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Zzyorxx II and Burnout Preview Released


Clint Thompson

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Nope. Two layers max. That's the limit. No need to speculate further *cough*sfdx*cough*laststrike*cough.

Uhm I better not run that then as it will damage the hardware by breaking the limits ;)

 

But seriously. Is it more complicated / resource hungry than on a bit plane system?

Edited by Ayreon
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I'm going to go with no. Bitplane/Chunky is irrelevant mostly. That is just how the data is encoded for the display hardware. Building the screen up is what matters, if anything bitplane based would be more faff as you'd potentially need to update multiple planes for pixel accurate parallax. Unless of course your parallax was only single plane :) and you had a reduced colour palette for those portions of the screen.

The above also kind of implies a frame-buffer is being used also. The Jag doesn't have such a thing (unless you decide to use one yourself), it's up to the programmer really. Ideally however on the Jag you will use the ObjectProcessor to layer your images on top of one another, complete with cutting out holes where necessary. This makes parallax on the Jag fairly trivial..

 

BUT! (isn't there always :) ), As the OP will fetch all the pixels per line that are defined in the object list, you can easily saturate the memory bandwidth of the Jag (even with that 64bit power :) ). If you have a couple of 8 bit images overlapping, no biggie, but as the number of overlapping images increases, so does the demand on the bus. Each line is painted over the previous line, so if you had an OP list with 100 squares all at 100x100 on the screen, the OP would read the memory for each of those simple squares one after the other. The list gives it no knowledge of the structure of the data being read in from the bitmap, so it has to read and interpret each one, each time. If you have one bitmap completely obscured by the next bitmap, the OP will render the 1st, and then the 2nd, even though you will only ever see the 2nd bitmap on the screen.

 

So it's "easy" to do parallax on the jag (you just change a few co-ords in a list), but there are pitfalls and gotchas.

 

Hopefully that makes sense and it's too much waffle :D

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3DO Crash And Burn info direct from those who worked on it:

 

Gregg A Tavares:

 

'The track is being

pulled off the CD. Originally the entire track was in memory but when the

enemies cars were added the frame rate went all the way down to 5fps. The

solution was to write a tool that would, for each view of the track, remove

all the polygons that are not seen. Since you can move left and right and

up and down (cockpit vs 3rd person) nothing is 'pre-calculated'

 

 

 

'The entire track is still in memory. The track consists of tons-o-polygons.

Far too many for any machine to display in real-time. On part of displaying

something in 3D is figuring out which parts you can see and which parts you

can't. For example, if you are driving down a race track and you are

looking forward you can't see behind you therefore you don't want to draw

the stuff behind you on the screen. So, you do some math to tell you what

parts of your 3D world you can actually see. This takes alot of time. In

fact it is probably this single biggest problem with anything that works in

3D. All programs deal with this in different ways. Flight Simulator does

it while it's running. It keeps a list of all the things you can see and as

you fly around it adds or removes things. To see it in action, fly in skew

mode and skew really fast and then stop. You will see different 3D parts

pop in one at a time as the program finds new things that are now in your

view.

 

On CnB we wrote a program that would 'drive' down the track and for each

section of the track it makes a list of all the parts that can actually be

seen. These 'lists of visible parts' are then stored in the CD and as you

drive down the track the 'list' for the part of the track you are currently

on is loaded. This makes it run faster because we don't have to do all the

calculations for which things are visible while you are racing.'

Thanks for the confirmation. Its really obvious when you know state of the art driving racing/Simulators. Grand Prix Legends was unplayable in Software mode, even on a 150 MhZ K5. NASCAR from Papy was not fully textured, neither Grand Prix 2.

Edited by agradeneu
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Of course, it's impossible , if the -ehm- "arguments" being used are "386 vs PS1" :lol:

 

Pure.

Comedy.

Gold!

 

The joke is on you my friend: In the mid 90s most common PCs were 286, 386 was a pretty good mid spec system. A friend got an 486 in 1994, very expensive. 486 were not very common because of high prices. You are absolutely CLUELESS.

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I use to tinker with and old "IBM 386" with Windows 3.1 around 95 or 96. Before than I use to do art work using Mario Paint and found that the Mario Paint tool-set was better than the Windows standard paint, but I learned a whole lot using both. Here's some work I did using Win3.1 paint using 16 colors and lots and lots of diskettes. I was dreaming up game designs even then, but never went all the way with it (too busy working); certainly won't let that happen again.

 

Enjoy. :)

post-3526-0-74831700-1535502125_thumb.jpg

post-3526-0-17004600-1535502471.jpg

post-3526-0-45608700-1535502500.jpg

Edited by philipj
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Thanks... :)

 

Here's a book I use to read almost religiously back in the mid 90s... I originally wanted to do comic book art at first; this book called "How to Draw The Marvel Way" really is a great starting point. It gives you all of the bare essentials for drawing anything. They also made a VHS I use to rent from the local library a lot. I'll post them both for reference sake.

 

 

https://archive.org/details/howtodrawcomicsm00stan?q=the+marvel+way

Edited by philipj
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I was casual artist drawing every so often... My epiphany about having some drawing skills was when my English teacher told me I had good penmanship when I first started writing in cursive before my teen years. I reason in my head if I can learn to write in cursive, I can learn to draw: I'm basically drawing lines and curves to make a fancy looking lettering thus I can apply the similar principles to drawing so I collected comics and started mimicking the art works just as I did with cursive letters. Latter on in life while taking an art class I learned that if you doodle everyday for three to five month, by the end of the year you will have basically come to a reasonable level of artistry especially if you start with a very good strong foundational knowledge. If you ever doodled in a note book on some level then the first step has already been taken, it's only a matter of consistent practice with a good knowledge base like "How To Draw the Marvel Way". The book is simple and was a great starting point for me back in the day; it's a bit dated today, but it gets the job done just fine.

 

I know things are going a little off topic, but I'll post one or two more image and end it there to get the topic back on track. The following image are the old art test from those commercials you see on TV; I call them the "Charlie Brown Test" because the guy who drew Charlie Brown comic strips took this test.

 

 

post-3526-0-79438500-1535512414_thumb.jpg

post-3526-0-80366400-1535512436_thumb.jpg

post-3526-0-70683600-1535512451_thumb.jpg

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And next to tick off the list:

 

3DO NFS:

 

From Eurogamer/Digital Foundary-

 

 

'As was becoming increasingly common at the time, The Need for Speed featured fully 3D environments and polygonal cars. The visuals are boxy by today's standards but at the time, it was an incredible sight to behold - a huge leap beyond the likes of Stunt Race FX, released on Super NES in the same year. The mountainous curves on Alpine can be seen twisting into the distance while the Coast offers up stunning beaches and steep overhangs - it was remarkably evocative for a racing game. Of course, there are many tricks happening beneath the surface - distant objects, for instance, are often represented via two-dimensional bitmaps rather than as 3D objects but the illusion was still effective.'

 

 

'The game featured three views - an interior cockpit view and two external options, with gameplay focused on a duel with a single other AI racer - cheesy 90s cliche, the 'X Man'. The cockpit view is presented with close facsimiles of original vehicle interiors and even a set of working gauges. Like the Test Drive games that preceded it, the transmission shifter also appeared on-screen dynamically every time you switched gears. In fact, when you first get behind the wheel, there isn't even a countdown - the game waits for you to shift into first gear before the race begins. It sets a precedent for a different kind of driving experience - despite its name, The Need for Speed was a slower-paced game. It's neither an arcade racer nor a simulation and in many ways, feels more like a precursor to Gran Turismo as a result.'

 

'The Need for Speed may look simplistic by today's standards, but Stunt Race FX released two months after NFS demonstrated just how far behind mainstream consoles were.

Now, as enjoyable as its races are considering the technology of the era, there is one significant flaw that holds back the game when played in retrospect - the frame-rate. The 3DO could never quite keep up with the action and The Need for Speed runs below 20fps with an average frame-rate hovering around 15fps. It feels incredibly sluggish by today's standards but when you stop and consider the competition, it feels more acceptable. Rival consoles were left with far less detailed racing games generally running at even slower frame-rates. Even on PC, most systems from this era were incapable of matching the prowess of the 3DO.'

Its somewhat shocking that an expert site like Digital Foundry is wondering why NFS was fully textured mapped but PC sims like Nascar and GP2 not. It's like not knowing the difference between Doom "3D" and Quake (1996). Latter one was regarded the first FPS game with fully 3D rendered Levels/worlds, and that was in 1996! Drawing some Polygons with textures does not make a game 3D. It's the interaction of the Player with a dynamic, fully rendered 3D world. Crash n Burn is just as "3D" as Road Blasters on the Lynx. Its draws polys, but it does not calculate Player interaction, movement and Physics in a dynamic 3D world. Its all preset and then rendered/drawn. Thats why TIE Fighter (PC) and Iron Soldier had no or just limited texture mapping. Thats why fully rendered 3D sim games had insane high System requirements and were running poorly even on a 486 or Pentium PC. LIke I stated before, X WIng vs TIE Fighter was performing miserably on an 133/150MHZ AMD K5.

When we finally got to play the Playstation port of Road Rash in 1996 we were severely disappointed by it. It was obvoius from the start that the game world was a looping rollercoaster pseudo 3D track, like we knew from 16 bit era games like Lotus Challenge. Or like Super Burn Out. The in game "Soundtrack" was pure trash, the great alt rock tracks were only played during FMV cutscenes. It was Pretty shocking how outdated that game was and how poorly it compared to older 16 bit racing games like StuntRace, Super Mario Kart or F Zero.

Edited by agradeneu
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  • 4 weeks later...

This is how my phone translated it:

 

Sequence memory, anecdote of Thierry Schembri:

---------------------------------------- -----------------------------

 

It must be said that if the development kit Falcon was a big joke, the one of the Jaguar did not was not less.

 

Before talking about it, I can not help but tell a new story about the attribution of the "developer licenses" of Falcon. Atari France, for a reason that I still can not explain (maybe the shortage of machines), had decided, before the launch of the Falcon for the general public, that would not developer Falcon who wants. In other words, it was necessary, to get the beautiful kit described by MetalSeb, to present a project that highlights the capabilities of the Falcon, if they did not please Atari (in this case Loic Duval & JM Cocheteaux ), the unfortunate developer would have the right to continue developing on his ST.

 

Not yet in the confidence of the little Atari world at the time, I had, unanswered, filed a file at Atari France to get a falcon preview with its valuable development kit. I did not want to confess myself defeated, and an acquaintance who managed to get approved developer (in fact, he just wanted a bike before premiere, but had sent a request with the letterhead of his company, Thomson, which, as if by chance, had opened some doors for him ...), I go to Atari France with him.

Luckily, it was the Christmas holidays, nobody was there, a secretary receives us. We present him the mail of Atari France like what my friend was a developer, she hesitates "I can not do anything, there is no one" "we come from afar expres", "good, alright", she comes back with the Falcon and its SDK. So I try "what? There is error, we had to have two", "oh well?", And immediately, she comes back with a second bike ) I reassure everyone, we had to pay, and very expensive to extra, because the miserable doc was not given! All that to say that at Atari France, to change, we were extremely strict!

 

Later, at Retour2048, after seeing the prototype of the Jaguar preview, we did everything to make us a developer and get a Jaguar development kit. After many parliaments and files of all kinds, we have finally obtained the coveted object. We were the first in Europe to have a Jaguar at home, it did not have its final carcass and joypad yet and there were still a lot of straps on the motherboard. Paradoxically, this pre-series machine will reveal to be much more reliable than the one we were given in replacement a few months later. The development kit cost us 50000 francs. It included a Jaguar (on which Rodolphe installed

a "Bi-TOS", an alpine board (cartridge emulation board connected to a computer via the parallel port) and ... the development kit.

 

Those who have already seen the development kit for Saturn and Playstation, released soon after, can forget what they believe to be a development kit. The Atari SDK contained a 50-page binder and ... a floppy disk. Atari had worked hard on it, it showed: the software kit was running on Atari ST and included: a command line assembler: MadMac, a linker command line: ALN, a debugger 68000 ADB (I think) and a debugger GPU (GDB), both in command line too.

Obviously, the command line with the gem is not great, so they had generously put on the floppy: command.prg, an interpreter of

orders, we would not have been in black on a white background, we would have thought on a PC of 1981.

The name MadMac said something may be something here, it was an assembler made by Atari for the kit development of 800xl & others.

Moreover, it was enough to type in the middle of the .6502 source and hop, we could make assembler 6502, Apple II lovers will appreciate.

The assembler was rudimentary, unusable, it was quickly replaced by Devpac by tinkering a little linker. The debugger was gorgeous, all in command-line text mode, he was losing control of the GPU all the time and was answering us when he was asked to post the contents of the registers: "Did the GPU died?" . Funny at first, less after ...

Some examples on paper, like the management of the list of objects of the object processor, made in Atari, puffed about 40% of the vbl (only to generate the list !!), redone in GPU, as if by magic, more than barely a line ...

The advertised performance of the machine was not at the rendezvous, benches given to the press that came out of the implausible results were pipelike (in fact, true, but did not correspond to anything usable, example: a number of pixels displayed by impressive seconds, and for good reason: in 2 bit and taking all the bandwidth!, graphics resolutions impossible to display because actually the Jaguar could display it, except that 2 MB of RAM was not enough to do it, sound capabilities presented as extraordinary, when in fact, unlike other consoles where there were x independent sound channels, there was only two channels (stereo what), all the mixing and the generation of the heights of the sounds were made to the hand, like a soundtrack on Atari STf),worst of all was the bandwidth problem, all CPUs were connected on the same bus (slow) and had to share access times with tricks and

hacks. In short, I will not go back on the Jaguar design errors, I would be too long, I prefer to remember the rest .

 

--------------

Note Rodolphe:

Yes and the sound was made to the DSP and the poor should also manage the famous network which was also bugged at the FIFO HARD chip obliging to capture each byte under penalty of losing it!

In short the famous network has never been really good with this bug!

And there was no redesign of the flea chip!

By the way, ditto for the GPU that had certain instructions that passed

not ! It was necessary to avoid them with other instructions ... [...] A little like the countries of the USSR which recovered in the 80s buggy CPUs from the west and managed to avoid the bugs to run programs. above !

In short, had to be very strong and cunning ..

-----------------

Thierry:

 

After making a few small programs to understand how the craft worked, we wanted to get down to business, and here we started to row serious. We were the only developers in France, nobody knew the machine, at Atari France, total silence ... I remember spending whole nights trying to display something without understanding why it did not work, nothing in the some leaves of the doc. One night, with Didier (the famous Checksum of the Equinox group, who had made the first soundtrack editor on Atari ST), we were trying

to get a sound out of the beast. The two lines of the doc were useless, and no one at Atari France could inform us.

Fortunately, we had recovered a mail with lots of fax numbers at Atari Corp, USA. We made a letter called "poor Jaguar developers in dire straits" and we asked for help to get a beep from the machine, we then faxed it to all the numbers we could find. A few hours later, a certain Leonard Tramiel answered us by giving us the information (that he had to get from someone else, because the same Leonard promised us a complete doc on the sound for the Jaguar, doc he was realizing, I'm still waiting ...).

 

The galley went on for a few months until Atari, finally aware (what was happening to them?) That they would not get away with the development kit, told Brainstorm to complete it. To do it again. I admit that Brainstorm did a great job from that moment on. They threw the crap from Atari and passed the PC development kit. Done a real multi-processor assembler with lots of compiler directives, a real debugger that worked (even if it was not easy to debug RISC cpu as we could not put a breakpoint on these CPUs, I had to make a hack, in fact a macro that looped in 68000 and scanned a memory address, and when I wanted to put a breakpoint on the GPU or the DSP,

JP foo

MOVE r1, r10

and the move was executed, I let you think what this kind of code gives:

MOVE r1, r2

MOVE r2, r3

nothing says that r3 will contain r1 (in fact, there is little chance that r3 contains r1), it will depend on where it is in its decoding when it will execute the other line. So basically, it was almost necessary to interleave two programs into one if we did not want to lose performance by doing, as many were doing:

MOVE r1, r2

NOP

MOVE r2, r3

NOP

Philosophical question ... But it's on the beginning we wonder why it does not work )

 

Despite Brainstorm's job, it was too late, they were doing a job that should have been done well before, before distributing anything, because when Brainstorm took the baby in hand, many people had received the kit Jaguar, and a lot of people quickly put it in a cupboard saying "but what is this shit ??" is how big boxes of video games did not want to lose time with this machine, the only relentless were often small studios of development, saying, wrongly, that they had the market for them and that they would be able to make a place in the sun with this machine ...

Error. ...

 

Too late, Atari did not understand that we do not realize a development kit DURING the development of games on the machine. Brainstorm was releasing a new version of compilers almost every day to fix bugs ... I happened to get stuck on a bug that was actually a compilation problem, the compiler was generating shit, go find that ... In the end, we did not know anymore: was it our fault? a bug of the compiler? a bug CPU (because there were: random RAM central jumps, some instructions bugged, unable to run code in RAM central, etc ...)? Stressing ... It is not surprising that many have given up.

 

All this is just fun, because one day Atari realized that there was competition in the console market. That's for sure, they were not going to win the game if people like Sega and Sony continued to sell their machines, something had to be done! And here we see that at Atari, there are strategists in marketing and business.

Atari's answer was clear: 1) stop the development of 2D games, 2) put pressure on 3D games 3) Add a CDROM to the machine 4) Launch the Jaguar II. 4 decisions, 4 mistakes: Atari stopped the development of 2D games like Shen's shoot'em up, I saw it, I played it, it was extraordinarily well done and far surpassed what was being done at the time ... She put pressure to make 3D games more or less crappy like Fight For Life, because, says one of the guys at Atari Corp "we have to do 3D to compete with the playstation ", but the Jaguar was a great machine for 2D, it broke the neo geo, she could have had his career, instead of trying to do the 3d with his poor blitter, that did they really hope? the kid who sees on one side fight for life and on the other side Toshinden, you think he's going to ask the father of the Christmas a Jaguar ... The addition of the CD was a big joke, I'm just coming back afterwards, as for the Jag II, without money to develop it, it was to run to failure.

-----------------------

Rodolphe:

I specify, it is the box mounted by the guys of BURN OUT that VX signed

with the CORP! 1 MF including 50% for each ... (VX and SHEN), so that we could earn money with the jag

------------------------ -

Thierry:

 

The Jaguar CD was the most grandiose of ideas. Atari no longer had a radish when they made this decision, we quickly realized. The Jaguar CD was an audio cd connected to the jaguar endpoint bus. They bragged to put 700 MB or more I do not know more on their record, and for

because it was not in ISO9660 format but it was an audio CD beast. The JagCD development kit was the pinnacle of achievement, I thought I had seen everything with their previous SDK, it was my estimate their capabilities.

I was busy at the time of the conversion of a PC game on Jaguar, Commander Blood, the sequel to the ark of Captain Blood, the famous game on ST. When I saw the JagCD SDK, I told myself that there was not going to be a lot of games coming out on this platform! It was necessary to develop on Jaguar CD: a PC, a jaguar, an alpine board, a macintosh, a hard external scsi and a falcon (do not raccoon), once all this mess on his desk, we have feeling of being in control of an airbus.

The Jaguar was rebricolée, a cable escaped. Then from memory, this cable went into the falcon cartridge port that was connected to the outer disk scsi. Another cable came out of the box scsi and went on the pc on which a parallel cable was connected and returned to the alpine board connected to the jaguar. aaaaahhh! The macintosh was used to generate cinepak sequences.

 

To impress the crowd, demos were needed on Jaguar CD, so we had a cd with a cinepak extract of the Star Wars.

Well, useless but good. Cinepak was a video codec developed by an external box. He was shooting on Saturn and PC, Atari had bought a super expensive license for the Jag. Good idea, except that the cinepak bookstore was nearly 800 KB in memory and mobilized 100% DSP (and all bandwidth incidentally). When we have only 2 MB of RAM, we make a test, and we quickly forget this joke to make his own video codec, what we had done for Commander Blood. Still missed Atari ((

 

The Falcon served as "emulator cdrom" for the jaguar, it goes without saying that it worked only with a specific type of hard drive scsi that, of course, broke down quickly. Of course, the model was not sold in France, that does not matter, it was not until two weeks that Atari Corp returns one.

 

The documentation was bloated, as usual, 5 pages (which were completed later) and roll youth!

It must be said that we did not need much documentation since in fact the API (a big word) CDROM was made up of two or three functions: go to a track, position itself on the disc and read. Ah guys, it changes a file management! it's calm.

We saw there the DIY, it was purely and simply an audio cd neither more nor less with a port io to read the bytes returned by the head of reading. Hop finished.

 

I had to convert a game consisting of about 400 files, it was out of the question to rewrite the game to fit the characteristics or absence of features of the Jaguar (especially since the game was a 200-page pad in assembler 386). So I asked Normari Kowalevski, Jaguar's development manager at Atari Corp, a very nice guy, who had a nice shitty stick, and who, for the record, will end up at Sony , so I asked him how

to manage files on the Jag CD Gentlemen, ladies who develop, hang on:

1) Know where is in hours: minutes: seconds the file on the cd

2) position the head on it

3) read the number of bytes wanted

Simple? uh no, if we follow this reasoning, it does not work, the head of the reader is imprecise, we miss suddenly on the beginning and the end of the file.

Thin, solution?

1) frame his file with a very identifiable pattern

2) position "a little" before the desired position

3) read a little more than expected

4) search in the read buffer the beginning and the end of its file in the middle of the garbage

Wow! cool ! but uh it still does not work? no ? if, oh excuse us, we forgot to put a hardware crc system for reading, in fact there

has one, but it does not always work. Slim. Solution?

1) Make a checksum of his file

2) Add the checksum at the end

3) As long as checksum not good, repeat the operation described previously.

Ah, if there is an error in reading the checksum? Oh, you

ask a lot ...

 

We laughed a while with our hh: mm: ss praying the sky that we do not have to put a larger file than expected that would shift everything and that would require us to recalculate the entire table, obviously it happened once, twice, three times, and we decided that they were fed up. So we started to write a mini OS for the Jaguar: an API for the sound, one for interrupts, the CPU object, and most importantly, a file system with FAT and all the toutim. In fact, we did the job that Atari should have done for a long time ...

 

It was said that Atari would appreciate the job, especially since it was thought to make this API available to all developers. What do you think Atari said ?? We were shouted by Atari Corp !!! Truthfully, they told us in essence that it was not our job to do that (who then?) And that because of our loss of time on something that was not essential (even luxury), Commander Blood would be late, and that was unacceptable. It was indeed, because Atari put the key under the door and stopped the Jaguar before CB was released!

 

Go one last anecdote before finishing, Atari organized from time to time international meetings for Jaguar developers. I went to one of them (with Rodolphe among others) in London. There, the developers, sitting in a meeting room, asked questions to

the dev makers from the USA. A guy asks a sharp question about the blitter. Silence, consultation, one of the guys from Atari speaks up and starts a confusing explanation, stammering, even me, who was far from mastering the blitter of the Jag, I realized that he told bullshit. In the middle of a sentence, he stops, and seeks.

------------------

Rodolphe:

YES! the guy was Bill Rebok (I'm not sure about spelling),

responsible ATARI USA and US developers I cross ..

One of the bridges of the body ...

--------------------

Thierry:

At that moment, Jeff Minter (l The author of Tempest, dressed in his inseparable sweater with a llama head, gets up, goes to the platform and gently pushes the guy from Atari's house and starts the explanation again, clear and answers the question. Atari's, it seemed like con Minter was applauded at the end of his explanation ... It gives a bit of an idea of ​​their competence ...

--------------- --------------

Rodolphe:

Yes, we were a 100aine in the room and there were quite a few new ones who had just signed on the jag (German and English), following a show the days before in London (which one was in April).

On the 100aine, we were the only French with 2 guys from Ubi soft who were lost at the jag ... We ate with them at the table (not great food and we were still hungry): 5-star hotel like 3 crap in the 'plate, it does not feed that! at the edge of the swimming pool with you opening ... ahah atari knew in feast in the eyes (the blow of star wars on CD in cinepak is of the same kind!).

I remember that Jeff was cheered when he got up to go take the microphone, a real star this guy !! It was impressive !! Really !

In the front row, there was the guys from Alien Vs Predator too ...

The CD player jag was plugged without its plastic wrapping, on the jag ...

I said it was a confidential meeting, but everything was confidential atari, especially the news, as if we were journalists in a secret society ..

When I think about it, they had a lot of success with the ST. Nowadays

jokes like that have no chance ... What is funny is the parallel to be made between the Corp and all these rotten dealers that we had in France that were not better: funny too !

 

-------------------------------

Voila

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Yes, that text is pretty well-known in the french Jaguar community. It says a lot about what kind of relationship Atari had with the developers (and it's pretty funny as well).

I think a fair criticism of the English press at least, is despite repeated looks at the Jaguar, the focus is always on UK/USA side of things.

 

We rarely get to hear of what it was like trying to deal with Atari France for example.

 

It did make for very entertaining reading.

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The second post on this page is interesting too: it tells how Atari's official distributor in France invested in a lot of money in advertising the Jaguar, had to wait a long time to get the hardware from Atari (while customers were cancelling preorders), and ended up with significant debts. And the only response from Atari was "we never asked you to believe in the product."

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The second post on this page is interesting too: it tells how Atari's official distributor in France invested in a lot of money in advertising the Jaguar, had to wait a long time to get the hardware from Atari (while customers were cancelling preorders), and ended up with significant debts. And the only response from Atari was "we never asked you to believe in the product."

 

Hahaha... that's straight cold blooded.

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It was said that Atari would appreciate the job, especially since it was thought to make this API available to all developers. What do you think Atari said ?? We were shouted by Atari Corp !!! Truthfully, they told us in essence that it was not our job to do that (who then?)

No thanks or anything.

 

Head right up their ass.

Edited by JagChris
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Even 20 years later in FB conversations they still have this limiting mindset. They always talk about the outside forces that were against them. And while that may be true, there is no self-reflection on their part. No 'well in hindsight we could have done this different or that better...' None of that.

Edited by JagChris
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Even 20 years later in FB conversations they still have this limiting mindset. They always talk about the outside forces that were against them. And while that may be true, there is no self-reflection on their part. No 'well in hindsight we could have done this different or that better...' None of that.

 

Did you work directly with Atari? I'm guessing nope. Then you just don't know.

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