dgrubb

I wonder if they could have adapted some of their own arcade titles in compilations as well.  It would have been great to see the Star Wars games on the Jaguar.

I think the Jaguar could have handled some of the Atari Games polygon titles like STUN Runner and T-MEK. Also, the Jaguar is well suited to super scalers as demonstrated by Super Burnout and the silky smooth Atari Karts. It would have been great to see something like OutRunners, Galaxy Force II and Power Drift on the big cat and the Jaguar could've handled them.

Jurassic Park SNES. I thought it was a great blend of outside over the top action and inside pseudo 3D adventure.
 

Agreed on Black ICE/White Noise, and maybe Freelancer. I would have liked to see Dracula: The Undead on there as well. It was coming but was cancelled. The previous two I mentioned were as well, of course.

A sequel of AvP for the Jag CD would be a fine addition.
 
A elaborate version of Dungeon Master would be a dream for the Jag. A D&D RPG, settled in the Forgotten Realms or any other RPG! This genre would give the Jag CD a honorable right to exist.

Probably, if handled carefully. Some of the huge success of the Amiga in the UK is frequently attributed to the timely release of the Batman pack, which bundled the A500 with the game adaptation just as the movie was at the peak of its blockbuster hype. However, knowing Atari, they would have ended up with the license for Howard The Duck.
 
Although, I hasten to add that I picked the Lawnmower Man because of the gameplay mechanics and the aesthetic rather than the weight of the movie. It could have been Cyberpunk Weirdness 2000 and it could have still been a great game for the Jaguar.
 
 
I would love to have seen something like in the catalog. Black ICE\White Noise?

Thanks for posting. I started reading the Amiga one and the presentation is gorgeous. I'll probably pick up the dead-tree format version later on.

Lawnmower Man is a great choice, and it brings up an interesting idea.  Would more movie tie-ins have helped the Jag library?  It would have been an easy way to bring more "familiar" content to the platform.  Maybe with a focus on the horror or sci-fi realm.  Example:  a dark-themed Bladerunner game.

------------------------- OFFER EXPIRED / NO LONGER FREE---------------------------
Sadly time is up so I edited the thread title to no longer reflect FREE    IF ONLY I HAD SEEN THEM SOONER. 
 
The Story Of Commodore Amiga in Pixels
https://fusionretrobooks.com/collections/pdf/products/the-story-of-the-commodore-amiga-in-pixels_pdf
 
The History Of Ocean Software
https://fusionretrobooks.com/collections/pdf/products/pdf-the-history-of-ocean-software
 
The Story Of U.S Gold
https://fusionretrobooks.com/collections/pdf/products/pdf-the-story-of-us-gold

The Jaguar library receives a fair amount of criticism, and I don't think it's all unwarranted, either for wasting the system's potential with 68K based ports or for attempting to compete with later systems like the PS on their own terms. In contrast, I feel a game like Tempest 2000 works because, beyond just being a fun game concept, Minter was very careful to craft his implementation to the system: lots of pixel shattering effects, abstract polygon 3D, transforms and rotations etc etc.
 
So, what other games, or game concepts, would have suited the special abilities and limitations of the platform?
 
My vote goes to The Lawnmower Man:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p64uiKnhAQM
 
It's a mix of platforming levels and 3D zones. I think it'd work on the Jaguar because the movie established an aesthetic which followed what the popular impression of what virtual realty was going to be like, rather than how it actually ended up being. That is, the movie tries to portray a virtual world as an extension to reality, rather than mimicking the real-world with real textures and shapes so it's all very polygonal and abstract. It's exactly the kind of 3D which could have been achieved well on the Jaguar with its proclivity towards things like gouraud shading. Also, the platform levels include a lot of pixel shattering effects (enemies and objects don't explode conventionally, they shatter, because ... umm ... stuff is like, all digital now, or something?) and would have benefited from embellishment of colours and scrolling effects.

I found one last night, but decided it'd be a fun project so got a start on making my own.
 

Perhaps this is clever marketing, but it looks like a Hyperkin employee showed off a prototype portable N64 that he shouldn't have:

Appreciate the feedback. Thankfully I have a very fast machine for rendering images and since the resolution is so low on the Jaguar anyways, that certainly helps cut back on required time as well. Hopefully after I fix a few things and add a wave of 25-35 fish per wave, I can have a single level playable preview/demo for everyone to try out after the holidays.

The artwork looks really nice and makes it look like you've put far more than ~20 hours into it.

General Weasely!     Oh man, that's good.
 
I think they tried to correct a lot of that in this film.
 
<SPOILER>
 
Ren is transformed in this movie.  Get rid of the mask.  Get rid of the emo.  Get rid of snoke and let him be the bad guy we want him to be.  It will be much more interesting going forward IMO. 

I might go see it, but will probably wait for the home release.
 
I wasn't very impressed by The Force Awakens which felt a bit by-the-numbers and between CGI-muppet, General Weasley and Emo-Vader I didn't find the villains credible or interesting. They completely undermine Ren in his first scene by allowing Poe to poke fun at him in a self-aware forth wall breaking way ("So who talks first? You talk first? I talk first?").

I've been kind of here and there on development direction regarding which game I can manage to complete first but this one has the most amount of progress in a very short period of time and is just one of those genre of games that I keep wanting to go back to and work on because it's fun.
 
Have only spent about 20 hours on it total so far but you can move around, eat some fish, progress through levels with background/music changes, etc. so just a very early limited preview of the work-in-progress:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjtzJ2KTlrg

Hello, Atari IO!
 
I'm a long-time fan of retro computing, but pretty new to Atari. I don't have very much in the way of personal experiences with Atari or arcades, as many here do, in fact I suck at playing video games, but came to it through another route. I'm an embedded software developer so I enjoy learning about different platforms, CPU architectures and clever electronics.
 
I got started on a project to emulate a 2600 in a micro-controller (currently lacking a TIA, but the 6507 mostly works ) and came to really appreciate the elegance of it considering the cost restrictions in place, along with the creativity of the developers tasked with creating engaging games.
 
I'm also very interested in the Jaguar. Despite its Hindenburg-esque history it remains a fascinating console: custom ASICs, weird co-processor architecture, love it. I hope to learn a lot more about it (I decided to sign up after coming across the thread with the JagDuo PCB and listening to a few of Shinto's game-by-game podcasts) and maybe even enough to be able to try my hand at a bit of homebrew hardware and software.
 
Cheers,
Dave.

Wow. Great collection, thanks!

Wow. Great collection, thanks!

To celebrate Atari's 40th anniversary, I decided to completely update my Old Era ROMs collection with tons of new info: release years, software houses, distributors, programmers, etc.

An awful lot of research has gone into this one (many thanks to all who provided me the correct information), so make sure you download this version, because it's quite a step forward from V13.

Ofcourse, the stripped down PAL and NTSC Harmony Cart ROM set is included as well.

If you want to add or correct any .bin file info, please do this with 100% verified documentation only, and I will be more than happy to include this into V15.

Enjoy:
http://www.atarimania.com/rom_collection_archive_atari_2600_roms.html

8)

Atari forum,
 There came a time when Al ALcorn had other things he wanted to do at Atari so
 he hired Lloyd Warman to take his place as the VP of engineering.  Lloyd had
 been an EE at Ampex so he would often become involved in hardware design and
 debug.

 When we were making some version of "Cocktail Pong" there was an assembly
 problem on the production floor.  I happened to be standing near him when he
 heard about it and he asked me to go with him to look at the problem.  There
 was some part that wasn't mounted good enough.  Someone suggested that we glue
 it and I said bad idea because glue will get all over and it's never a good
 idea to use glue in a production environment.  I volunteered to design a
 bracket to fix it.  On the way back to the lab Lloyd said "you will be my
 troubleshooter".

 He and I got along very well at work and socially.  We would go out to dinner
 and visit each others houses.  I got to know his wife and kids and he got to
 know mine.

 It was typical that a game company would only qualify one distributor in each
 city.  But crafty Nolan Bushnell set up a separate game company called "Kee
 Games" that seemingly had no connection to Atari. It was run by Joe Keenan a
 neighbor of Nolan.  The "unqualified" distributors were more than happy to buy
 games from Kee thinking they were "sticking it" to Atari.

 One day someone showed me an article in the paper that revealed the fact that
 Kee Games was actually a wholly owned subsidiary of Atari so there was no
 reason to keep the two companies separate so Kee Games was shut down and many
 of their managers and engineers came to Atari.

 After a heated meeting one day with managers from both Atari and Kee Games
 Lloyd told me someone from Kee Games fired one of Atari's managers.  Lloyd had
 attempted to defend the fired manager but the same person from Kee turned to
 him and said "you're fired too".

 Lloyd went to Nolan Bushnell later that day and complained that there was no
 reason for him to have been fired.  Nolan agreed and said he had a side
 project that Lloyd could do until he found a new job.

 Next post:  BUILDING ARCADES

Jerryd
 

Thanks for posting this, the Metroid series constitute most of my desert island games.

Sure! It was a kind of research project, really. The schematics for the 2600 are very simple looking (three ICs!) so I figured it would be possible for somebody to understand it top-to-bottom. If you can write a good emulator of a system then you can reasonably claim to have a good knowledge of it. I'm also interested in uCs and the idea of fitting an entire console into the computational power of a single IC or two tickled me a bit.
 
Having said that, embedded stuff is usually more I/O bound so raw processing power is less of an issue than some other architecture characteristics (see below).
 
There are a few related and experimental projects on my GitHub:
 
HiFive-2600: https://github.com/dgrubb/HiFive1-2600
 
My first attempt. This is based around a new RISC-V uC which is very performant and can be clocked at a massive 300MHz+ so I thought it would be a great platform. Unfortunately, it only has 16kb of scratch memory, supplemented by an external SPI flash chip. The SPI flash is memory mapped, but the access time is comparatively slow and causes a cache flush. The result is that a lot of the massive processing power is wasted unless you can fit the whole program in 16kb, which isn't going to be the case here. Still, on this version you can load a cartridge and step through each processor tick, while printing the 6507 state on a console.
 
STM32-RIOT-6502: https://github.com/dgrubb/STM32-RIOT-6502
 
Similar to the above on a slower uC, but one with enough RAM to fit the whole program and run at full-speed. I can just about get the 6507/memory/cartridge state emulation to execute within a 1.19MHz period, enough to run those parts at the the same speed as a real 2600. The TIA is out of the question though, as it uses an NTSC colour clock of 3.58MHz. As with the other project you can step through the emulation state, or run it at full-speed. The TIA has a very simple state machine, but the timing requirements are quite strict. To finish this project off and get some actual video out going I'm planning on implementing the TIA in a separate uC. That's a work-in-progress for the time being.
 
I was pretty chuffed just to get the 6507 emulation (mostly ) working, probably quite a few bugs and mistakes which will need correcting which I'll find as I flesh out the unit tests. It got the point where I was seeing 6502 op-codes in the license plates of other cars during my commute!