Starcat

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-atari-st-and-the-creative-people-vol-2#/ Last day! At 98% I really hope this gets funded.

I just talked to the author and the video wasn't at all meant to cause hurt feelings. He himself was active in the demoscene back in the day and while he doesn't consider the Atari mouse to be very good, the video was meant as an artists expression. A way to show the disruptive and creative spirit of the scene. It's obvious that the book is full of love for Atari and the community.

To be honest, I just liked the project. That video on the other hand, I don't see why somebody would do that. That's not really good promotion among the Atari scene. However the book seems to be promising. Only 4 days left.

I'm in contact with Tursi. Seems to be a rare problem, possibly damaged as it didn't have the power mod yet.

Hello folks, it's been a while that I used my skunk v2 to upload roms to cart space. For some reason the erase screen (rainbow bars on the Jag) seems to go on forever. On the PC end using jiffi, it doesn't get pase the erase part which is supposed to take about 9 secs. I'm using windows 7 and I have a usb hub only for the skunk connected to a usb 2 port, so it should get enough power. Any ideas what might be wrong or how to fix this? Cheers

Thanks guys! @82-T/A: Making yourself "known" is pretty much pointless, too. The individual has no value to the big companies, they want exchangeable workers. The well known developers of today all worked in small teams and on projects they loved. Today that is only possible as an indie. In writing as well as indie game development, a lot of the time it's best to have a dayjob and make something great in your spare time. Sturmwind for Dreamcast is a good example. My goal is always to improve my skill and make something I enjoy. In writing that works well for me. At the end of each year I have a decent stack of new stories, some published and one or two novel drafts.

Hello folks, I'm Starcat from the Jag forum and I just discovered this: The Atari ST and The Creative People vol. 2 Digital entrepreneurs review their demoscene past. A narrative art book with 90s pixel-creativity. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-atari-st-and-the-creative-people-vol-2#/ I think this is amazing and needs support! Cheers

Hello folks, I still get emails to this day about Eerievale. The old pages are not online anymore, but in case you wonder what happened to the project, I'll sum it up again. In 2003 the first proof-of-concept of the engine was shown. The first story draft was done in 2005, along with a trailer and an updated demo. Back then I had no professional game experience, just passion for my hobby. Programming the Jag, writing and making little games. So I studied game design, talked to publishers and tried to get into the industry. In 2010 I had my degree and was soon pretty disillusioned about working at a game studio. They took my ideas and got financed, I got nothing, not even a job. Fortunately those ideas were not related to my personal projects, but it was tough anyway. So I tried to make Eerievale on my own with a few friends. Some progress was made, I went as far as I could from my savings. There was no way I could make a living in games at the time, so I switched to web and application development and started an apprenticeship as IT specialist. During that time the work on the game went into hibernation. I tried to revive it, but I had to realize it was too big for me to handle alone. The publisher who was originally interested in 2005 turned out to be so small that he had no more resources than I had myself and couldn't help. After moving to a different city and looking for a new job in 2013 I tried one final time. I talked to different game studios to see if they cared to team up. Turned out one studio was very kind, they actually knew the publisher I was in contact with and didn't recommend working with him. I actually ended up working for the studio on different projects. It was great fun at first, I made friends and I could finally use my "old school" experience and gain some up to date commercial game experience. Sometimes I tried to pitch Eerievale, but knowing suggestions ended up in a folder for later reference and not actually get done, I kept things vague. The studio prefered doing contract work for publishers. About the time I realized they would never be right for what I wanted to do, things went real bad. The team was slaving away to the breaking point, we were not paid in a while, it's a typical games industry story of today. In short: things didn't work out. I quit and decided to work in software development instead. The first big chunk of Eerievale development time went into the technology and learning how to develop games in the first place. However over the years most time acually went into writing the stories which would shape the game world, the characters and their stories. As anyone in game development can tell you, making a proof-of-concept demo and working on technology is not the same as making a game. At the time over ten years had passed, since the name Eerievale was first mentioned, but I didn't have much of a game to show. Just some demos, concepts and a lot of stories. Making the Eerievale game would have required funding and a team to be successful. I couldn't find either and the game was too big to make on my own. So I decided a few years ago, it would be best, to move on and make something different. Here I am now: I still enjoy the Jaguar even if I'm mostly silent these days and I still enjoy making games. Most of all I love writing and that is fortunately a craft I can persue without much resources or a team behind me. My latest book project is coming along nicely and it is sort of a spinoff of the Eerievale story or a spiritual successor if you will. All seven steampunk detective stories of my book are now written. Each story is a seperate case for the protagonist "Robert Fuchs" (Robert Fox) and can be considered a short novel of its own, but with some connections to the other stories. Next step is editing which will be a lot of work, but I believe it will be well worth it. First reader feedback was very good so far. The whole book will be a decent paperback and a treat for anybody who likes this sort of thing: Detective stories, Steampunk, the supernatural, puzzles, a bit of humor here and there. Also the world of Eerievale. These stories feel very much like I would have wanted the game to feel. This book is probably the closest thing to it. It's only German for now and scheduled for release in Autumn 2018. Let's see how this goes. If there is enough interest, who knows maybe my publisher would consider an english translation or something. Maybe the protagonist should be called Robert Fox then? Cheers

@SainT: It's good that you look into it, but focus on the more important features for now. @orpheuswaking: The game project was stopped years ago, sorry. Now back to topic.

I'm very much looking forward to this. If there was a list, I'd also like to sign up. If there is a USB connector to transfer data, is it theoretically possible to support usb devices like a keyboard or mouse when it's running a game? (and not connected to a pc?)

@phoenixdownita: I know it's a bit tricky in English. Actually the english word fox comes close, you just put the the u sound of luck in there instead of the o. Then again, I believe there must be a few people who actually have that name and live in the states. I wonder how they handle it. @NostalgiaECS: Unless you find a way for the Jag to playback books, you're out of luck. Making this a game has been tried with Eerievale and I'm afraid it didn't work out.

Thanks guys! Actually I'm still very much into retro gaming, but I don't have as much time as I used to. So I'm not reading much of the forums these days, mostly getting the news by following fellow developers. Sadly I don't have much time to develop games next to my day job. I focus most of my energy on my writing these days. I'm very excited of finally getting part of the Eerievale universe to readers in the form of my steampunk-detective stories which are about supernatural investigator 'Robert Fuchs'. (German language only) But I still enjoy making games if I get around to it. At a very slow pace though. Don't get your hopes up. I'm just doing this for fun, but if I get something cool done Jag or otherwise, I'll share it on my site.

Hey everybody, let me begin by saying how cool it is that so many familiar names are still around and the community is going strong. It has almost been ten years since I visited the forum and community on a daily basis. This won't change in the future, I just dropped by to let you know what I've been up to if you're curious about that. I'm not active anymore, but I've always been an AtariAge member. So I figured I'd drop by for this post. From time to time I still read news about the Jag and see bits and pieces. I love hearing what the folks of Jagware and Reboot are up to. Keep up the great work! So what have I been up to? I've worked in the games industry as programmer, writer and game designer for a while, then I switched to web application programming to earn my bread. So have I traded in my dreams of creating exciting characters, worlds and stories for the average office job? Not quite, that job is just a security net. I've found my profession in writing popular fiction in the genres: speculative fiction, steampunk and thriller. I still love playing games and sometimes I toy around with game ideas or do some writing for games, but my day-job doesn't leave much time for that. Stories are what lead me to game development in the first place and which is one reason why I love adventure games. The thing about storytelling in games is that it's an abstraction from the written word and therefore takes a lot more resources. It takes me a lot more time to program and design a game situation to tell a story, compared to if I wrote it as a short story or fleshed it out as a novel. When I do get around to making games they have a retro-feel, but are on modern platforms and not the Jaguar, sorry. If you still care about my projects despite the fact that they're not for the Jag, take a look at my blog sometime (http://www.larshannig.com). Right now there isn't much activity, but you can still find my Jag games in the download section. More importantly if you know how to read German you may want to take a look at my author page (http://www.larshannig.de) or my facebook author page (http://www.facebook.com/lars.hannig). I'm currently working on a book project set in the same world as Eerievale. It's a spin-off which contains several steampunk detective stories about 'Robert Fuchs'- investigator in supernatural cases and it's as close as you may get to experience that world. The release is scheduled for late 2018 and it's in German only (unless an english publisher is interested ). Have a great time! Lars

That's awesome news regarding CD audio! After being out of the loop for so long, I suppose it was him. He didn't say much. Just asked if I still had the lib. Not sure if he wanted to use it for anything or was just curious.

Hello folks! Jeff Nihlean recently contacted me if I still had the SPU Lib by JRob. As the weblinks here are broken, I'll just post the files here. It's still the only working lib with cd audio support that I know of. I wish somebody would implement CD audio support in the awesome current audio libs (like Linkos work). Maybe this code is a starting point. Enjoy! Cheers, Lars jcdlib.zip spulib105.zip

This release is awesome! Keep up the great work!!

I just dropped by to see that I missed all this. This whole rootkit topic is really sad to hear, but somehow things like this always seem to happen in the Jag community. It really sounds somebody went through a lot of trouble for it. I can relate how you feel. Personally I've seen so much crap happen in the community and experienced so much flaming and lies being spread as thank you for years of hard work on my side, that it took all the fun out of it. And fun was, what it all was about to me. So while I never left, I decided to focus on what's important to me. Making games for the fun of it. It's always just a few bad apples that ruin a great thing for everybody and I didn't want that to happen. Maybe you should take some time off and work on projects for the fun of it and return with something cool when you're ready. Great to hear that you decided to touch the release again and give the remaining copies to people who appreciate it.

Congrats on the release. It's great to see more cart games, looks nice!

You are welcome Actually the releases of Ocean Depths, JagMIND: Bomb Squad and Lost Treasures all include CD lables for printing inlcuded in the archive. They are modified versions of the originals, so they include "Donationware" on the lable. Enjoy!

sorry, double post^^

Wow! So that's the DC game Duranik have been working on all these years. This is one of the best-looking shooters I've seen so far. Hats off to the team! Amazing work, really!

@Thorsten: Just out of curiosity, are you sure you mean 10" screensize? I didn't know there were LCD screens that size, especially as TVs. Unless it's some kind of portable screen for DVD players.

Congratulations on this release! It's really great work, ovalbugmann! I know how much patience and work it can take to create a decent Jaguar Cinepak Disc and sadly people tend to underestimate the effort. I'm glad you take the time to figure out the best settings and keep supporting the format. Keep up the good work.

I just finished translating the press release. It's now online on the Euro JagFest Homepage. +++ Press Release +++ Atari Jaguar Europe Festival Announcement of the Atari Jaguar Europe Festival 2010 The Atari Jaguar Europe Festival, "ejagfest" in short, takes place on 27th November of this year in Kaarst, Germany. The Atari Jaguar Europe Festival is an annual festival for all Atari Jaguar and Lynx fans, developers and retailers. Open-minded fans of other video game systems are welcome, of course. The „Atari Jaguar Europe Festival“, "ejagfest" in short, takes place on 27th November of this year in Kaarst, Germany (not far from Neuss/Düsseldorf). It’s a meeting of retro gaming fans from all over Europe. The focus of attention is Atari and all consoles of the cult lable. All of you who would like to play systems like the Jaguar, Lynx, VCS 2600, 5200, 7800 or on a trusty homecomputer of the 80s, this is the right place. Retro games, homebrew announcements / presentations, prototypes believed to be lost and demos of all kind can be experienced on the ejagfest. Developers from all over Europe regularly take the opportunity to present their new developments on the festival, and sometimes even have exclusive items for sale. New VCS 2600 games such as “Rasterfahndung” and “Encaved” were shown. Starcat presented projects such as “Star Alliance”, an early tech demo of “Eerievale” and released a limited ejagfest edition of his Jaguar CD title “JagMIND: Bomb Squad”. Beta-Versions of the Jaguar puzzle game “Clicks” and “Impulse X”, the new game by Matthias Domin were presented. The impressive „Atariowl Project“ for the Jaguar was presented for the first time and early exclusive screenshots of the Lynx version of Iron Solider were shown. Another highlight was the presentation of the only working “High-res Jaguar Virtual Reality Headset” in existence, which was shown on ejagfest in the year 2007. Competitions such as “Club Drive” or “Kasumi Ninja” make sure everyone has a fun time. Next to these fun competitions, the official European championship in “Checkered Flag” for the Lynx is taking place each year. To make the event complete there are retro game retailers to offer Jaguar/Lynx titles and a variety of other retro games and systems. Additional highlights of this year • An exclusive demo of the promising Action-RPG „Atariowl Project“, which sets new standards on the Jaguar will be presented. • For the first time since the project’s revival, the Eerievale Team provides insight into the progress on the correspondent multiplatform graphic adventure. • The well known Jaguar developer teams “Reboot” and “Jagware” will be present with their latest developments. • Matthias Domin, developer of Jaguar titles such as „Double Feature“, „Clicks“ and „Impulse X“ announced his attendance. • Gary Taylor shows his new custom overlays & boxes for the Jaguar and the already released Aircars 94 Beta. • Nick Harlow of 16/32 Systems will have a wide variety of new and used atari games and systems for sale. • Sijmen and Sandra of „The Atari Shop“ will be present with their Atari & Retro merchandise. Competitions: • Checkered Flag European Championship (Atari Lynx) • Kick-Off NRW-Championship (Atari ST) This list is nowhere complete, every visitor who has something to show is welcome to. Please let us know in advance if possible. All of you who enjoy retro games and a nice chat with like-minded people are welcome to join us. This year is the event‘s 10th anniversary and takes place for the 7th time in a row at the Bischofshof location in Kaarst. Opening is on 27th November at 10:30am. Entrance fee is 5,00 Euro. The exact address, directions and latest news can be found on: www.jagfest.org/euro and on www.twitter.com/ejagfest

I originally wanted to wait for Björn to write the announcement of this year’s Euro JagFest, but as it’s already been three weeks since the date was announced on the official homepage, I think it’s more than overdue to announce the event here. This year’s Euro JagFest will take place on 27th November in the same location as the last years in Kaarst, Germany. Thanks to a number of developers taking place this year, you’ll have the chance to see the latest progress on upcoming projects or possibly see new projects for the first time. * If everything goes as planned, there will be a new version of the Atariowl Project to see, which is even more impressive than the previously shown versions. * For the first time since the project restarted earlier this year you’ll be able to witness the progress on the new Eerievale game. * Members of Reboot and Jagware will attend the event to show some of their latest work and give people the chance to try their excellent games. * Nick Harlow of 16/32 Systems will be there again and have a variety of Atari hardware and software for sale. This short list is not complete, if you plan to attend and would like to demonstrate a project or show off a rare collectible, feel free to let us know. As every year there will be very fun game competitions and lots of great people to meet. Don’t miss it.