitch (Jaguar coder) also arrived and we had some time to speak with him. In our room there was the Jaguar with the rotary controllers and a Tempest 2000 competition. Most people took this competition very seriously! Other people were playing Tempest 3000 on the Nuon 504 DVD player, this game is even more colorful than the Jaguar version and much harder to play, but you can see it's made by Yak, the person who wrote Tempest 2000 and Defender 2000 for the Jaguar. Later that evening we went to a restaurant to eat something and played some games until about 02:00 then we went to bed... The next morning most people where already awake and the atmosphere was already very good.
Some people of the MyAtari team say thumbs-up for this event!
People from different countries were there, even some people from Switzerland. It was nice to meet them again, this would make this JagFestUK meeting a success already. The most interesting thing that day was to see Robert Demming with his developer Jaguar and Alpine board. He showed some new software and showed me how powerful this development kit was. On this development kit he showed the latest software that is being developed for the Jaguar. It makes it possible to create a menu on a CD and load program ROMs into the Jaguar with a menu selection. At this point it only runs on development systems but the goal is to make it possible to run it on non-modified Jaguars. Robert also told me about his own Jaguar CD-creator project. A PC program that will make it easier to create Jaguar CDs. This has a lot of potential because making cartridges is very expensive. CD-ROMs are cheap and a perfect medium for home-brew game developers to release their products. After this conversation I decided to get myself such a development system soon. I walked around and saw Nick was happy because so many people were there. In this room I went to LinkoVitch and watched the little program demo he had written on the Jaguar. He also tested my Jaguar with BJL ROM and it turned out my cable was defective. I was very happy because the Jaguar was not broken. I had a very good talk with him and asked him a lot about the Jaguar. He explained some things and answered some technical questions I had about some coding on the Jaguar. I was very happy to see he enjoyed this event. Then it was my time to play Tempest 2000 on the Jaguar. It was a match between two members of the Dutch MNX team! I played against Fox-1 and it was a close finish but Fox-1 seems to be just a little better player than I. Then it was time to build the Air Cars network. Eight Jaguars were connected to each other with a ScatBox or CatBox interface. It seemed to be a little hard to get it running because not all players seemed to connect to the network. But after some tries and looking at the wires we managed to connect eight players in a working network. This was the first time I played Air Cars this way. We used the same network later to play BattleSphere but with only eight players, next time we need to make a 16-player network with BattleSphere, I think, this is also a very nice game but I need to practice because I didn't know how to use the controls in this game. Then after losing very badly at the Worms competion, a game that I never played before, I bought this game from Nick. Then I start to play it together with three other people and it seems to be a very cool fun game and very addictive. The rest of the time we had a lot of fun and talked to people. I had a very good time but we did play Worms a lot. Then we bought tickets from Nick and could win some great prizes like an Alpine board. I liked this so I bought some tickets to get a chance of winning this piece of hardware. The second and third prizes were also very cool. Fox-1 was lucky and won the fourth prize, the Robinson's Requiem CD-ROM game for the Falcon, he was very happy with it and told everyone that he now will buy a Falcon030 system to play this game... This was just a small impression of the complete event it was so cool that it is hard to write everything down. The next Jaguar events I will try to visit are: JagFest 2nd edition in France 25 - 26 October 2003. Euro-JagFest 2003 in Germany 22 November 2003. Another event is the ABBUC JHV meeting (8-bit), 25 October 2003. txg@myatari.net
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