atarifan49

You might have to ask Don Thomas on that one. It was just Atari's way of warning you incase you got the undying urge to play your Jaguar CD in an audio player. When I make Jaguar CD's I use a recording done by Carl Forhan for the first track. I've also seen on various CD's that came out of Atari where they used track #2 from the Tempest 2000 audio CD. Sometimes the full track, sometimes just a part of it. Glenn

Next Gen was good for a while, in their beginning. But evetually they became just like the rest...biased! I did like their layout and had more content and less flash. But as soon as they stop giving the Jaguar any respect, I stopped reading them. I think Gamefan was one of the few who stuck with the Jaguar as long as they could. All the rest are not good enough to recycle for toilet paper! Everyone of them are all biased! Just look at who dominates the ads the most and you see who they favor. Not saying that Atari didn't contribute to their own demise, but the magazines had a huge impact on its survival. My opinion is that most of the people who write for those magzines are people who couldn't make it in the video game industry. In fact they probably couldn't get the game tester job! That's my two angry cents! Glenn

How can one D/L the game and play it? I thought you needed a devkit to play the PZ rom? I don't remember it working with the Jag emulators either... Having a dev kit helps or even a flash cart. But, you can always find someone to program some EPROMS and use a two chip or four chip cartridge board (or use an old Cybermorph or Raiden or Tevor McFur) and assemble it. I think the copy available for download needs the universal encryption header added. It can be done, just need the right tools to do it. Glenn

Agree, the slowness in the frame rate was frustrating at times. Also, it was a challenge to get going in the game. But once you got a weapon I think the game really picks up. Once you get into Highlander game, it's a lot of fun. IMHO. Glenn

Considering you can still purchase the game from B&C for $69.95. http://www.myatari.com/bcjaguar.txt Glenn

Gaztee, cool pictures. Curious to learn if he shared any info on far they got in development of it? Did the game appear to be near complete and polished (e.g. title screen, music, menus, etc)? Glenn

Jason. Thanks for sharing info on your delimena. That's pretty damn cold of them to do that. You would think a company like HVS would have some integrity. Keep up the fight! Glenn

I don't think any commercials were aired in the UK. Certainly didn't see any VHS tapes in PAL format. All commercial tapes I've seen are all in NTSC. The love dool, knife throwing, and clinton I believe never aired. Atari did very little playing of these commercials outside of certain markets. New York and San Francisco were always their biggest markets (biggest in the sense of advertising and initial product selling). They mainly concentrated their effort on magazine ads in GamePro and Next Generation since they can do more magazine ads for the price of one commercial. Glenn

Wasn't he supposed to be getting a CD devkit from them too? Last I heard he was going to take it to court... Stone Oh yeah, that's real smart. Taking someone to court for something that you never even own or created because they indicated in an email that they may give it to you. Doing that what's to stop them from actaully destroying the source and saying "oops, there was an accident!" Sorry. And then your out of money for a lawyer and court fees. Might as well give it up. It's not much different than trying to get Leonard Tramiel to give up the CD private key (that's banking on if he really still has it). Glenn

MegaData is trying to secure the source from High Voltage. Unfortunately this has been going on for some time. I think the source is gone forever.... There are some folks that are lucky enough to have a ROM of this game. I believe MegaData (Zenantyx?) has exclusive rights to it though. Jason Sounds to me that they're just stringing him along. If they haven't given him the stuff yet, then he'll never get it. They probably end up erasing all their past Jaguar stuff. Besides, the demo of it isn't worth wasting precious silicon over. Glenn

It would be even cooler if someone compiled all of them onto a CD that plays on a Jaguar? I happen to like the Stimulus Response Experiment with the Video Game Marketing the next one. Off topic: Sega had a funny one for the launching of the Saturn. I think it was Theater of the Eye. Funny part was call to the brain from the sphinker yelling, "What's going on up there?" Glenn

Matthias, Did you do any changes to the MAKEFILE? After extracting the reguired pieces of the Jaguar ROM I tried to do the MAKE command and got an error immeadiately. I guess something on my GCC isn't quite up to par. Glenn

That was so true. Jack Tramiel didn't want anything to do with video games. Not sure why he bought that part of the company unless he just wanted the rights to the game titles or something. A story that I heard was about a tour Jack was taking of the company and an employee was showing him the 7800. Jack basicly be-littled this guy because he didn't want anything to do with video games. I heard this guy got his revenge later when they needed his help to resurrect the 7800 project. I wish I could remember it more, its a pretty good story and I'm not giving it much justice here. They did admit about the mistake they made in passing up the Apple II. But in a sense I'm glad they did, I prefer my 8bit Atari computer design than the under powered Apple II. You don't see people coming up with new and interesting graphic demos for the Apple II. They're just now getting a taste of their own medicine. I'm happy to see them eat third place. If I have to see another stinking Mario game.... Glenn

That's the exact reason why Nintendo was interested in Atari. Atari had the brand name and distribution connections. Nintendo may have aggressively ruled the Japanese market (and I mean ruled with an iron fist), but their President realized the importance of having a name like Atari (at that time) distributing their product. Plus he was impressed by the name since he is a very big Go player. Just too bad pride and licensings had to cloud the discussions and ruin the talks. Glenn

I investiaged this possibility and it turns out that using a MAC address assigned to a different company is also frowned upon. Another option I thought of was for a group of people to buy a block and split them up, but the lawyers jumped upon a guy for doing just that. These guys are pretty protective of their MAC addresses. It may be frowned upon but still doesn't stop me from taking the MAC address from that old ethernet card and using it on something else. As long as I don't use that card in any of my systems while I have the Jaguar ethernet adapter connected to a network. So if I decide to send a dead ethernet card to the local landfill, which I own, what's to stop me from using that MAC address. Another thing, my router is capable of having the MAC address changed to whatever address I want to enter. So what's the big deal about reusing MAC addresses from dead and obsolete cards? Glenn

Caught the show by accident. I truly love the time they spent with Al Alcorn. He tells some of the best stories from that time. I got to over hear him and one of the 2600 programmers talk after their panel discussions at CGE. They both really enjoyed the questions and feedback people gave them at the show. Plus they're enjoying their new found "cult status!" Greg, thanks for making those movie files. I'm going to get those downloaded as soon as possible. Glenn

Have to check those other ones out. Glad to share the knowledge of the other books. Enjoyed everyone of them. But I'm also the type that will read anything that mentions something of Atari's past (except Joystick Nation - hate that b#$%@!). Glenn

I have almost all the complete footage in Quicktime format. I made the mistake of putting cheap-ass labels on the CD's that I put them on and now can't quite recover all the files because the CDs are slightly warped. Also, don't quite have the tools to generate the required GameFilm format movie track and associated scene information tracks. Source code to the player would be helpful too. And last but not least, it is not really known who really owns the rights to the film. That would take some legal research to find this out. Does the original director/producer own the film? Did Atari? Did it transfer to Hasbro and then on to Infrogrames? Kinda of a sticky situation. Glenn

If there was, I'm not aware of any. Caves of Fear was done to prove the GameFilm technology. American Hero was the film that was shot to produce the first game based on it. I think Atari paid about a million dollars to have American Hero filmed. Don't have exact numbers or factual source information, just word-of-mouth info. Glenn

David Sheff - Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World. ISBN # 0-679-73622-0 David Sheff - Game Over:Press Start to Continue. ISBN # 0-9669617-0-6 Other Readings: Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari. By Scott Cohen - Covers the Bushnell and Warner days of Atari. The Home Computer Wars by Michael S. Tomczyk. ISBN # 0-942386-78-7. Mainly about Jack Tramiel and his days at Commodore. Has brief insight to the acquiring on Atari by Jack Tramiel. Plus this guy had worked for Jack and shows some of his loyality to him in the book. Still not a bad book to read to understand Jack's business philosophy that he always stuck to. Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of Video Games by Leonard Herman. http://www.rolentapress.com/. It's now in its 3rd Edition. Hackers by Steven Levy. Written about the true hackers. Not the types you hear about on the 10 o'clock news trying to break into computer systems. The ones who figured out how to turn a multi-million dollar mainframe computer into a spacewar game machine at MIT. The days of the Homebrew Computer Club in the '70s and Steve Wozinak. The '80s with Sierra On-line Systems and great game programmers like John Harris. Atari, Inc. The Early Years by Colin Covert. Visits Atarimagazines.com. http://www.atarimagazines.com/hi-res/v1n1/...tarihistory.php And don't ever read J.C. Hertz and her Joystick Nation. She's a complete idiot and doesn't deserve any respect!!! Glenn

Or at least risen to the occasion! Glenn

Ok, what's your source for this? I think David Sheff in his book Game Over tells the story of this time pretty good about how Atari almost had worldwide distribution rights for the soon to be NES. It was killed when Coleco overstep the bounds and displayed Donkey Kong for the Colecovision/Adam at a CES show. Atari was under the impression they had exclusive rights to the game for home computers. It was because of this situation that the NES deal was called off. Coleco ended up shooting themselves in the foot with future deals with Nintendo over that situation. One thing that I have to say that Nintendo did well before they marketed the NES in the US was they studied everything that Atari did wrong. Smart move by them to bring back a market, that in 1983/1984 looked like would not be able to bounce back. I would think they had the rights to use Donkey Kong on the 7800 from the licensing deal they had for the computer. Glenn

I can understand your view if you compare against places like Ebay, thrift shops, and personal auctions. But like other people have pointed out, it costs money to warehouse and preserve these items. If you buy something on Ebay or thrift shop, does it come with a warrenty? Do you have a recourse if the item breaks in the first week. B&C is probably the longest running Atari only business that exists today. If he were to price things at how people would love to see them priced, he would be out of business the next day. Businesses that did price things like this (e.g. San Jose Computers) have long ago disappeared. You have a perfect right to voice your opinion. But before you do that, try and give a little thought as to why prices are they way they are. Let me give an example of something. B&C sells keyboards for the TT030 for about $100. $100 for a keyboard?! That's outragous. But here's something that most people don't think about. If he sells that keyboard, he's now left with a TT030 setup that he can't sell because he doesn't have a keyboard for it. The parts are dwindling down are the economics of the situation dictate the prices. I'll get off my soap box now... Glenn

Of course I'll lend my knowledge and assistance. Currently have a P4 1.5GHz. Still trying to crack open some Zip files that contain design files for the Phylon Playlink 2000 Modem. The Playlink was a PC modem similar to the Jaguar modem. I'm currently trying 9 character length passwords using lower case alphabet and numbers. Don't see any chance of finding the password anytime soon! My machine is running about 3.6 million passwords a second and still this round of 9 characters is going to a take a year to finish (I'm between 1/5 and 1/4 way complete). Been re-reading about the RSA stuff again and looking at the source code from Atari. It's hard to picture the exact methods that Atari used for their version of RSA. They appear to use some very elaborate techniques of binary shifts, multiply's, and table coefficients to do some of the needed big number math. Defintely not seeing anything in the source code that will help other than using the code to try out key combinations. Playing with Maple's modulus math and conversion features to gain some familiarity with RSA and Jaguar keys. Will look forward to one day taking a number theory class on this stuff. Here are some particulars to keep in mind regarding the Jaguar keys and RSA (this is from what I understand): - public and private key are both 518 bits in size which occupy 65 bytes - Upper two bits of those 65 bytes are always zero and the lower bit is always 1 (makes the number odd) - The highest value that can exist in a 518 bit number is: 858099707516326214372737599885174152158679412517913176174307932398192897924707006515319955082681819372162038923935107254640248499964580476571753536389382143 - I would assume that since the keys are around 518 bits that they used two primes that are around 259 bits in size (that's if Atari used two primes of relative size to each other) - According to the prime number theorem for the maximum value of a 259 bit number there are approximately 5.159928120e75 possible prime numbers. And for the maximum 518 bit number there are approximately 2.389915430e153 possible prime numbers. With the source code I've seen, it appears Atari used the same public key value but had changed the private key. I wonder if this other private key could be of any use to maybe figure out what the public and private exponents used? Most readings I've seen about RSA they talk about generating a public and private key pair. The pairs usually consist of the public key and it's exponent and the private key and it's exponent. The exponents are usually the same. And I've see readings where they used exponents like 3, 17, 513, and 65537 because of their ease of use in the computer. Not sure what that's all about. Here is the public key for the CD (and this is the same format that the private key is stored on a floppy disk - filename privatcd.key): ;public: dc.b $2c,$80,$1e,$32,$56,$f3,$58,$0f dc.b $1f,$73,$48,$8a,$32,$20,$3e,$b7 dc.b $e8,$c7,$03,$17,$11,$51,$6f,$8f dc.b $92,$dc,$64,$c2,$4b,$ae,$e6,$e0 dc.b $c9,$ca,$38,$35,$0e,$07,$03,$ec dc.b $4e,$3b,$a8,$f3,$1f,$2f,$90,$a6 dc.b $43,$c2,$cd,$a0,$ff,$2d,$5b,$26 dc.b $8e,$4a,$a9,$3b,$4a,$63,$a6,$aa dc.b $27 It translates into this decimal number: 596653630719654612440623473278982820957206430858729448527486706562543697147570802966340194172821550557913190019422036107579879935928914629216030878738065959 It would be a trues pleasure to one day know what the key is. Not that it will make publishing Jaguar CD's any easier. In fact it will only make it more complicated to get CD's made that will always pass the authentication check. Remember the problems that Telegames experienced when they went to have IS2 glass mastered? The CD making place had to find the guy who had made the CD's when Atari was publishing them. Something in their process wasn't being done right. Be nice to learn about the lessons learned on that one! Regards, Glenn

My 4MB alpine! Glenn